Meinarti

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Meinarti , also Mainarti; was an island with a village in the Nile in northern Sudan . The remains of a Nubian settlement from the Meroitic period to the Christian Middle Ages were archaeologically researched before the island sank in the rising Nubia Sea in the 1960s .

location

Meinarti was just north of the 2nd cataract a few kilometers upstream from the Sudanese border town of Wadi Halfa . A little north on the western bank of the Nile was the ancient Egyptian settlement of Buhen, which is also flooded today .

History and appearance

Excavated by William Yewdale Adams from 1962 to 1964, Meinarti is one of the best known Nubian settlements.

The oldest settlement dates back to the late Meroitic period around 300 AD. Only a few remains of the larger buildings of the oldest strata had survived. If there should have been Meroitic temples, these were destroyed during the subsequent X- Gruppe time and the public buildings became inoperative. During this time, a deterioration in the building fabric can be determined. The settlement seems to have been destroyed by a flood of the Nile.

During the Christian Empire of Nobatia , around 660 AD, an approximately 200 × 80 meter large site was completely rebuilt. In contrast to the Meroitic buildings, the houses, which were mainly made of adobe bricks on low quarry stone bases, were smaller and were grouped closely at the location of the former public buildings on the somewhat elevated center of the island. A village settlement developed in Christian times with an estimated population of 200 to 400.

The original construction of a church in the east of the village dates back to the 7th century. To compensate for the unevenness of the rock surface, the adobe walls stood on a low base made of rubble stones. Later the church was completely renovated, the previous slab floor made of quarry stone, similar to that in the monastery church of ar-Ramal , was compensated by a screed floor made of Nile mud . At the same time, the fixed house structures gave way to sloppy building methods. Since these layers show relatively rich finds, this has probably nothing to do with the impoverishment of the inhabitants. In the period that followed, however, the residential buildings became somewhat more stable. In the 12th or 13th century a monastery was built in the south, mentioned by the contemporary Armenian historian Abu Salih . The monastery is said to have been dedicated to Saint Michael and Kosma.

Many houses made of thin, single-row adobe walls could not be covered with the usual Nubian vaults , but were given a lighter flat roofing from a layer of wooden beams. Corner reinforcements made of large stone blocks, which were otherwise seldom attached, served as a stabilizing measure for the thin mud brick walls. In the late Christian phase, some residential buildings in Nubia had very low entrances with a clear height of around 80 centimeters. The passages to the side rooms of the apse of the church on the Nile island Kulubnarti were just as low and could only be passed by crawling. A building from Meinarti called a “block house” had the lowest entrance height of 50 centimeters.

The place was probably abandoned in 1286, which may have happened on the orders of King Semamun , who had Nubia evacuated before an imminent attack by the Mamluks . The place was then repopulated. In the middle of the 14th century the island was inhabited by Arabs who probably destroyed the frescoes in the church. However, the Arabs were expelled and a Christian population lived again until around 1500.

The island remained deserted until it was repopulated in the mid-19th century. During the Turkish-Egyptian rule, soldiers from the garrison of Wadi Halfa stayed for a short time in the medieval island fortress before the Mahdi uprising was suppressed .

literature

  • William Yewdale Adams: Sudan Antiquities Service Excavations at Meinarti, 1963–64 . Kush 13, 1965
  • William Yewdale Adams: Meinarti II: The Early and Classic Christian Phases. Sudan Archaeological Research Society Publication 6, 2001, ISBN 1841712531
  • William Yewdale Adams: Meinarti III: the late and terminal Christian phases. Archaeopress, Oxford 2002, ISBN 1841714518
  • William Yewdale Adams: Meinarti IV and V: The Church and the Cemetery. The History of Meinarti, An Interpretive Overview. Sudan Archaeological Research Society Publication Number 11, 2003, ISBN 184171545X
  • Sheryl Green, Stanton Green, Georges J. Armelagos: Settlement and Mortality of the Christian Site (1050 AD – 1300 AD) of Meinart (Sudan). In: Journal of Human Evolution, 3, 1974, pp. 297-316
  • Derek A. Welsby: The Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia . London 2002, pp. 124-27, ISBN 0-7141-1947-4

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ William Ywedale Adams: Nubia Corridor to Africa . Princeton University Press, Princeton 1977, p. 488
  2. ^ Friedrich Wilhelm Deichmann , Peter Grossmann : Nubian research. German Archaeological Institute. Gebr. Mann Verlag, Berlin 1988, pp. 129, 135

Coordinates: 21 ° 0 ′ 25 ″  N , 30 ° 34 ′ 40 ″  E