Recover a Lost Kingdom on the Nile and build of Merowe Dam

El sitio más extenso de pirámides nubias se encuentra en Meroe, entre las quinta y sexta cataratas del Nilo, a un centenar de kilómetros al norte de Jartum, capital de Sudán. Durante el período Meroitico, más de cuarenta reinas y reyes fueron enterrados allí.

En los años previos a 2007, equipos arqueológicos de Gran Bretaña, Alemania, Hungría, Polonia, Sudán y Estados Unidos se apresuraban a cavar en los sitios que pronto estarían bajo el agua de la Represa de Meroe (Merowe Dam) en sudán. Los equipos se sorprendieron al encontrar cientos de ruinas, cementerios y motivos de arte rupestre que nunca había sido estudiados. Una de las operaciones de salvamento más completas era llevada a cabo por el grupo del Museo Arqueológico de Gdansk en Polonia, encabezado por Henryk Paner que investigó 711 sitios arqueológicos sólo en 2003.

"Esta área es increíblemente rica en arqueología", dijo Derek Welsby del British Museum en un informe del  invierno de 2006 en la revista Archaeology magazine.

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La escala de los esfuerzos de rescate no se compara con lo poco que se hizo para salvar el patrimonio arqueológico en la década de 1960 cuando se construyó la represa egipcia de Asuán. Parte de la historia del norte de Nubia fue sepultado por las aguas de la represa egipcia. Sin embargo, hay que reconocer que imponentes templos que los faraones erigieron en Abu Simbel y Filae fueron desmontados y restaurados en terrenos más altos.

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Los Cusitas de Nubia no dejaron una arquitectura tan masiva. Su reino decayó y desapareció a finales del S XVI antes de nuestra era y Egipto se volvió más poderoso y expansivo con los gobernantes de la época conocida como Nuevo Reino.

En Sudán, la represa de Merowe construida por ingenieros chinos y subcontratistas franceses y alemanes, se sitúa al final de la cuarta catarata, un estrecho paso de rápidos e islas. El incremento de los aguas del Nilo por el embalsamiento en Meroe, creó un lago de 2 kilómetros de ancho y 100 millas de largo, provocó el desplazamiento de más de 50.000 personas de las etnias Manasir, Shaigiyya y Rubatab. La mayoría de los arqueólogos sólo tuvieron hasta 2007 para descubrir los lugares de la Cultura Kush próximos a las riberas del Nilo.

Las proporciones de las pirámides de Nubia difieren notablemente de las egipcias: están construidas con bloques de piedra escalonados de 30 a 6 metros de altura, dispuestas sobre cimientos relativamente pequeños, que rara vez superan los ocho metros de ancho, dando lugar a estructuras altas y estrechas, con una inclinación de aproximadamente 70°. La mayoría tienen templos contiguos, con características cusitas evidentes (*). En comparación, las pirámides de Egipto de la misma altura por lo general tenían cimientos por lo menos cinco veces más grandes y se inclinan en ángulos de entre cuarenta y cincuenta grados.

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Todas las tumbas de las pirámides de Nubia fueron saqueadas en tiempos antiguos, pero los relieves murales que se conservan en las capillas de las tumbas revelan que sus ocupantes reales eran momificados, cubiertos de joyas y enterrado en ataúdes de madera. En el momento de su exploración, por los arqueólogos en los siglos XIX y XX, algunas pirámides contenían restos de arcos, carcaj de flechas, anillos de pulgar característicos de arquero, arneses de caballos, cajas de madera, muebles, cerámica, vidrio de colores, vasos de metal , y muchos otros artefactos que atestiguan un intenso comercio Meroitico con Egipto y el mundo helenístico.

Una pirámide excavada en Meroe incluye cientos de objetos pesados, tales como grandes bloques esculpidos y 390 piedras que formaban la pirámide. Una vaca enterrada completa con pomada oleosa en los ojos fue descubierta también en el área antes de ser inundada por la represa de Meroe, al igual que “rocas musicales” que creaban un sonido melódico.

(*) Los cusitas son un grupo de etnias afroasiática (la misma a la que pertenecen semitas y bereberes) del Cuerno de África (Etiopía, Eritrea y Somalia) y parte de la costa sudanesa del mar Rojo que se caracterizan por hablar lenguas cusitas. Las etnias más importantes de este grupo son los oromo (25 millones, principalmente en Somalia) los somalíes (15 millones en Somalia) los sidama (en Etiopía, 2 millones) los hadia (1.6 millones), los kambata (1.4 millones) y los afar. Los cusitas reciben ese nombre del reino de Kush, un antiguo Estado (750 a. C.) contemporáneo al Imperio Egipcio, que se situaba en el norte de Sudán, o Nubia —de hecho Kush significaba Nubia en egipcio.

Although Nubia is often referred to as Kush, it’s difficult to discern what was Nubia and what was the Kingdom of Kush.  This is in part because the Roman Empire referred to the entire area south of Egypt as “Cush” and sometimes “Ethiopia”, while Greece referred to the same area as “Nubia” and “Ethiopia” and referred to all dark-skinned people as “Cushites”.

Nubia is a region along the Nile in what is now southern Egypt and northern Sudan.  Although rich in gold during the Ancient Egyptian dynasties, most of this was pillaged and taken by Egypt, Rome, and other marauders.  By the first century A.D., Nubia was a moderately poor area.

http://revengeofthecimbri.com/wp-content/uploads/ancient-nubia-and-egypt1.jpg

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Dam construction and archaeosite destruction

Scholars Race to Recover a Lost Kingdom on the Nile

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/science/19kush.html?_r=1

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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Excavations in what is now Sudan are uncovering ancient settlements and relics of a gold industry from the kingdom of Kush.

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2007: A University of Chicago team is racing to uncover ruins of the kingdom of Kush before the area is flooded by a new dam in northern Sudan.

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The kingdom of Kush flourished for five centuries in the second millennium B.C. in a state society without a writing system, an extensive bureaucracy or major urban centers.

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Scholars Race to Recover a Lost Kingdom on the Nile

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/science/19kush.html?_r=1

On the periphery of history in antiquity, there was a land known as Kush. Overshadowed by Egypt, to the north, it was a place of uncharted breadth and depth far up the Nile, a mystery verging on myth. One thing the Egyptians did know and recorded — Kush had gold.

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A Lost Kingdom on the Nile

The New York Times

Scholars have come to learn that there was more to the culture of Kush than was previously suspected. From deciphered Egyptian documents and modern archaeological research, it is now known that for five centuries in the second millennium B.C., the kingdom of Kush flourished with the political and military prowess to maintain some control over a wide territory in Africa.

Kush’s governing success would seem to have been anomalous, or else conventional ideas about statehood rest too narrowly on the experiences of early civilizations like Mesopotamia, Egypt and China. How could a fairly complex state society exist without a writing system, an extensive bureaucracy or major urban centers, none of which Kush evidently had?

Archaeologists are now finding some answers — at least intriguing insights — emerging in advance of rising Nile waters behind a new dam in northern Sudan. Hurried excavations are uncovering ancient settlements, cemeteries and gold-processing centers in regions previously unexplored.

In recent reports and interviews, archaeologists said they had found widespread evidence that the kingdom of Kush, in its ascendancy from 2000 B.C. to 1500 B.C., exerted control or at least influence over a 750-mile stretch of the Nile Valley. This region extended from the first cataract in the Nile, as attested by an Egyptian monument, all the way upstream to beyond the fourth cataract. The area covered part of the larger geographic region of indeterminate borders known in antiquity as Nubia.

Some archaeologists theorize that the discoveries show that the rulers of Kush were the first in sub-Saharan Africa to hold sway over so vast a territory.

“This makes Kush a more major player in political and military dynamics of the time than we knew before,” said Geoff Emberling, co-leader of a University of Chicago expedition. “Studying Kush helps scholars have a better idea of what statehood meant in an ancient context outside such established power centers of Egypt and Mesopotamia.”

Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute at the university, said, “Until now, virtually all that we have known about Kush came from the historical records of their Egyptian neighbors and from limited explorations of monumental architecture at the Kushite capital city, Kerma.”

To archaeologists, knowing that a virtually unexplored land of mystery is soon to be flooded has the same effect as Samuel Johnson ascribed to one facing the gallows in the morning. It concentrates the mind.

Over the last few years, archaeological teams from Britain, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Sudan and the United States have raced to dig at sites that will soon be underwater. The teams were surprised to find hundreds of settlement ruins, cemeteries and examples of rock art that had never been studied. One of the most comprehensive salvage operations has been conducted by groups headed by Henryk Paner of the Gdansk Archaeological Museum in Poland, which surveyed 711 ancient sites in 2003 alone.

“This area is so incredibly rich in archaeology,” Derek Welsby of the British Museum said in a report last winter in Archaeology magazine.

The scale of the salvage effort hardly compares to the response in the 1960s to the Aswan High Dam, which flooded a part of Nubia that then reached into what is southern Egypt. Imposing temples that the pharaohs erected at Abu Simbel and Philae were dismantled and restored on higher ground.

The Kushites, however, left no such grand architecture to be rescued. Their kingdom declined and eventually disappeared by the end of the 16th century B.C., as Egypt grew more powerful and expansive under rulers of the period known as the New Kingdom.

In Sudan, the Merowe Dam, built by Chinese engineers with French and German subcontractors, stands at the downstream end of the fourth cataract, a narrow passage of rapids and islands. The rising Nile waters will create a lake 2 miles wide and 100 miles long, displacing more than 50,000 people of the Manasir, Rubatab and Shaigiyya tribes. Most archaeologists expect this to be their last year for exploring Kush sites nearest the former riverbanks.

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Deciphered documents and archaeological finds suggest that the kingdom of Kush maintained control over a wide territory in Africa.

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This necklace spacer, a relic of a gold industry, was uncovered in what is now Sudan.

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The pyramids of Merowe, distant relatives of the Great Pyramids, north of Khartoum.

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Most archaeologists expect this to be their last year for exploring Kush sites nearest to the former riverbanks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/science/19kush.html?_r=1

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Technical details of Merowe Dam

The dam is designed to have a length of about 9 km (5.6 mi) and a crest height of up to 67 m (220 ft). It will consist of polystyrene-faced rockfill dams on each river bank, an earth-rock dam with a pepper core in the left river channel and a live water section in the right river channel (sluices, spillway and power intake dam with turbine housings). Once finished, it will contain a reservoir of 12.5 km3 (3.0 cu mi), or about 20% of the Nile's annual flow. The reservoir lake is planned to extend 174 km (108 mi) upstream.

The planners expect an annual electricity yield of 5.5 TWh, corresponding to an average load of 625 MW, or 50% of the rated load. To utilize the extra generation capacity, the Sudanese power grid will be upgraded and extended as part of the project. It is planned to build about 500 km (310 mi) of new 500 kV aerial transmission line across the Bayudah desert to Atbara, continuing to Omdurman/Khartoum, as well as about 1,000 km (620 mi) of 220 kV lines eastwards to Port Sudan and westwards along the Nile, connecting to Merowe, Dabba and Dongola.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merowe_Dam

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Sudan riot police break up dam protest

Published on 12/22/2011 in dams, displacement of people, hydropower, policy, privatization and water wars. 0 CommentsTags: merowe dam.

Photo retrieved from: www.starafrica.com

“Police then forcefully moved in and detained an unknown number of the demonstrators.

Their protest came exactly one month after about 1 000 people displaced by the dam began a sit-in over the government’s alleged failure to compensate them with replacement homes as promised.

They are continuing their sit-in at Al-Damer, a town around 300km north of Khartoum.

http://peakwater.org/category/displacement-of-people/page/3/