ANCIENT NUBIA: ENJOY TRAVELLING ACROSS THE NILE

Tina Picotes at Blue Nile Sailing Club, Khartoum

Claire Fontaine, Tina Picotes, Joseph de Ca'th Lon and The Grandma have just arrived to Khartoum, the capital and largest city of Sudan. It is located at the confluence of the White Nile, flowing north from Lake Victoria, and the Blue Nile, flowing west from Ethiopia.

The location where the two Niles meet is known as al-Mogran, The Confluence. The main Nile continues to flow towards Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea. After a flight from Barcelona to Cairo and a second one from Cairo to Khartoum, they have finally arrived to their destination.

Here, in Khartoum, they're going to start a cruise across the Nile to emulate the novel Death on the Nile written by Agatha Christie in 1937. The book features the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. The action takes place in Egypt, mostly on the Nile River.

For every friend, this trip has a special motive. Joseph de Ca'th Lon is an expert in Archaeology and Mathematics visiting Nubia and Egypt is a dream for him. Tina Picotes loves travelling and Nubia and Egypt offer her lots of emotions and incredible places to discover. Claire Fontaine is a great expert in design and Ancient Cultures are always a fantastic source of inspiration and The Grandma loves languages and she's excited with the possibility of descifring old Egyptian hieroglyphs and Nubian writings.

The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Intermediate Language Practice (Vocabulary 4) manual while they have been waiting their private boat to sail along the Nile river.

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Nubia is a region along the Nile river encompassing the area between Aswan in southern Egypt and Khartoum in central Sudan. It was the seat of one of the earliest civilizations of ancient Africa, with a history that can be traced from at least 2500 BC onward, Kerma culture, and was home to several empires, most prominently the kingdom of Kush, which for a while even ruled over Egypt.

Old map of Nubian lands

Its collapse in the 4th century AD after more than 1000 years of existence was precipitated by an invasion by Ethiopia's Kingdom of Aksum and saw the rise of three Christian kingdoms, Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia, the last two again lasting 1000 years.

Their eventual decline initiated not only the partition of Nubia into the northern half conquered by the Ottomans and the southern half by the Sennar sultanate in the 16th century, but also a rapid Islamization and partial Arabization of the Nubian people. Nubia was again united under the Khedivate of Egypt in the 19th century. Today, Nubia is split between Egypt and Sudan.

The name Nubia is derived from that of the Noba people, nomads who settled the area in the 4th century CE following the collapse of the kingdom of Meroë.

The Noba spoke a Nilo-Saharan language, ancestral to Old Nubian. Old Nubian was mostly used in religious texts dating from the 8th and 15th centuries. Before the 4th century, and throughout classical antiquity, Nubia was known as Kush, or, in Classical Greek usage, included under the name Ethiopia (Aithiopia).

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Historically, the people of Nubia spoke at least two varieties of the Nubian language group, a subfamily that includes Nobiin, the descendant of Old Nubian, Kenuzi-Dongola, Midob and several related varieties in the northern part of the Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan.

Until at least 1970, the Birgid language was spoken north of Nyala in Darfur, but is now extinct. However, linguistic evidence indicates that the languages spoken in the ancient Kerma Culture, present-day southern Egypt and northern Sudan in Nubia, belonged to the Cushitic branch of the Afroasiatic languages.

Joseph de Ca'th Lon at Nubian Pyramids

Nubia was divided into two major regions: Upper and Lower Nubia, so called because of their location in the Nile river valley, the lower being further downstream than the upper. 

Lower Nubia lay between the First and Second Cataracts of the Nile river, spreading into modern southern Egypt and northern Sudan, while Upper Nubia extended between the Second and Sixth Cataracts, in modern central Sudan.

With the end of colonialism and the establishment of the Republic of Egypt (1953), and the secession of the Republic of Sudan from unity with Egypt (1956), Nubia was divided between Egypt and Sudan.

More information: Ancient Origins

During the early-1970s, many Egyptian and Sudanese Nubians were forcibly resettled to make room for Lake Nasser after the construction of the dams at Aswan. Nubian villages can now be found north of Aswan on the west bank of the Nile and on Elephantine Island; and many Nubians now live in large cities, such as Cairo.

The trip has started in Lake Nasser, a vast reservoir in southern Egypt and northern Sudan. It is one of the largest man-made lakes in the world. Before construction, Sudan was against the building of Lake Nasser because it would encroach on land in the North, where the Nubian people lived. They would have to be resettled. In the end Sudan's land near the area of Lake Nasser was mostly flooded by the lake.

The Grandma & Claire Fontaine at Nubian Ruins

They have visited the Nubian Pyramids that were built by the rulers of the ancient Kushite kingdoms.

The area of the Nile valley known as Nubia, which lies within present day Sudan, was home to three Kushite kingdoms during antiquity. The first had its capital at Kerma (2600–1520 BC). The second was centered on Napata (1000–300 BC). Finally, the last kingdom was centered on Meroë (300 BC–AD 300). They are built of granite and sandstone.

Kerma was Nubia's first centralized state with its own indigenous forms of architecture and burial customs. The last two kingdoms, Napata and Meroë, were heavily influenced by ancient Egypt culturally, economically, politically, and militarily. The Kushite kingdoms in turn competed strongly with Egypt economically and militarily. 

In 744 BC, the Kushite king Piankhi overthrew the 24th Dynasty and united the entire Nile valley from the delta to the city of Napata under his rule. Piankhi and his descendants ruled as the pharaohs of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty. Napatan control of Egypt ended after being conquered by Assyria in 656 BC. The Nubian pyramids are recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

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Act like a man, think like a king.

Nubian Proverb