9 - Christian Nubia

Summary

INTRODUCTION

With the coming of Christianity during the period following the fourth century AD, the history of Nubia enters a new stage. The ending of the Meroitic state described in chapter 4 did not result in any substantial cultural changes. Though fashions in material objects changed slowly - these changes being shown most clearly in the pottery – the general life of the country, the styles of buildings and the nature of the agricultural village life remained substantially the same. The evidence for this is now considerable and, as a result of the extensive archaeological work undertaken in face of the threat of inundation from the High Dam at Aswan, there is a very great deal of material from which the life of the time can be reconstructed.

It should be borne in mind that this great increase in knowledge is confined to the area between the First and Second Cataracts and that, in spite of some new investigations, little more is known about areas further south than was known forty or fifty years ago, and, for the period under consideration, many important regions still lack more than the most superficial investigation.

In the northern regions, and – it can be assumed – further south also, life went on after the end of centralized Meroitic rule in much the same way. The basis of life was the cultivation of the river banks by the use of the saqia wheel, and the villages of late Meroitic times continued to be inhabited in the fifth and sixth centuries much as they had been from the time of the repopulation of Lower Nubia early in the Christian era.