1- Kush: The Jewel of Nubia
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50books_pocKush: The Jewel of Nubia by Miriam Ma'at-Ka-Re Monges
Hello there, I'm going to attempt to read and review 50 books that are probably mostly going to be focused on Africa because Iam minorly obsessed find the cultures, philosophical systems and religions interesting. I'm probably not going to finish 50 in a year because with any luck I'll have a PhD place soon and then the sponges will eat my brain I'll have very little free time.
This is a very interesting and readable nonfiction book about Ancient Egypt and Nubia the Kingdom south of Egypt. It argues (very well) that Nubian culture influenced Egyptian/Kemetic culture and gives some wonderful details about society and worship in both. It shows very definately that Egypt was an African culture and shouldn't be held apart. It shows striking similarities in Egyptian and Nubian culture. It argues very successfully for an Afrocentric approach.
I have two problems with it. The first is that I don't think it was edited very well. For example you open the book and are presented with an 'upside-down' map of Egypt and Nubia, the caption tells you the orientation is changed so that you see the map from an Afrocentric perspective. It takes several pages for this to be explained; essentially the Nile runs south to north so if you live on the Nile south is up (which absolutely explains the positions of Lower and Upper Egypt and that always confused me). A few tweaks would have made it more accessable.
I picked this up because I wanted to know more about Nubia. The first half of the book is almost entirely about Egypt and the second half constantly compares the two cultures. I came away feeling vaguely dissapointed, not because I didn't learn anything but because the title fooled me into thinking this book would be all about Nubia.
So in conclusion a very good book about Egypt and the relationship between Nubia and Egypt. The chapters on Divine Kingship and Matriarchal Systems are particularly informative, the discussion on the roles of royal women and the Kandakes/Candaces were fantastic. The evidence linking Egypt and Nubia is pretty solid and (I think) it blows the idea of Egypt somehow being a Middle Eastern or Mediterranean civilisation out of the water and through the stratosphere in a gazzillion smoking pieces. But when you pick it up expecting to dive in to Kush, to Kerma surfacing in Cairo seems a bit of a shame.
Hello there, I'm going to attempt to read and review 50 books that are probably mostly going to be focused on Africa because I
This is a very interesting and readable nonfiction book about Ancient Egypt and Nubia the Kingdom south of Egypt. It argues (very well) that Nubian culture influenced Egyptian/Kemetic culture and gives some wonderful details about society and worship in both. It shows very definately that Egypt was an African culture and shouldn't be held apart. It shows striking similarities in Egyptian and Nubian culture. It argues very successfully for an Afrocentric approach.
I have two problems with it. The first is that I don't think it was edited very well. For example you open the book and are presented with an 'upside-down' map of Egypt and Nubia, the caption tells you the orientation is changed so that you see the map from an Afrocentric perspective. It takes several pages for this to be explained; essentially the Nile runs south to north so if you live on the Nile south is up (which absolutely explains the positions of Lower and Upper Egypt and that always confused me). A few tweaks would have made it more accessable.
I picked this up because I wanted to know more about Nubia. The first half of the book is almost entirely about Egypt and the second half constantly compares the two cultures. I came away feeling vaguely dissapointed, not because I didn't learn anything but because the title fooled me into thinking this book would be all about Nubia.
So in conclusion a very good book about Egypt and the relationship between Nubia and Egypt. The chapters on Divine Kingship and Matriarchal Systems are particularly informative, the discussion on the roles of royal women and the Kandakes/Candaces were fantastic. The evidence linking Egypt and Nubia is pretty solid and (I think) it blows the idea of Egypt somehow being a Middle Eastern or Mediterranean civilisation out of the water and through the stratosphere in a gazzillion smoking pieces. But when you pick it up expecting to dive in to Kush, to Kerma surfacing in Cairo seems a bit of a shame.
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Date: 2010-06-23 05:02 pm (UTC)I remember having a book called 'Black Athena' about Egyptian and sub-Saharan influences on ancient Greek culture. Are you familiar with this? I have always been curious about how that text figured into wider scholarship.
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Date: 2010-06-23 05:25 pm (UTC)My knowledge of African history is sketchy and skips over stupid geographical distances and timelines (and generally doesn't focus on eastern Africa at all but the west coast). So I really know nothing about the wider scholarship's view on this, or the history to any great/acceptable depth and I'm not familiar with the book you mentioned. But now I'm checking Monges references it-
Most of what I know about Africa might-possibly-depending-on-your-source have been accurate three or four hundred years ago in Benin and part of Nigeria...... And Timbuktu is awesome.
I haven't sold this review on false pretenses now have I?
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Date: 2010-06-23 05:45 pm (UTC):-)
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Date: 2010-06-24 06:02 pm (UTC)Bernal published Black Athena in 1987; Mary Lefkowitz, who is his chief critic, published two rebuttals, Black Athena Revisited (an edited collection in which many scholars take aim at Bernal's arguments) in 1996 and her single-authored Not Out of Africa in 1997; and then Bernal published Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to His Critics in 2001. I've often thought it would be interesting to read them all in order, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
My own two cents, bearing in mind my area of expertise is several hundred later: Denying that African cultures were part of and had significant influences on Mediterranean civilization is absurd. So is divorcing East African and Middle Eastern history. (Nubia converted to Christianity before most of Europe and maintained strong ties with other Christian cultures; the Christian Aksumite empire in Ethiopia was the dominant power in Southern Arabia even when they didn't directly rule it.)
I think it's hard to deny that racism in classical scholarship has led to de-emphasizing these connections. That said, some of the Afrocentricist arguments I've heard press those connections so far that they wind up denying the diversity of African cultures and the very real histories of racism toward black-skinned peoples in cultures like Greece, and I think that's also a problem.
My impression is that there's a lot of really good scholarship on Africans and the "classical" world that has moved beyond the Bernal v. Lefkowitz wars. I've head very good things about Edwin Yamauchi's edited collection Africa and Africans in Antiquity, for instance, which is an edited collection of essays by 10 scholars about Egypt, North Africa, the Sudan, and the Horn of Africa.
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Date: 2010-06-29 02:11 pm (UTC)