When Greek was an African Language | Page 2

entity created by the inhabitants of the upper Nile valley and
not as a remote outpost of Egyptian civilization doomed to ultimate
decline and extinction because of its location in the interior of Africa.
The catalysts for this change were two of the major developments of
the Cold War period: the construction of the huge Aswan High Dam
and the end of Europe's African empires.
This is not the place to tell either the story of how the Soviet Union
came to construct the Aswan High Dam or the end of Europe's imperial
dreams in Africa. What does concern us, however, is the fact that
construction of the dam was preceded by the largest and most complex
archaeological salvage campaign in world history—the UNESCO
sponsored international effort to excavate and record every significant
archaeological site in the 200 mile stretch of the Upper Nile valley that
would be flood by Lake Nasser, the lake created by the dam. [7] The
result was the discovery and ongoing publication of a mass of new
native Nubian sources--both textual and material--for the history of just
about every aspect of ancient and medieval Nubian life..
Decolonization, on the other hand, transformed the writing of African

history, encouraging the emergence of a new historiography of Africa
that placed Africans at the center of their history. The Sudan was no
exception. As a result, it is possible for the first time to discuss the
place of Greek and Greek culture in Nubia in a new way, one that
focuses on its function as one element in the long history of a culture
that was created by Nubians. In the rest of this paper I will try to give
you a progress report on the current state of that story.

THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD [8]
When does the history of Greek and Greek culture in Nubia begin? At
first glance we seem to have a firm date. According to the second
century BC historian Agatharchides of Cnidus, the author of the
standard classical account of the region, Greeks first entered Nubia,
when Ptolemy II campaigned there in the 270s BC. Precise dates for
the beginnings of complex historical processes are rarely what they
seem, and, unfortunately, that is true in the case.
While people from ancient Nubia are attested in the Aegean as early as
the second millennium BC, [9] direct Greek contact with the region
began in 593 BC, when the army of the 26 &supth; th dynasty Egyptian
king Psamtek II campaigned in Nubia. Greek mercenaries were part of
Ptamtek's army, and they commemorated their role in his expedition in
graffiti scratched on the colossi of Ramses II at Abu Simbel.
[10] Four centuries later Greeks again entered Nubia. In the late 330s
BC Alexander dispatched a small reconnaissance expedition into the
region, allegedly to find the sources of the Nile, and a decade or two
later Ptolemy I raided northern Nubia. [11] Greek objects also
occasionally reached Nubia before the 270s like a spectacular vase by
the 5 &supth; th century BC Athenian potter Sotades, now in the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, that was the prized possession of a
Nubian aristocrat buried in the west cemetery at Meroe.
Ptolemy II's campaign, therefore, was not the first but at least the fourth
time Greek soldiers operated in Nubia. Why Ptolemy II invaded Nubia
is not clear, but Agatharchides suggests that he hoped to put an end to

attempts by the kingdom of Kush in the central Sudan to expand its
influence north toward the Egyptian border. The details of the
campaign are lost, but the poet Theocritus (Idyll 16, lines 86-87)
claimed that he "cut off a part of Black Aithiopia." presumably the
so-called Dodecaschoenus--the roughly seventy-five mile stretch of the
Nile immediately south of the first cataract--together with the important
gold mining region east of the Nile in the Wadi Allaqi. Inscriptions and
coins fill out the picture, indicating that Ptolemy II also garrisoned
some of the old Middle Kingdom forts in the second cataract area, and
suggesting that his authority temporarily, at least, reached the modern
border between Egypt and the Sudan at Wadi Halfa. What set Ptolemy
II's Nubian campaign apart from previous Greek incursions south of
Egypt, however, was that it opened a period of sustained contact
between Kush and Ptolemaic Egypt, and the reason for that was
something new: Ptolemy's need to find a secure source of war
elephants.
The military use of elephants was millennia old in Asia. The Greeks
and Macedonians first encountered them in battle, however, during
Alexander's campaigns. Although the Ptolemies like other Hellenistic
kings considered these living "tanks" an essential component of their
armies, acquiring them was