Prof Honegger details emergence of Kerma
The first kingdom of Nubia was main rival of Egypt
By Cinatra Fernandes
KUWAIT CITY, April 11: Professor Matthieu Honegger shared a lecture detailing twenty years of archaeological research on the origins of Kerma, the first kingdom of Nubia in Northern Sudan at the Yarmouk Culture Center on Monday evening as part of the Dar Al Athar Islamiyyah’s 22nd cultural season.
Professor Matthieu Honegger teaches at the Institute of Archaeology, University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. He is also the head of the “Protection and valorization of the archaeological heritage of Kerma project”, supported by the Qatar-Sudan archaeological project. His most recent publication was included in Quaternary Science Review 130 and covered “Human occupations and environmental changes in the Nile valley during the Holocene: The case of Kerma in Upper Nubia (northern Sudan).”
The capital of the first kingdom of Nubia and its main necropolis are located in the north of Sudan close to the third cataract of the River Nile (2500-1500 BCE). During the last twenty years, his work has focused on the previous periods of the kingdom wherein he tried to draw the main stages of the evolution of the society in order to understand the factors which led to the emergence of the Kerma civilisation.
In his lecture, he addressed issues of the climatic variations, the adoption of an economy based on the stock breeding and subsequently on the adoption of agriculture, before dealing with the interactions with Egypt and the emergence of a first elite in a period contemporary with the VI dynasty.
He began by informing that the main temple of the city of Kerma built 4,000 years ago and which is still preserved 20 meter high today is located close to the museum of Kerma and cultural center, 600 km north of Khartoum.
Kerma is the center of the first Nubian kingdom, located in Upper Nubia between the 2nd and 5th cataract of the Nile until the colonisation of the Egyptian around 1500 BC. Nubia, he informed, was located at the frontier between one of the first historical societies to the north i.e. Egypt and to the south, a society where written sources are available only from the 19th century. “We are in an intermediate position between two worlds, its typically a proto-historic context where we have some very few written sources from Egypt and the main source is archaeological facts,” he explained.
He pointed out that Kerma emerged as one of the major economic and political centres in the Nile valley around 2000 BC and was the main rival of Egypt. Rulers of Kush, as the Egyptians called it, are believed to have collected raw materials in their hinterlands such as ebony, ivory, gold and incense, which they then brought to Egypt where exotics goods were exchanged for manufactured commodities.
Prof Mathieu Honegger delivers a lecture at the Yarmouk Culture Center on Monday evening.
At the beginning of the 20th century, George Reisner initiated the expedition of the town of Kerma and its cemetery and this work was continued by the University of Geneva under Charles bonnet on the city of Kerma and then on the site of Dokki Gel from 1977 to 2013. Since 1994, there has been an ongoing Swiss project on the prehistory of the area and on the origins of the kingdom of Kerma.
Professor Honegger stated that the alluvial plain which extends south of the Kerma is the largest of Nubia and was very highly occupied during pre-historic and proto-historic times. Archaeological surveys have revealed hundreds of settlements and cemeteries of Mesolithic, Neolithic and Kerma periods.
The area of Kerma is characterised by three monumental sites of the eastern cemetery which covers 70 hectares and where an estimated number of graves of about 30,00040,000 exist, the town of Kerma which is believed to be the capital of the kingdom since 2000 BCE covering 20 hectares and lastly, the city of Dokki Gel which was built by the Egyptians of the new kingdom when they colonised the area.
He highlighted that this project was focused not only on archaeology and research but it includes, in collaboration with Sudanese counterparts, works of valorisation and the cultural mediation of the heritage through the museum of Kerma which was inaugurated in 2008. He added that during each field season there is a reconstruction of archaeological structures and protection of the main sites from vehicular traffic and the extension of cultivated fields.
Based on his research, he shared that the climate began to become humid in 9000 BC. And the population of this area became sedentary in 6000 BC with the adoption of the first Neolithic components such as the domestication of cattle and agriculture. In his assessment of North Africa, the emergence of pastoralist society is observed with very strong societies well adapted and developing close to the Nile valley. Around 3000 BC, the complexity of the organisation and finally the formation of the Kerma kingdom is seen.
Excavations
He informed that excavations undertaken in the Kerma region have brought to light remains from many periods and about two hundred sites have been identified. The site of the humid period were located outside the alluvial plain and correspond to an older climatic phase. Three principal sites have been excavated Starting from 5400 BC, most of the sites are relocated to the alluvial plain, this change follows a period of increased aridity beginning in the first millennium. The population adopted a pastoral economy and must have practiced more skilled agriculture, he opined, based on observations from four different sites of this period.
He presented an overall chronology in the region of Kerma in the sequence in which narrative components appear and identified
DAI Director-General and Co-founder Sheikha Hussah Sabah Al-Salem Al-Sabah
Prof Mathieu Honegger
A section of audience during the lecture.
two temporary gaps which he attempted to correlate with environmental changes. The most visible event, he explained, appears in 5400 BC corresponding with increased aridity and reduction in population density.
One of the major excavated sites is El Barga contains Mesolithic habitation structures in the sandstone bedrock and includes an important archaeological assemblage dated to about 7400 BC, he informed. In these Mesolithic times, people were hunting and gathering but were mostly sedentary. He shared the discovery that cemeteries then were not differentiated from the habitation area.
Comprises
He discussed two cemeteries found nearby, one Mesolithic of the same period that dates from the 8th millennium BC and comprises 50 tombs without grave goods. Another Neolithic cemetery is located further south and includes over 100 tombs with a lot of grave goods. One of the Neolithic graves was packed by the Bucrania of a cow and is one of the oldest domesticated cattle remains in Africa.
He pointed that an important change in the funerary rituals and the morphology of the skeletons occurs, the presence of grave goods largely new to the region occurs systematically in the Neolithic graves such as pendants, earrings. At the anthropological level the contrast is extreme and all these elements to an important change — the arrival of a new population.
Another important site where they worked for ten years is Wadi El Arab that extends over 3 hectares if stratified occupations and includes two excavated sectors where five phases and series of habitation were identified. In the eastern cemetery of Kerma, the team discovered a Neolithic settlement was composed of few huts and enclosures used for cattle, small fences for wind protection, and fireplace.
Professor Honegger discussed in detail the grave goods found in the cemeteries that included sophisticated items. He also shed light on the Pre-kerma agglomeration in the center of the Eastern Cemetery circa 3,000 BC and the presence of storage pits that suggest an agro-pastoral society.
He provided a chronology of the graves from the beginning to the end of the civilisation and pointed to many interesting discoveries made such as the presence of bows in graves to denote the importance of bowmen in society and the presence of ostrich sticks in female graves. He elaborated on the evidence that depicts the emergence of a stratified society. He touched upon the changes in funerary rites and the plundering of rich graves among several other aspects such as pottery, funerary traditions and social relations between the buried people, noting that the stratification was linked with the geopolitical situation in Nubia, competition between groups and foreign trade playing a vital role.