https://undark.org/2018/02/28/undark-podcast-episode-24/
Podcast #24: Finding Nubia
Our latest Undark podcast looks at an ancient civilization, rediscovered but threatened; science and the media; and the world's strangest flower.
Join our podcast host and former NYT editor David Corcoran as he talks with Amy Maxmen about her Undark article on an ancient civilization, rediscovered but threatened. Also: Science and the media; and a look at the mega-flower Rafflesia.
Ep. 24 Finding Nubia by Undark Magazine via #soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/undark-magazine/ep-24-finding-nubia?utm_source=soundcloud&utm_campaign=wtshare&utm_medium=Twitter&utm_content=https%3A//soundcloud.com/undark-magazine/ep-24-finding-nubia
Here's a full transcript of the podcast, lightly edited for clarity.
David Corcoran: This is Undark. We're a magazine devoted to exploring the intersection of science and society, and we're this podcast.
Hello again; welcome to Episode 24. I'm David Corcoran. For our cover story, A Cradle of Civilization, not the one you may be thinking of, not the one between the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. Not Greece or Rome or Egypt. Reporter Amy Maxmen traveled to a region called Nubia, and she brings back a story of an ancient society that built cities and temples and even pyramids — fabulous antiquities that are now in danger of vanishing forever. She joins us now. Amy, welcome to the podcast.
Amy Maxmen: Hi, thanks a lot. Good to be here.
David Corcoran: So, Nubia. It's a place I'd heard of but I'm afraid I would never have been able to locate it on a map. Where is it?
Amy Maxmen: So Nubia is in central Sudan. It also kind of overlaps a part of southern Egypt today and the Nile flows right through it.
David Corcoran: So it's kind of northeastern Africa, but way south of where we think of as the Egyptian civilization, with all the pyramids and so on. Why did you go there? How did you hear about this story?
Amy Maxmen: I actually went to Sudan for another story. I went to write about a surgeon who was fighting this terrible flesh-eating disease and while I was reporting that story I thought I'd just check out the National Museum. And I was just completely stunned by how awesome it was. Not like in the design of the museum, but because of what it held. It had giant statues of pharaohs and it had some temples that had been removed from northern Nubia when the Aswan High Dam was built in the '60s.
The things that really caught my attention were these ceramics and other objects that kind of had a mix of designs too. They had maybe ancient Greek designs on them and some things that were Egyptian. And also things that we would think of as classically African designs on them, and that was really cool. I talked to somebody at the museum and they pointed out that the reason for all these gorgeous objects that were mixed like this was because the center was actually this giant hub, maybe 3,000 years ago, just like New York City is today where there was a lot of goods traveling back and forth through the area from all over the world.
After seeing all of that, I just sort of became obsessed with going back and seeing a lot more.
David Corcoran: To plot this on a timeline, you said, what, 3000 B.C.? How does that compare with the ancient Egyptian society, the pharaohs and the pyramids?
Amy Maxmen: So certainly at that time, Egypt was around too. I think what makes Nubia, or I guess just around the Nile in general, what makes it interesting is that people were there since the beginning. … I guess the name Nubia is where we get a little bit tricky. What I wrote about mainly was the Kingdom of Kush. They're Kushites. Sometimes those are referred to as Nubians. So the Kushites, they started around 2000 B.C. But of course there were people there earlier, so you find very old drawings and rocks from, say, 3500 B.C.
David Corcoran: Let's talk about what they did. First of all, I guess we should say that people settled in the Nile Valley right when their home communities began to be wiped out by dust storms and desert. So they kind of gravitated to the Nile Valley. You say they organized a society there. What kinds of things did they build?
Amy Maxmen: Well, when you get into the Kingdom of Kush, we start seeing settlements and towns. They also were kind of like the Egyptians in that they were decorative in death. A kind of a classical Nubian architecture for necropolises would be these things called tumuli. They're kind of these burial mounds that might be surrounded by rocks or other objects. But also they built pyramids to commemorate the dead, and sometimes those pyramids have small temples outside of them.
They're smaller on the whole than [in Egypt]. One archaeologist told me there's five times as many. So what you're struck by is the sheer number. It's kind of neat [that] where the Egyptians built these great pyramids for royalty, it seems like the Kush were building them also for regular people, not just for royalty, so you'll see whole fields of pyramids …. At one site I went to I asked the archaeologist, "Have you found anything recently?" And he just casually said, "Well, there's about 50 pyramids. These are the bases of them because they have been eroded down."
So we went out and saw this whole field of kind of square bases of pyramids. Some were really quite small, as small as, say, six foot by six foot. Some of them were also interesting. I remember there was one that had the shape of a dome inside of it.
David Corcoran: So almost like a cemetery of pyramids?
Amy Maxmen: Yeah. And then also the tombs had some sort of unique items too. For example, the things that stick out in my mind, for one period, one of the archaeologists found a couple of these incense burners that are also shaped like ducks within tombs. … If you're burying your loved one, you stick a duck-shaped incense burner in to the tomb; and that's sort of a fad that was unique to that area for a little while.
David Corcoran: And what was their language?
Amy Maxmen: The language is Meroitic, and very little is known about that. In fact, I met somebody who might be one of the only people who can translate it, and he's still — this is his pursuit of what he's working on. It looks nothing like hieroglyphics. And he said that it's not at all related to hieroglyphics.
So I saw these — they look like gravestones that have etchings of Meroitic, and he sort of traced some of those similarities to languages that are spoken all around Sudan, like some languages that are spoken by people in Darfur, some in Eritrea, some to Nubians today. The present-day language is called Nubian. And so he's presently trying to decipher it. If you can imagine, this is nowhere close to what's known about Egypt, because at this point there's plenty of Egyptologists who can read hieroglyphics.
David Corcoran: And no Rosetta Stone, apparently.
Amy Maxmen: No.
David Corcoran: So how was all of this discovered?
Amy Maxmen: Well it's been slowly documented for quite some time since the late 1800s. Some archaeologists had gone down there and just seen the more grand structures like the big temples, the big pyramids. And then more recently, there's a decent amount of work going on there now. You know, sometimes it's a matter of just going to the place and having the funds and the ability to start slowly digging up what you find.
For example, a lot of it's buried beneath sand. So what people might do is go out with something called a magnetometer that can give you a sense of if there is something of different density belowground, and that might give you a sense that there's something below there — if it looks like it's a number of walls. So, then you'll have archaeologists slowly start digging there and seeing what they find.
David Corcoran: And they're still digging, right? They're still finding things.
Amy Maxmen: Oh, yeah. I was not prepared for how much they'd be finding things. I think like any journalist who goes on a trip, the fear is that nothing will happen. It was kind of the opposite problem where every site I looked at … It was almost silly the amount of … just amazing discoveries like, "Oh, we just opened up this tomb for the first time." And "Oh, look. Here's a mummy." There was no place that had nothing going on. And that's only right by the Nile.
David Corcoran: You actually describe the unearthing of a mummy in your story. Did you witness that?
Amy Maxmen: That was cool. I didn't witness it. When I got there this had been found pretty recently and to give you a sense of what the archaeological conditions are like. So this team of archaeologists was staying in a house, and in the room where we greeted everyone and went to join them for lunch, there was this head just sitting on the table, along with a leg near it, and they had flesh on them. The head was bizarre. It had matted hair on its head. And the strangest thing is that its tongue was sticking out. Apparently that can happen. She said it was probably a natural thing that happened during decomposition.
But she had found it pretty recently before we'd gotten there, and that's just sort of where they were keeping it for the time being.
David Corcoran: So we've been talking for a few minutes and we haven't even gotten to the main point of your story, which is that all of this is in danger of being wiped out forever. What's going on?
Amy Maxmen: Well, there's a number of things depending on the site you're talking about. You know, one reason part of Nubia was discovered by Western archaeologists originally was because of the Aswan High Dam that was built in Egypt. This is a hydroelectric dam, and it made a huge reservoir and in the reservoir's wake it drowned a lot of ruins. So right before the water came in, archaeologists went about documenting what was there and then moving certain things that could be transported.
Similarly, now there's more dams that are being planned along the Nile. These are extremely political to the extent where it's not really smart to easily report on them within Sudan because on one side you have government [officials] who are sort of secretive about making deals about the dams. And then there's some resistance, understandably, by people who live in the towns that would be submerged if those dams are built.
So it's a pretty hot topic and those dams would — it's estimated that they might submerge thousands of ruins and rock etchings and everything like that. So there's the dams in some places, and other places the dams would raise the water tables so that the tombs would also fill with water. There's that; but then there's also the stuff that threatens archaeology, I guess, everywhere, which is just development. Populations grow; people come to towns where they want to live. And also, there's not only just more mouths to feed, which means more farming, but also people want to live a better life so they might try and have bigger farms.
Then what else? When I was driving in northern Sudan you can see that there's a lot of illegal gold mining, so you'll see people going out with metal detectors and those metal detectors also can hit things that are buried in tombs. So they'll loot the tombs. That's another threat. I talked to one archaeologist, and he felt like that was the biggest threat to the sites that he's been working on. He's already had a number of tombs looted recently too.
And one other thing that is threatening the ruins right now is simply just time and desertification and processes that occur that are beyond our control. So specifically, I think probably the best known site in Nubia is called Meroe. It's a Unesco World Heritage Site, so that's recognized and protected. But … they had a number of droughts in the '80s and '90s, and then also there's been a lot of grazing nearby from all of these events. A lot of sand has blown into Meroe, which is this area of — it's really majestic. It's just in the middle of nowhere; there are these 43 pyramids that are attached to temples, and they're really intricately carved. And this is the place where I also saw some archaeologists uncovering the tombs for the first time where you could see goddesses painted on the walls. …
But you can just tell that all of the etchings are being scraped away by sandstorms. And the sand, I guess because Meroe's built within a basin, the idea is that the sand sort of moved in because it's becoming drier, and maybe because of pastoralization. The brush that might've blocked the sand isn't there anymore. So now you've got the sand that's trapped in this bowl and it just whips around every day. That's another reason why things are falling apart.
David Corcoran: Desertification — these are kinds of natural forces that nobody can really stop. But all these dams, and the looters getting into tombs to steal precious metals, it's kind of hard to imagine things like this going on and those other centers of antiquity that we all know about, Greece and Rome and Luxor and so on. Why has there been so little attention to the situation in Nubia?
Amy Maxmen: Well, for one, depending on what the thing is. In the case of the dam, it's a sovereign country, so unless the U.N. decides that one of these sites is a World Heritage Site, which they have done for, say, Meroe, people can't go in and tell Sudan what to do. It's its own country. And if the government decides that it wants a dam, then I think it can build a dam and there's not really much anybody else can do about it.
As far as development, if people want to expand their farms and if they realize that there is ancient property on that area, they might work with the National Corporation of Antiquities and Museums; that's an agency within the government in Sudan that is sort of responsible for their antiquities. So let's say those farmers might go to that department and say what's there, and maybe they'll work out a deal. Or maybe they won't. And it's also hard to draw a hard line there. Those are complicated issues, people have to feed their kids, they're not part of the world's anthropology museum.
And a lot of it is only coming to light now. I was in one area, and this archaeologist and I were walking around the town where people live. And you have to realize the places where I was traveling, there was often no running water. There was no electricity unless you had your own generator, which maybe only the archaeologist did. There was one sand- [and] mud-brick house that we were walking by, and the archaeologist pointed around to the back to me and what happened there, and he had dug a big pit. And he thinks there's actually some old settlements below this person's house. And the reason why he knew about it was that they actually had told him it's weird, in their kitchen they notice that whenever anything like water flows in, it flows down this one hole and it just seems to all drip down there. So it seemed like it was hollow below there — and sure enough, it was.
So he's sort of working with that family to see, you know, "What if we pay you to move, would you be interested in that?" A lot of it is just kind of getting the trust of people and seeing if they will agree to halt what they're doing or to move slightly in order for you to excavate.
David Corcoran: So why do you think Nubia hasn't gotten the kind of attention that all those other early civilizations like Greece and Rome have gotten?
Amy Maxmen: There's a few reasons for that. One of them is it's not the most hospitable place to travel in. There's sandstorms, it's dry, it's hot. Even if we were talking about the past 50 years, it's not a comfortable trip. For part of it I was in a boat without electricity, without running water. But even earlier you could say, "Well, I guess Egypt was like that too." The British were really interested in Egypt in the 1800s and the early 1900s. There's a lot of classically trained Egyptologists there. So they dug in deep to Egypt, and understandably: Egypt has some magnificent pyramids, so that's not foolish. So I think they sort of were paying a lot of attention to Egypt and maybe not further south.
But then the other part that you really can't dismiss is there's a huge role of racism in Western archaeology as it was. And I'm not just making that up, it's quite explicit. One of the archaeologists who's best known for his work in Nubia in the early 1900s, he would even write, whenever he found a pyramid, he just explained, "Well this is clearly built by a light-skinned race because Negroids couldn't have done something like this."
So it's pretty clear that people also just didn't expect there to be anything of worth further south — based on pigmentation of somebody's skin. And I think that plays in to why it's not paid a lot of attention.
David Corcoran: So are you hopeful, Amy? Are there any prospects that the great bulk of this civilization and its creations will somehow be preserved? Or is it doomed to be wiped out?
Amy Maxmen: Well, you know, what's kind of funny about the whole "archaeology racing against the clock" thing is that's sort of how it goes. And the upshot of development and dams and everything like that is that sometimes it really provides that push for people to start funding more archaeological work and for governments, including even Sudan's own government, to at least go and see, "OK, what's there before we wipe this place out?"
So this is sort of driving some of the research there, and the other great thing is there are some Sudanese archaeologists who are leading some of the projects. … They can work more than, say, a few months of the year there, but also they're going to be interpreting everything they find through a different lens than, say, when Americans or Europeans are doing it. …
There's some really good tools out there right now, so the archaeologists that I saw, not only were they using these methods to see what's below the dirt and to excavate that way, but they could use, say, cameras attached to kites or even drones to get a better sense of the geometry of everything. … And there's a researcher at the British Museum who is using all of the images he takes of everything and he's making this sort of — it looks almost like a video game. It's this interactive graphic [Editor's note: Follow this link and search for "interactive model"] where you can walk through the ancient settlements he's uncovering. So me, sitting here in California, I can go online and it's almost as if I'm in Sudan walking through the old ruins. So at least that way they're preserved online.
I guess I'm hopeful that with more people talking about it and more of this going online that it will make its way into textbooks and into classrooms, and then people start learning about these great civilizations that existed in sub-Saharan Africa. Things that we might learn a lot less about in school.
David Corcoran: Well, Amy Maxmen, I want to thank you for going to Sudan to report this story for us and coming on the podcast to talk about it.
Amy Maxmen: Thank you, it's been a pleasure.
David Corcoran: Amy Maxmen is an award-winning journalist at Nature magazine. Her work also appears in National Geographic, Wired, and Nautilus among other outlets — including, of course, Undark, where her story about Nubia is this month's Case Study.
-- Sent from my Linux system.
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