O.C. Art Review / CATHY CURTIS : A Clear Picture of Ancient Nubian Culture Proves Elusive

OK, so it isn’t thrilling. “Ancient Nubia: Egypt’s Rival in Africa,” at the Bowers Museum through Aug. 14, is a major scholarly show about a little-known ancient culture. Organized by the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania, it’s the kind of exhibition the Bowers needs if it is to be taken seriously as an educational institution.

Frankly, though, it isn’t easy to bond with the ancient Nubians, even after an hour or so of gazing at the 234 objects in the galleries. Somehow, a clear image of these people--who lived along the Nile River (in portions of modern-day Sudan and Egypt) between 3000 BC and AD 300--remains elusive.

This difficulty isn’t entirely the fault of curator David O’Connor. Compared to what is known about ancient Egypt, Nubia is largely a riddle. Although excavations began in 1906, archeologists have unearthed only a small number of sites.

The stumbling blocks have been legion: flooding caused by the building of Egypt’s Aswan Dam; intransigent Islamic fundamentalist leadership in the Sudan; civil war; and the logistic nightmares associated with working in the hottest, driest place in the world. Even Nubian texts have been only partially deciphered.

It is also very difficult to reconcile the tentativeness of scholarly research--kernels of hard-won facts embedded in speculative theories--and the need to paint a clear and vivid picture in an exhibition for the general public.

This task isn’t made easier by the objects in the show.

The vessels, vessel shards, funerary sculptures, jewelry and other items simply aren’t the sort of chichi objects, adorable miniatures or strikingly “modern-looking” sculptures that become conversation pieces. (Yet the Nubians did have a taste for luxe. “The Gold of Meroe,” an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last spring, showcased gold and silver jewelry from a Nubian queen’s tomb.)

The visual treats on view at the Bowers tend to be sparser and more unexpected. Except for an attractively stylized gold and ivory image of a fly from the grave of a warrior who died about 1650-1550 BC--as tenacious creatures, flies were emblems of military valor--most of these pieces date from very late in the game (the Meroitic period, 250 BC-AD 350).

They include exuberantly free-form insects, animals and faces painted on vessels; a piquant funerary statue of a robed governor equipped with wings and a sun-disc balanced on the edge on his head; and a bronze pitcher whose handle metamorphoses into the seductive image of a woman bending forward, with outstretched arms.

One unsettling aspect of the show, however--particularly in an era of far-ranging Afrocentric studies--is the show’s apparent indifference to racial matters.

Why aren’t the Nubians viewed specifically as black Africans, with ties to other African cultures as well as to Egypt? Other sources point out that, in ancient Egyptian art, the Nubians are distinguished from the Egyptians by skin color, hair texture and facial features.

In the catalogue, O’Connor is oddly tight-lipped on this subject. The Nubians’ “precise ethnic status is unknown,” he writes. Case closed. Yet he unhesitatingly identifies men portrayed with kinky hair in an Egyptian tomb painting as Nubians bearing tribute to Pharaoh Tutankhamen.

O’Connor does insist on viewing ancient Nubia as a sophisticated rival of Egypt. Nubia had its own distinctive culture, he writes, a blend of Egyptian and Nubian elements. But he is maddeningly elusive about what those elements were, aside from fighting skills (thanks to years of service in Egyptian armies), a handful of as-yet poorly understood local gods, and certain burial practices.

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During the Bronze Age, people in Lower Nubia raised cattle and cultivated grains (for bread and beer), dates and nuts. Known awkwardly as the “A-Group”--the provisional name bestowed by pioneering scholar George A. Reisner--these early farmers lived in huts made of perishable materials, or mud-brick or masonry houses.

Graves containing elite members of society (and their servants and relatives) often contain imported goods--such as copper objects and jars from Egypt--indicating the importance of trade to upper-class living standards. As in Egypt, objects buried with the dead were meant to be used in the afterlife.

The A-Group was supplanted by the C-Group around 2400 BC. A few hundred years later, when Egypt was in a decline, the Kingdom of Kush became a wealthy and powerful state further south along the Nile, in Upper Nubia. (This culture is confusingly labeled as “Kerma” because the excavation site is in the modern Sudanese town of Kerma.)

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Kerma culture kings were buried under mounds of earth (tumuli) nearly as big as football fields. Dead royalty, surrounded by hundreds of harem-women, servants and guards obliged to die for their master, were placed on huge beds. (The show includes the surviving wooden legs of one such bed, carved in the shape of animal legs.)

In the catalogue, O’Connor raises the specter of ethnocentric bias, which leads us “to overvalue developed societies with material cultures similar in important ways to our own, and undervalue others with material cultures more alien to us.”

Just because the great Egyptian pyramids were much bigger than the royal Nubian tumuli (10,000 square meters versus 6,400 square meters), that doesn’t mean Egyptian culture was necessarily superior.

Other elite members of society--upper-level bureaucrats, priests, military leaders--also were buried with such accouterments as toiletry kits (razors, containers for eyeliner), swords and ostrich fans, as well as pottery containers and tableware.

Interestingly, the bowls and jars found in cemeteries tend to be small (as opposed to the various useful sizes found in settlements) and there are hardly any cooking pots--as if the dead and their retainers would be relieved of kitchen chores in the afterlife.

Egypt conquered Nubia around 1550 BC, but it seems to have permitted its colonial outpost a lot of freedom, primarily for reasons of self-interest: Egypt depended on Nubia as a trading center for gold, ebony, ivory and animal skins from other African states. Although dark-skinned slaves are portrayed in Egyptian paintings of the era, O’Connor writes that these people “probably” were not really Nubians but just folks from Southern Nubia (a sort of unincorporated area populated by nomads).

In 724 BC, the pendulum swung again. Kushite King Piye conquered Egypt and declared himself Pharaoh. The Assyrians invaded 60 years later, driving the Nubians back to their homeland.

Undaunted, the Nubians established a court in Meroe, which became a cosmopolitan center reflecting the cultures of central Africa, Egypt, and Greece and Rome. In Meroe, the Nubians developed a written alphabet, allowing them to place inscribed tablets in temples and tombs. (Some of these are in the show.)

In the exhibition, a wooden and ivory box from a woman’s grave handily sums up the extent of this ancient form of multiculturalism. The partially draped female figures look like provincial Roman work, as do the garland decorations. The sphinxes are Egyptian, of course, and lion faces might represent Apedemak, a Nubian lion god particular to the Meroitic period.

The Nubian world underwent a major cultural upheaval in the Sixth Century, when missionaries converted the Nubians to Christianity. Islam was introduced in the 1300s.

Today, certain Nubian traits persist among the people of the Sudan, southern Egypt and Ethiopia. The lively catalogue on Nubia issued by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston--which also has conducted extensive digs in Nubia--mentions and illustrates such things as women’s hairstyles, tattooing and scarification, a love of wrestling, funerary beds (no longer buried with the dead, but used in processions) and similar styles of pottery and sandals.

Details like these can make a remote period snap into focus. For all its worthy scholarship, the University of Pennsylvania’s museum might have put much more effort into building bridges between the vitality of an ancient culture and the curiosity of today’s viewer.

* “Ancient Nubia: Egypt’s Rival in Africa” remains through Aug. 14 at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana. Hours: 10 am. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, Thursdays until 9 p.m. $4.50 adults, $3 seniors and students, $1.50 children 5 to 12, under 5 free. (714) 567-3600.