Kulubnarti

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Kulubnarti
Waters Nile
Geographical location 21 ° 3 '  N , 30 ° 39'  E Coordinates: 21 ° 3 '  N , 30 ° 39'  E
Kulubnarti (Sudan)
Kulubnarti

Kulubnarti is an island in the Nile in northern Sudan that has been inhabited since the time of the Christian Empire of Makuria from around AD 1100 to the present day. Until the 15th century, while Islam spread south , the remote area was the last known Christian retreat in Nubia . It is the only Nubian place with an uninterrupted and archaeologically researched settlement history from the Middle Ages to the present day.

location

Kulubnarti ("Island of Kulb ") is about 120 kilometers as the crow flies southwest of Wadi Halfa and a little north of the Dal cataract , which is between the 2nd and 3rd cataracts. The rugged and inhospitable rocky area known as Batn al-Hajar (“belly of the stones”), at the southern end of which Kulubnarti lies, acted as a natural barrier separating Lower Nubia, which was culturally more strongly influenced by Egypt from the Roman period, from southern Upper Nubia.

Batn al-Hajjar consists of bare granite mountain chains with deeply cut gullies in between, which rise above a basement of Precambrian sedimentary rock. The wind has filled rock hollows with sand. Agriculture is only possible in small favored corners and on the approximately one kilometer long island, as the rocks are close to the river and the usual wide zone of alluvial fertile farmland on the banks of the Nile is missing. Today's population lives predominantly in the modern village of Kulb on the western (Kulb West) and eastern (Kulb East) banks of the Nile. The altitude is about 200 meters. Because of the rocky mountains rising to over 600 meters, the asphalt road between Abri and Wadi Halfa runs north of Kulb East at a greater distance to the east of the river.

Research history

The traveler Johann Ludwig Burckhardt came up the Nile on his first expedition south of Aswan in 1813 to the 3rd cataract. In his travelogue Travels in Nubia , published in 1819, he mentions the island and the small church. Somers Clarke undertook the first archaeological investigations while traveling at the beginning of the 20th century, during which he researched Christian building remains along the Nile between Cairo and Soba . He published the results in 1912 under the title Christian Antiquities in the Nile Valley .

In 1969 and 1979 William Yewdale Adams carried out extensive excavations on the island and the neighboring mainland on behalf of the University of Kentucky . Around 1,300 small finds were collected and archived. The results provided a continuous history of settlement and an exemplary understanding of the changes in social structures during the gradual transition from the Nubian-Christian empire to Turkish rule .

Other research groups examined the human bones found in the two cemeteries. The irregularities detected during skull measurements were related to the presumed eating habits. 30 adult skulls from an early Christian burial site on the island, which came from the period between 550 and 850, showed that the population of this time had worse living conditions than in the Middle Ages: The finds were compared with 30 other skulls, those in the later, 550 to 1500 used cemetery were excavated on the western mainland near the village of Kulb.

Settlement image

Three late medieval settlement sites and a few smaller sites on the island were examined, as well as the two cemeteries mentioned and a church in Kulb with the only dome spanning the entire church area (12th century at the earliest).

church

Somers Clarke published a sketch of the mud- brick island church in 1912 . In 1964 Peter Grossmann found her standing completely upright except for the missing vault. The very small building was a bit slanted on the basic plan and almost square at around 7 × 6 meters. The room layout corresponded roughly to the usual village churches in Nubia, but was simplified overall. On the east wall there was a rectangular divided central chancel with side rooms that were entered through entrances from the side aisles. The corners of the west wall were also separated by side rooms, in the southern room a two-flight staircase led to the roof. As usual, the entrances were located opposite each other in the western area of ​​the two longitudinal walls. Their round arches were just over a man's height at the top. Instead of four, there were only two central pillars in the line of the central apse . After deducting the adjoining rooms, the nave was almost twice as wide as it was long on both sides and obviously had no windows. There were three pairs of slotted windows in the west wall, and the same were preserved in the east wall of the two adjoining rooms of the altar. On the inside of the south wall, remains of painting could still be seen, in other places fragmentary inscriptions.

The missing roof shapes can be reconstructed from the vaults that were preserved on almost all walls. The two rectangular pillars made of brick and the wall corners of the western side rooms connected round arches. A square wall segment, presumably provided with window openings, and on top of it a central round dome (see: Nubian vault ) was constructed above this . In Nubia, the transition to the dome only took place directly at the base of the dome and not, as in European and Oriental architecture, by a drum . The only increased by a drum central dome in Nubia is likely next to the domed church of Kulb the River Church in Kaw have possessed. The dome protruded far beyond the longitudinal, triple-sided barrel vaults of the other rooms.

William Yewdale Adams and Peter Grossmann date the church to the 13th or 14th century. It is possibly the last church building completed in Nubia.

fortress

The most striking building from medieval times is a fortress (Kurfa) on the scree field at the southern end of the island. It consists of a mighty quarry stone masonry that tapers towards the top and is plastered with clay. Multiple military expeditions by the Egyptian Mamluks at the end of the 13th and 14th centuries ended the power of the Christian Makuria empire. Immediately after Kulubnarti, the Mamluks do not seem to have penetrated during the last invasion in 1365. As a result, the power vacuum led to anarchic conditions in the region. During the Ottoman rule in Egypt , smaller garrisons stationed in fortresses secured the southern border of the Ottoman Empire , which in Sudan was on the 3rd cataract , from the middle of the 16th century . Like the cities of Faras and Gebel Adda, which were also fortified since early Christian times, Qasr Ibrim belonged to an administrative district ( Sanjak ) around 1600 . An official tax collector (Kaschef) resided in the fortress of Kulubnarti at least since the 19th century . There were similar fortresses in Tarmuki, Kasanarti and Meinarti (all north of the 2nd cataract and now flooded by Lake Nasser ).

There were no traces of settlement around the church. To the east of the fortress there were four residential buildings made of adobe bricks with rubble stone plinths from Christian times. Christian graffiti has been preserved in the western house . Two of these houses had an upper floor, the walls of the first floor were carefully bricked with rubble stones. The ceiling above the ground floor consisted of three long barrel vaults lying next to each other.

When the last Christians had given up their religion and when the population converted to Islam, the excavations to date have not clarified with certainty. No remains of a mosque from the Ottoman period have been found. The only clues regarding Islam were three pot shards with verses from the Koran.

literature

  • William Y. Adams: Kulubnarti. Volume 1: The Architectural Remains. University of Kentucky - Program for Cultural Resource Assessment, Lexington KY 1994.
  • William Y. Adams, Nettie K. Adams: Kulubnarti. Volume 2: The Artifactual Remains (= Sudan Archaeological Research Society. Volume 2). Sudan Archaeological Research Society, London 1999, ISBN 1-901169-01-4 .
  • William Yewdale Adams: Kulubnarti. Volume 3: The Cemeteries (= Sudan Archaeological Research Society. Volume 4). Archaeopress, Oxford 1999, ISBN 1-84171-027-X
  • Friedrich Wilhelm Deichmann , Peter Grossmann : Nubian research (= archaeological research. Volume 17, German Archaeological Institute). Mann, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-7861-1512-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Valerie Burke DeLeon: Fluctuating asymmetry and stress in a medieval Nubian population. In: American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 132, 2007, pp. 520-534, ISSN  0002-9483
  2. ^ FW Deichmann, P. Grossmann: Nubische Forschungen. Berlin 1988, pp. 50, 156.
  3. ^ FW Deichmann, P. Grossmann: Nubische Forschungen. Berlin 1988, pp. 45-47, panels 73-76.
  4. ↑ Anonymous: The Ottoman Turkiyya in the Sudan. AH 930/1553 AD - 1200/1823 ( Memento of May 3, 2006 in the Internet Archive ). Durham University (at Internet Archive)
  5. ^ FW Deichmann, P. Grossmann: Nubische Forschungen. Berlin 1988, p. 7.
  6. ↑ Timothy Insoll: The Archeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. 2003, ISBN 0-521-65171-9 , p. 113.