06-20-2007, 03:25 AM
Deccan Chronicel, 20 June 2007
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Hunt on for Nile land of gold
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<b>On the periphery of history in antiquity, there was a land known as Kush. Overshadowed by Egypt, to the north, it was a place of uncharted breadth and depth far up the Nile, a mystery verging on myth.</b> One thing the Egyptians did know and recorded â Kush had gold. Scholars have come to learn that there was more to the culture of Kush than was previously suspected. <b>From deciphered Egyptian documents and modern archaeological research, it is now known that for five centuries in the second millennium BC, the kingdom of Kush flourished with the political and military prowess to maintain some control over a wide territory in Africa.</b>
Kushâs governing success would seem to have been anomalous, or else conventional ideas about statehood rest too narrowly on the experiences of early civilisations like Mesopotamia, Egypt and China. <b>How could a fairly complex state society exist without a writing system, an extensive bureaucracy or major urban centres, none of which Kush evidently had?</b>
<b>Archaeologists are now finding some answers â at least intriguing insights â emerging in advance of rising Nile waters behind a new dam in northern Sudan. Hurried excavations are uncovering ancient settlements, cemeteries and gold-processing centres in regions previously unexplored. In recent reports and interviews, archaeologists said they had found widespread evidence that the kingdom of Kush, in its ascendancy from 2000 BC to 1500 BC, exerted control or at least influence over a 750-mile stretch of the Nile Valley. </b>
This region extended from the first cataract in the Nile, as attested by an Egyptian monument, all the way upstream to beyond the fourth cataract. The area covered part of the larger geographic region of indeterminate borders known in antiquity as Nubia. Some archaeologists theorise that the discoveries show that the rulers of Kush were the first in sub-Saharan Africa to hold sway over so vast a territory.
<b>âThis makes Kush a more major player in political and military dynamics of the time than we knew before,â said Geoff Emberling, co-leader of a University of Chicago expedition. âStudying Kush helps scholars have a better idea of what statehood meant in an ancient context outside such established power centres of Egypt and Mesopotamia.â</b> Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute at the university, said: <b>âUntil now, virtually all that we have known about Kush came from the historical records of their Egyptian neighbours and from limited explorations of monumental architecture at the Kushite capital city, Kerma.â </b>
<b>To archaeologists, knowing that a virtually unexplored land of mystery is soon to be flooded has the same effect as Samuel Johnson ascribed to one facing the gallows in the morning. It concentrates the mind.</b> Over the last few years, archaeological teams from Britain, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Sudan and the United States have raced to dig at sites that will soon be underwater.
<b>The teams were surprised to find hundreds of settlement ruins, cemeteries and examples of rock art that had never been studied. One of the most comprehensive salvage operations has been conducted by groups headed by Henryk Paner of the Gdansk Archaeological Museum in Poland, which surveyed 711 ancient sites in 2003 alone. âThis area is so incredibly rich in archaeology,â Derek Welsby of the British Museum said in a report last winter in Archaeology magazine. </b>
The scale of the salvage effort hardly compares to the response in the 1960s to the Aswan High Dam, which flooded a part of Nubia that then reached into what is southern Egypt. Imposing temples that the pharaohs erected at Abu Simbel and Philae were dismantled and restored on higher ground. The Kushites, left no such grand architecture to be rescued. Their kingdom declined and eventually disappeared by the end of the 16th century BC, as Egypt grew more powerful and expansive under rulers of the period known as New Kingdom.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
In India many dams are being built. Is there enough care being taken to preserve teh heritage?
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Hunt on for Nile land of gold
Â
<b>On the periphery of history in antiquity, there was a land known as Kush. Overshadowed by Egypt, to the north, it was a place of uncharted breadth and depth far up the Nile, a mystery verging on myth.</b> One thing the Egyptians did know and recorded â Kush had gold. Scholars have come to learn that there was more to the culture of Kush than was previously suspected. <b>From deciphered Egyptian documents and modern archaeological research, it is now known that for five centuries in the second millennium BC, the kingdom of Kush flourished with the political and military prowess to maintain some control over a wide territory in Africa.</b>
Kushâs governing success would seem to have been anomalous, or else conventional ideas about statehood rest too narrowly on the experiences of early civilisations like Mesopotamia, Egypt and China. <b>How could a fairly complex state society exist without a writing system, an extensive bureaucracy or major urban centres, none of which Kush evidently had?</b>
<b>Archaeologists are now finding some answers â at least intriguing insights â emerging in advance of rising Nile waters behind a new dam in northern Sudan. Hurried excavations are uncovering ancient settlements, cemeteries and gold-processing centres in regions previously unexplored. In recent reports and interviews, archaeologists said they had found widespread evidence that the kingdom of Kush, in its ascendancy from 2000 BC to 1500 BC, exerted control or at least influence over a 750-mile stretch of the Nile Valley. </b>
This region extended from the first cataract in the Nile, as attested by an Egyptian monument, all the way upstream to beyond the fourth cataract. The area covered part of the larger geographic region of indeterminate borders known in antiquity as Nubia. Some archaeologists theorise that the discoveries show that the rulers of Kush were the first in sub-Saharan Africa to hold sway over so vast a territory.
<b>âThis makes Kush a more major player in political and military dynamics of the time than we knew before,â said Geoff Emberling, co-leader of a University of Chicago expedition. âStudying Kush helps scholars have a better idea of what statehood meant in an ancient context outside such established power centres of Egypt and Mesopotamia.â</b> Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute at the university, said: <b>âUntil now, virtually all that we have known about Kush came from the historical records of their Egyptian neighbours and from limited explorations of monumental architecture at the Kushite capital city, Kerma.â </b>
<b>To archaeologists, knowing that a virtually unexplored land of mystery is soon to be flooded has the same effect as Samuel Johnson ascribed to one facing the gallows in the morning. It concentrates the mind.</b> Over the last few years, archaeological teams from Britain, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Sudan and the United States have raced to dig at sites that will soon be underwater.
<b>The teams were surprised to find hundreds of settlement ruins, cemeteries and examples of rock art that had never been studied. One of the most comprehensive salvage operations has been conducted by groups headed by Henryk Paner of the Gdansk Archaeological Museum in Poland, which surveyed 711 ancient sites in 2003 alone. âThis area is so incredibly rich in archaeology,â Derek Welsby of the British Museum said in a report last winter in Archaeology magazine. </b>
The scale of the salvage effort hardly compares to the response in the 1960s to the Aswan High Dam, which flooded a part of Nubia that then reached into what is southern Egypt. Imposing temples that the pharaohs erected at Abu Simbel and Philae were dismantled and restored on higher ground. The Kushites, left no such grand architecture to be rescued. Their kingdom declined and eventually disappeared by the end of the 16th century BC, as Egypt grew more powerful and expansive under rulers of the period known as New Kingdom.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
In India many dams are being built. Is there enough care being taken to preserve teh heritage?