Living on the Edge: Syncretism, Acculturation and the Meroitic Kingdom

Summary

Although Greco-Roman Egypt has received more scholarly attention, the contemporaneous Meroitic civilization of Nubia deserves recognition as an important culture in the history of North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean world. Examination of the archaeological evidence from the Meroitic civilization of Sudan (ca. 400 B.C.E. to ca. 400 C.E.) presents the opportunity to further current understandings of evolving cultural interaction on the fringes of several distinct world powers (namely Egypt, the Hellenistic World, and Rome).

While previous discussions of Meroitic funerary religion have attempted to address the nature of Meroitic cultural and religious integration, the small data sets, geographic specificity, and narrow scope of the attempts has meant that the entirety of Meroitic funerary religion as currently understood, is in essence based on limited archaeological evidence. This has led to skewed and incomplete presentation of the culture as a monolithic unit. Through the inclusion and analysis of significantly more archaeological evidence, taking the form of Meroitic offering tables, a more nuanced and dynamic view of the Meroitic kingdom emerged, one which demonstrates a diversity of cultural processes due to varying levels of interaction and exchange, and which presents an entirely new view of the structure of the Meroitic kingdom.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The Practices of Death: The Archaeology of Mortuary Ritual in Ancient Egypt and Sudan

Keywords

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