Kawa

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Gempaaton (Kawa) in hieroglyphics
gm pA i t
n
ra 		niwt

Gempaaton
(Gem pa Aton)
Gm p3 Jtn
(with ideogram for village)
in an inscription by Arikamaninote

Kawa ( ancient Egyptian : Gempaaton ) is an ancient religious center and settlement in Upper Nubia in Sudan , whose heyday was in the early Kushite period. The entire settlement period is roughly estimated for the 14th century BC. Indicated to 4th century AD.

Geographical location

The excavation site is located in the middle of the Nubian Desert on the eastern side of the Nile between the 3rd and 4th cataracts, on the opposite bank and three kilometers south of Dongola . The sandy desert soil extends at this point to the Nile, which otherwise forms a river oasis in its course and enables the irrigation of fertile farmland.

history

The ancient Egyptian name of Kawa "Gempaaton" ("Gem-Aten") indicates that the place was founded under Akhenaten (reign around 1351-1334), who had a temple built for his new Aton cult. All buildings of the faith reformer were destroyed shortly after his death and the earlier worship of Amun was reinstated. The oldest remains in the city are a small temple (Temple A) built by Tutankhamun for Amun at the end of the 14th century .

A cemetery of the Kerma culture from the period from 1750 to 1550, a little northeast of the village, indicates, however, that an older settlement may have been here. The area may have been populated during the entire Kerma period (2500–1450).

After the end of the Egyptian New Kingdom , the place lost around the 12th century BC. Gradually in importance. Construction began again under Shabaka (reign around 716–702), who built a shrine dedicated to Anukis here. Taharqa renewed and enlarged the Temple of Amun (Temple T) from 684 to 680 . From about the 5th century BC. No traces of settlement were found until the 1st century AD. After the Roman advance in 23 BC BC up to the capital Napata , Lower Nubia became a Roman province and experienced an economic boom through technical innovations, but Kawa remained as a small settlement at most.

meaning

Amun Temple on the Nile. Row of columns and foundation of the outer wall

In the Napatean period (before the center of gravity of the Kushite empire shifted to Meroe ), apart from the capital Napata, most of the construction was in Kawa and Nuri . This also fits an archaeobotanical analysis of plant remains , most of which date back to the 8th to 5th centuries BC. Were dated. The Temple of Amun was one of the largest Kushitic temples and the center for the royal ceremonies reported in long royal inscriptions by Harsijotef , Nastasen and Arikamaninote . After the coronation in Napata, the king had to travel to three other temple sites on his throne journey, the first stop was Kawa. This was followed by the Amun temple of Tabo on the island of Argo and finally the Amun temple of Sanam .

The stone foundation of the Amun temple was the best preserved of all the temples in Taharqa at the time of the excavation. Reliefs and painted scenes on the temple show Taharqa victoriously trampling his enemies. The most important stele inscriptions of Taharqa were discovered in Kawa: five steles show his piety, Taharqa reports on events in distant Egypt, about his coronation and about himself as a god-king, whose father is Amun-Re of Karnak. A stele mentions how he moved from Nubia to Egypt at the age of 20, the beginning of adulthood. Artists from Memphis were employed to design the temple . Therefore, some of the reliefs show the style of Egyptian funerary temples of the pharaohs of the 5th and 6th dynasties of Abusir and Saqqara . On the representation of Amun-Re found in the temple, the god is embodied by a ram's head with twisted horns. The model was the Egyptian god of the Nile Khnum , from whom the Amun-Re accompanying goddesses Satis and Anuket were adopted. The temple was further decorated at a later date.

Cityscape

Mud brick buildings near the Temple of Amun. Facing south

The settlement area covered about 40 hectares. The more than a meter thick walls of the Amun temple were made of hewn stones. A processional street led to the main entrance. Nearby were the Eastern Palace and the G 1 building: both were multi-room temples and were also dedicated to Amun. G 1 was like the Amun Temple facing the Nile, the Eastern Palace was oriented to the south. On the southern outskirts of the city, in building A 1, which was made of adobe bricks and is described as a sanctuary, an altar was excavated on a stone floor with a painted inscription of Taharqa.

The houses were made of unfired adobe bricks and were found plundered. About one kilometer northeast of the city, a cemetery with over 1,000 graves was examined. Part of it were tumuli and mastabas , the stairs of which have already been filled up again by sandstorms. Three kilometers south of Kawa is a small cemetery from the Meroitic period. Medieval pot shards were also found there.

exploration

Mud brick walls on the highest settlement hill . The floor is littered with remnants of wall and pot shards

The first excavations were carried out by Francis Llewellyn Griffith of the Oxford Excavation Committee from 1929 to 1931 , and between 1935 and 1938 by Walter Bryan Emery and Laurence Kirwan. Both teams limited themselves to uncovering the temple and the palace complex without excavating the urban settlement in the vicinity. From 1993 to 1995, Derek A. Welsby began for the British Museum with the surface investigation and partial excavation of the housing estate (in both areas B and Z) and the cemeteries. With three mud walls visible on the surface, he found a 6.6 × 4.3 meter rectangle, which he identified as a brick kiln. It's an unusual shape; kilns were generally round. 1997-1998 Welsby was able to expand the research program as head of the Sudan Archaeological Research Society . The excavations ended around 2001. Most of the excavated foundations are covered with sand due to the summer storms that stir up the soft sandy soil.

literature

  • MF Laming Macadam: The temples of Kawa. Volume 1: The Inscriptions. (2 parts: text, plates). Griffith Institute, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 1949 ( Oxford University Excavations in Nubia ).
  • MF Laming Macadam: The temples of Kawa. Volume 2: History and Archeology of the Site. (2 parts: text, plates). Griffith Institute, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 1955 ( Oxford University Excavations in Nubia ).
  • F. Abdel Hamid Salih Khidir: The Excavation of Tumulus KE5 at Kawa, Sudan. In: The Sudan Archaeological Research Society (SARSN), Newsletter 7, 1994, pp. 26-29.
  • Gem-aton. In: Hans Bonnet: Lexicon of the Egyptian religious history. 3rd unaltered edition, Nikol, Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-937872-08-6 , p. 212.
  • Derek A. Welsby : Survey and Excavations at Kawa, the 1997/8 Season . In: Sudan & Nubia, 2, 1998, pp. 15-20 ISSN  1369-5770
  • Derek A. Welsby: The Kawa Excavation Project. In: Sudan & Nubia, 4, 2000, pp. 5-10.
  • Derek A. Welsby: Excavations within the Pharaonic and Kushite Site at Kawa and in its Hinterland, 2000-2001. In: Sudan & Nubia, 5, 2001, pp. 64-70.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Welsby: Survey in the Northern Sudan. P. 30.
  2. ↑ Welsby: Kushite buildings at Kawa. P. 33.
  3. ^ Dorian Q. Fuller: Early Kushitic agriculture: Archaebotanical evidence from Kawa. In: Sudan & Nubia. 8, 2004, ISSN  1369-5770 , pp. 70–74 as PDF (1.1 MB) .
  4. ↑ Angelika Lohwasser : The world of gods in the kingdom of Kush. Part 1: Gods from the Egyptian pantheon. In: Communications from the Sudan Archaeological Society in Berlin. 6, 1995, ISSN  0945-9502 , p. 30.
  5. ↑ Corey J. Chimko: Foreign Pharaos: Self-Legitimization and Indigenious Reaction in Art and Literature. (PDF; 324 kB) In: The Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities. 30, 2003, ISSN  0383-9753 , p. 24f.
  6. ↑ Angelika Lohwasser: Gender research in Egyptology and Sudan archeology. Humboldt University, Berlin 2000, pp. 38, 64 ( Internet articles on Egyptology and Sudan archeology 2).
  7. ↑ Karol Myśliwiec : The Twilight of Ancient Egypt: First Millennium BCE Translated from the German by David Lorton. Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY et al. 2000, ISBN 0-8014-8630-0 , p. 98
  8. ↑ Welsby, Kushite buildings at Kawa, illustration p. 36

Coordinates: 19 ° 6 '  N , 30 ° 32'  E