Stuart Tyson Smith

Pharaohs, Feasts, and Foreigners

Previous investigations of Egyptian imperialism have focused principally on the policies of pharaoh and his close advisors to the exclusion of other data. But archaeological evidence indicates that Egyptian frontier communities did more than simply implement central policy. In this paper, I present an analysis of cooking and serving assemblages from the Nubian fortress of Askut that illustrates the role of individual agency in the day to day cross-border interactions that characterized frontier life. The study demonstrates that Egyptians and Nubians collaborated and may have intermarried in spite of a politically charged ideology of separate identities and otherness.

Symbolic equids and Kushite state formation: a horse burial at Tombos

Abstract The recent discovery of a well-preserved horse burial at the Third Cataract site of Tombos illuminates the social significance of equids in the Nile Valley. The accompanying funerary assemblage includes one of the earliest securely dated pieces of iron in Africa. The Third Intermediate Period (1050–728 BC) saw the development of the Nubian Kushite state beyond the southern border of Egypt. Analysis of the mortuary and osteological evidence suggests that horses represented symbols of a larger social, political and economic movement, and that the horse gained symbolic meaning in the Nile Valley prior to its adoption by the Kushite elite. This new discovery has important implications for the study of the early Kushite state and the formation of Kushite social identity.