A lushly illustrated gazetteer of the archaeological sites of southern Egypt and northern Sudan and named a 2012 American Publishers (PROSE) Awards winner for Best Archaeology & Anthropology Book For most of the modern world, ancient Nubia seems an unknown and enigmatic land. Only a handful of archaeologists have studied its history or unearthed the Nubian cities, temples, and cemeteries that once dotted the landscape of southern Egypt and northern Sudan. Nubia’s remote setting in the midst of an inhospitable desert, with access by river blocked by impassable rapids, has lent it not only an air of mystery, but also isolated it from exploration. Over the past century, particularly during this last generation, scholars have begun to focus more attention on the fascinating cultures of ancient Nubia, ironically prompted by the construction of large dams that have flooded vast tracts of the ancient land. This book attempts to document some of what has recently been discovered about ancient Nubia, with its remarkable history, architecture, and culture, and thereby to give us a picture of this rich, but unfamiliar, African legacy.

"Ancient Nubia ... will introduce you to the peoples and culture of the ancient land of Nubia. A civilization sometimes threatened by, but more often competitive with, its more powerful northern neighbor, Egypt. Ancient Nubia had an identitiy and a diversity of tradition that is extraordinary to investigate."--Cover.

First published in 1996. This book is designed to provide a clear, up-to-date account of the past of Nubia (both in Egypt and the Sudan) from the earliest human activity known there in Old Stone Age times until the coming of Islam in the fourteenth– fifteenth centuries AD, based on over 45 years' experience of that country both as an archaeological civil servant and an academic. The archaeology and ancient history of Nubia has not been well known until very recently and the book is planned to fill a gap by making this story more widely known. This book is designed to provide a clear, up-to-date account of the past of Nubia (both in Egypt and the Sudan) from the earliest human activity known there in Old Stone Age times until the coming of Islam in the fourteenth– fifteenth centuries AD, based on over 45 years' experience of that country both as an archaeological civil servant and an academic. The archaeology and ancient history of Nubia has not been well known until very recently and the book is planned to fill a gap by making this story more widely known.

The cultures of Nubia built the earliest cities, states, and empires of inner Africa, but they remain relatively poorly known outside their modern descendants and the community of archaeologists, historians, and art historians researching them. The earliest archaeological work in Nubia was motivated by the region's role as neighbor, trade partner, and enemy of ancient Egypt. Increasingly, however, ancient Nile-based Nubian cultures are recognized in their own right as the earliest complex societies in inner Africa. As agro-pastoral cultures, Nubian settlement, economy, political organization, and religious ideologies were often organized differently from those of the urban, bureaucratic, and predominantly agricultural states of Egypt and the ancient Near East. Nubian societies are thus of great interest in comparative study, and are also recognized for their broader impact on the histories of the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia brings together chapters by an international group of scholars on a wide variety of topics that relate to the history and archaeology of the region. After important introductory chapters on the history of research in Nubia and on its climate and physical environment, the largest part of the volume focuses on the sequence of cultures that lead almost to the present day. Several cross-cutting themes are woven through these chapters, including essays on desert cultures and on Nubians in Egypt. Eleven final chapters synthesize subjects across all historical phases, including gender and the body, economy and trade, landscape archaeology, iron working, and stone quarrying.

Numerous research projects have studied the Nubian cultures of Sudan and Egypt over the last thirty years, leading to significant new insights. The contributions to this handbook illuminate our current understanding of the cultural history of this fascinating region, including its interconnections to the natural world.

Nubia: Ancient Kingdoms of Africa is the accompanying catalogue for an exhibition at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World that explores the rich cultures of ancient Nubia in present-day southern Egypt and northern Sudan. The exhibition traces the rise, fall, and re-emergence of Nubian power over the course of some 2,500 years, from the earliest Nubian kingdoms of about 3000 BC through the conquest of Egypt beginning in about 750 BC. Beautifully illustrated, the catalogue includes a historical overview of Nubia and its excavations by Guest Curator Geoff Emberling; a series of archival excavation photos from one of Nubia's most prodigious excavators, George A. Reisner; a checklist of objects from the exhibition; and a selected bibliography for further study of these rich but little understood African kingdoms.

Includes a brief introduction to Nubia cultures and highlights of the Nubia gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, obtained from Nubian excavations.