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Curzon
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Curzon

Date

February 21st, 2008

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The Other Pyramids

The ancient nation of Nubia, located in northern Sudan, is oft ignored in western and world history books. But this region, home to several historical kingdoms, including Meroë, which ruled from 800 BC to 350 AD, was an independent region that managed to survive the conquests of Alexander and the Roman Empire and is home to hundreds of pyramids.

During a brief conquest of Egypt, Nubia was heavily influenced by the culture of the upper Nile, which resulted in a burst of pyramid-building activity. This activity continued for centuries, during which approximately 220 pyramids were constructed to serve as tombs for royalty.

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The pyramids of Meroë are notably different from the pyramids of Giza. First, at heights ranging from approximately 6 to 30 metres, even the tallest are less than a third of the size of the Great Pyramid. Also, they are built at a much steeper angle than Egyptian pyramids, and of stepped courses of horizontally positioned stone blocks. Unfortunately, the tops of at least 40 were destroyed by the infamous Italian explorer Giuseppe Ferlini in the 1820s in a search for treasure.

Comments to this entry

lirelou
February 21, 2008
11:38 pm
I read the recent National Geographic article on the same subject. It did not note the difference in size, and chose to make the Nubians more important than they were in Egyptian history. When a nation has several thousand years of documented history, a mere hundred so or years conquest is worthy of mention, but hardly of primary importance. Unless, of course, it is the act that delivers the coup de grace, as the Roman conquest of Egypt did. The article reminded me of a visit to the Smithsonian over twenty years ago when an Afro-centric group was making an argument that Moses was Black. In the course of articulating this view, the presenter made the point that Cleopatra was likely Black. This underscored a complete ignorance of what the Ptolemaic dynasty was, and their adoption of the Egyptian custom of brother and sister pharonic marriage which would have kept the Greek bloodline (a bit too) pure.
dj
February 22, 2008
7:22 am
Yeah, the afro-centric Egyptian viewpoint keeps popping up. These people cite dark skinned reliefs on temple walls as their reasoning. When I look at them they could easily pass for dark skinned arab types today.
Seerov
February 25, 2008
9:42 pm
Every now and then there's a demonstration against the depiction of King Tut as being "too white." No matter how many times the Head of Egyptian Antiquities insists that Tut was not a Nubian, they just don't give up. I've seen this for Ramses II too. Ramses II had red hair and a mummified face that clearly wasn't black African but here too, we see the same thing. If you really want to see some comedy find the book "Black Athena." In this book the author claims that the ancient Greeks were Black Africans!

Of course the same claim has been made for Jesus, Mohammed, Hannibal, and even Beethoven. In fact, I read somewhere that a claim was made for a Viking chieftain with the name "Eric the Black" as being an African. Of course, no one points out that this would make "Eric the Red" an Amerindian.