What have people from the Nile Valley Collective been writing about recently?
Hidden Treasures of Nubia
A large number of Nubian artifacts reside in US museums, too often not on display, but occasionally seen in impactful exhibitions, such as Ancient Nubia Now, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2019–2020.
Touches on: history and future of museum curation, ways that histories are presented to the public in Western cultural institutions
Speaker: Solange Ashby
See video here (begin at 32:38)
Part of the 2-day symposium Exhibiting Africa: State of the Field in African Art and the Diaspora
Nubian worshippers influenced rites at Lower Nubian temples
Touches on: worship of Isis, temples in Lower Nubia, Nubian cultic practices, Meroitic royal funerary cult
Author: Solange Ashby
Read more here
Through prayers and legal agreements inscribed on temple walls, we see the activities of Nubian worshippers in Egyptian temples of Lower Nubia.
Women in the ancient Nile Valley accessed power through many different roles
In progress: a book on Women of the Sacred South: Female Power in Ancient Nubia and Egypt
Author: Solange Ashby
Objects, language, and people moved between the Nile Valley and West Africa
Particular innovations in the so-called early Nigerian ram-headed aegis are attributed to Yoruba cultural conceptions. The diffusion of words from Nile and Darfur Nubian into Hausa occurred prior to the eighteenth century.
Touches on: movements of specific artifacts across Africa, artistic representations of deities on collars, sharing words across African languages
Author: Sandro Capo Chichi
Read more here
See Sandro’s art featured here in the web exhibit New Perspectives on Ancient Nubia
Techniques of iron production in ancient Egypt
An ethnoarchaeological approach shows the striking convergences between ancient Egyptian techniques and contemporary techniques used elsewhere in Africa.
Touches on: iron production, the sacredness of iron, connections between ancient Egypt and elsewhere in Africa
Author: El Hadji Malick Dème
See it here
Offering breads in the Pyramid Texts of Unas
The wide variety of bread types allows a thorough study of its symbolism in a funerary context and its association with the resurrection of Osiris.
Touches on: types of bread, eye of Horus, the idea of life after death
Author: El Hadji Malick Dème
Read more here
African American and Caribbean scholars’ interpretations of Nile Valley history
Their counternarratives resisted interpretations clouded by 19th-century ideas of race and racial hierarchy and restored the ancient Nile Valley to its place in African history.
Touches on: writing history, interpretation of archaeological materials, disciplinary silos, Kush
Author: Debora D. Heard
Read more here
“Racial” paradigms in popular and scholarly works must be reconsidered
Problems related to ongoing racial paradigms are pointed out in concepts, comments, and studies from various time periods, as well as recent presentations in the media and studies, on Nile Valley peoples.
Touches on: complexity of the term “race,” race and power, systems of classification of humans, physical variation among humans, media representations of Nile Valley cultures
Author: S. O. Y. Keita
Read more here
Relocating the concept of the “father of the god” in an African context
The concept of “father” and the Egyptian title “father of the god” encompasses a broader set of roles than just an immediate biological ancestor.
Touches on: history, sociolinguistics, cultural determinism, priesthood, the political/administrative role of vizier
Author: Kimani S. K. Nehusi
Ancient Nile Valley history has important contemporary resonances in Brazil
A common ground is offered to encourage dialogue between scholars of ancient Nile Valley cultures and those who participate in Afro social movements in Brazil.
Touches on: connections between Brazil and Africa, Pan-Africanism, Afrocentrisms, histories of Egyptology, contemporary Brazilian history, Carnival
Author: Thais Rocha da Silva
Read more here
Ancient houses were active parts of, not disarticulated from, the ancient settlement
A new approach to understanding domestic spaces must consider the community as a whole and could use gender as a way to think about social relationships, not simply a label for particular rooms in a house or a particular set of activities.
Touches on: domestic spaces, villages and towns, gender roles, social relationships, community
Author: Thais Rocha da Silva
Read more here
Kushites created a vibrant African tradition
The Kushite civilization that flourished for a thousand years was not an imperfect imitation of ancient Egypt, as some Egyptologists have asserted, or even the fount of Egyptian civilization, as some Afrocentric scholars have argued.
Touches on: misunderstandings of Kushite culture by scholars, archaeology in Sudan, borrowing between cultures
Author: Stuart Tyson Smith
Read more here
Tracing thousands of years of the rich diversity of African histories
A book of essays that presents to nonspecialists the great precolonial kingdoms of Africa that have been marginalized throughout history.
Touches on: political and social organization, oral histories, archaeological evidence, modern legacies of ancient cultures
Authors: David Wengrow and many others
Read more here
Transforming our understanding of the human past
Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there.
Touches on: theories about ancient human societies, origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization, how we make sense of human history
Authors: David Graeber and David Wengrow
Read more here
See Kevin Suemnicht’s review “The Black Radical Tradition in The Dawn of Everything” here
How Pauline Hopkins set the record straight
Editor, author, and singer Pauline Hopkins wrote the novel Of One Blood (1902), setting the record straight about the Africanity of ancient Nile Valley cultures.
Touches on: Afrofuturism, hidden cities, “passing,” historical research in a literary context
Author: Vanessa Davies
Read more here
Amy Jacques Garvey and Marcus Garvey on ancient Nile Valley cultures
On the pages of their newspaper, the Garveys challenged scholars’ incorrect views.
Touches on: pan-Africanism, early 20th-century racialized thinking, modern Egyptian political and intellectual leaders’ views of Egypt’s place in Africa
Author: Vanessa Davies
Read more here
Booker T. Washington considers cultural connections across Africa
Washington’s thoughts on ancient Nile Valley cultures remind us to interrogate who constructs research questions and whom does research benefit.
Touches on: educational philosophies, early 20th-century racialized thinking, US Public Health Service syphilis study, human-population genetics, precarity and privilege as related to scientific research
Author: Vanessa Davies
Read more here
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