Dongola Reach Expedition

Year 2000 Excavation

Excavation in the year 2000 will focus on sites at the Third Cataract itself. The gently undulating topography at Tombos conceals the remains of up to a dozen mud brick pyramid tombs with underground shaft and chamber burial complexes cut into the granite bedrock. This cemetery of wealthy bureaucrats provides a unique opportunity to investigate the origins and history of the colonial agents of Egypt's empire. Were they Egyptian colonists or Egyptianized native elites? And did their small community survive to influence the rise of the Napatan Kingdom of Kush? Excavation at Kerma sites that survived into the Napatan period on the East Bank at Hannek and Akkad will balance the picture from Tombos.

 
These questions bear on the origins of the Napatan kingdom of Kush, whose rulers became Pharaohs as the 25th Dynasty of Egypt (c. 750-600 BC). Some suggest that some survival of the New Kingdom imperial administration provided the foundation for the rise of this powerful and sophisticated Nubian state. An alternative view attributes this development to internal competition between native polities that had quickly lost any veneer of Egyptian civilization. Later Egyptianizing features like the royal pyramids at Napata and Meroe were not the survivals of an old imperial culture, but were consciously borrowed from contemporary Egypt to legitimize Napatan rule both at home and abroad.

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