PHARAONIC PRESENCES IN THE BATN AL-HAJAR

The 2018 Nubian Conference provided an opportunity to both present some research of an earlier generation of fieldwork, still not fully published, as well as suggest some new perspectives on such material. My particular interest lies on just one region of Nubia, the Batn al-Hajar, and here what may be termed it ‘Pharaonic’ archaeology, if mainly relating to the period of the New Kingdom in the later second millennium BCE. The materials this paper draws on are the records of the UNESCO sponsored Sudan Antiquities Service team, directed by Tony Mills, who surveyed the region over six years between 1963 and 1969. This barren and rocky region (c.130km upriver of the Second Cataract), represents about 20% of the riverine territory between Aswan and the Third Cataract. As such this was a not insignificant part of Nubian territories which the Egyptians came to know in the late third and second millennia BCE, if also perhaps the least known. [Opening paragraph]