2. Egyptian.—The first effective occupation of the northern parts of the Sudan dates from the Middle Empire, but though it is represented by several monuments noted in the list below, it did not last for long. The kings and queens of the New Empire returned to the conquest and exploration of the south, and left much more striking memorials of their greatness. The tablets found at Tel el Amarna are full of requests from Syrian princes for gold, which was exported to them unworked, and by them smelted and wrought into ornaments and vessels. Now the bulk of this gold came from the numerous mines which still exist between the Red Sea and the Nile; in a word the Northern Sudan was the “Rand” of the ancient world. The shafts and huts of the miners, their washing-tables, grinders, and other appliances are found still in situ, and the position of some of the finest temples is now seen to be determined by their nearness to rich auriferous regions. This is, perhaps, the most important discovery made since the days of Lepsius.
Under the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties the Northern Sudan was an Egyptian province, an appanage often of the heir-apparent, and the monuments of this date (see below) are thoroughly Egyptian in character. Under the twenty-second dynasty the conditions were reversed and Egypt became an Ethiopian province; but, as is usual, the civilised power conquered its conqueror, and although Napata now reached its zenith, the character of buildings, statuary, and inscriptions, was not native but Egyptian; this was only natural, seeing that the Ethiopians could command the best workmen in Egypt. It is not until the sixth century B.C. that we begin to see signs of a change. The inscriptions of Heru-Sa-Atef and Nastasenen clearly betray the native origin of their authors; they were written in hieroglyphics by priests who aimed in vain at reproducing the old classical idiom of Thebes. Their last editor very aptly compares them to attempts of a Dongolawi to write Koranic Arabic.
3. Meroitic.—With the conquests of Alexander and his successors and the spread of the Roman Empire, Ethiopia was brought into touch with a wider system than any it had yet seen, and this Greco-Roman period coincides with the development of a complex original style, in which the African character seems to find its first articulate expression. Exact dates for the numerous monuments in this style cannot be given; some may go back before the time of Alexander, some of the most elaborate certainly fall late in the Roman period. The architectural forms of the latter show the gradual supersession of Egyptian conventions by European designs and construction, while the rich attire of the rulers portrayed bears witness not less to their barbaric taste than to the wealth which radiated under the Pax Romana even beyond the limits of the empire. In this mingling of East and West these works should be compared with those of other schools that arose under the shadow of the Roman Empire, such as the Palmyrene school in Syria and the Greco-Roman Buddhist school in the north-west of India.
The most characteristic works of this school are to be found in the Berber province. The pyramids (Bagarawiya) and the avenue of rams and the pylon-fronted temples (Nagaa and Wadi El Sufra) point back to Egyptian prototypes, but side by side with these we see temples where the pylons have given way to columns fluted and spaced in the fashion of a Roman peristyle shrine, and one small building which has even been described as a Christian basilica!
The Meroitic Pantheon is equally mixed: we pass from the Ammon of Thebes to the Ammon of Napata, and from him to a strange Ethiopian Serapis and a still stranger local or Indian lion-headed god.
The subjects are mostly, like those in Egypt, scenes of adoration or offerings of spoils of victory, but the persons sculptured are Egyptian neither in type nor costume. The best-known of these is the fat Queen “Candace,” whose very fleshly charms are set off by masses of jewellery, heavy necklaces, armlets, bracelets, sandals, and clinging feather-like garments. Her consorts and attendants are only less richly bedizened with jewels and rare stuffs, embroidered with crosses, crescents, “and other delights.” Other panels represent water goddesses and hunting scenes with wild beasts (lions, elephants, etc.), led in captivity by men and genii. The small objects found on these sites (now mostly at Munich and Berlin) give the same impression of barbaric wealth, and the relatively numerous bells show that the Ethiopian of those days was as fond of noise as his black successor.
Unfortunately the inscriptions which accompany these buildings cannot be deciphered. As we saw above, Egyptian was a foreign language to the people of Napata in the sixth century. On the Meroitic monuments not only is the language foreign, but new phonetic values have been given to the old hieroglyphic signs, which makes even transliteration impossible until more bilingual inscriptions turn up.[236] And these hieroglyphics persist until superseded by a script based on Egyptian demotic or perhaps some Arabian alphabet, which is equally unintelligible.
4. Christian.—The Christian antiquities have fared still worse at the hands of explorers than the earlier ones; the traveller notes “ruins of a Coptic convent” and hurries on to something more congenial. Lepsius collected a few inscriptions, and these have been supplemented from time to time; a few things have been found at Soba and rough sketches published of one or two churches.
The most interesting building known to the writer is the church at Old Dongola, a building in two storeys of burnt bricks, subsequently encased in a thick shell of sun-dried bricks. The ground plan of this is believed to be unique: it looks like an adaptation to Christian ends of old Egyptian structural motives. This building and the ruin-heaps into which many other churches—still called Kanisas by the natives—have been reduced, show that all the lessons of construction learnt under the Roman Empire were not forgotten under the rule of the Christian kings. The pottery of this period was, so far as one can judge from fragments still lying on the surface, more finely levigated, better baked, and more variously decorated than in earlier or later days.
Inscriptions in three languages have been found. At Soba, and perhaps at Geteina (White Nile), Christian inscriptions occur in an unknown language, but in the Greek alphabet eked out by five additional letters; from the Dongola province and from Northern Nubia come inscriptions in Greek and in Coptic. Some of these are dated in the eighth and ninth centuries A.D., and the formulæ used in them are similar to those found in Egypt.