Meroe (dedikált példány) [antikvár]

PREFACEThe six papers united in the present volume were written in the course of the 1980s. Five of them (here Chapters Il-VI) were originally published between 1987 and 1992, while Chapter I was originally written in 1988 for a Festschrift in honor of Negm-el-Din Mohammed Sherif which could, however, not be published. They were intended to give an overview of the actual state of research on the textual and archaeological evidence of Middle Nile history between the seventh century B.C. and the late fourth century A.D., i.e., in the period of the Kushite kingdom (in the literature usually divided into a Napatan, 7th to 3rd c. B.C., and a Meroitic, 3rd c. B.C. to 4th c. A.D., period). They reflect the shift of scholarly interest occurring after the end of the period of rescue archaeology: with the conclusion of the UNESCO Nubian Campaign and in the possession of the lessons of the first important publications on the surveys and rescue excavations carried out between 1959 and 1969, students of the Middle Nile cultures entered a new phase of Nubian Studies and were confronted with the necessity of the integration of their field into Ancient History. The chapters of this volume reflect, on the one hand, the present writer" s interest in the critical re-analysis of the textual evidence and in the re-assessment of archaeological chronology. On the other, they demonstrate his efforts to understand the cultural identity of the Middle Region through the investigation of the Kushite state structure and the political and cultural contacts of the Region with Egypt.The six papers are published here in a more or less revised form: Chapter II, IV, and V present abbreviated versions of the original papers, in order to avoid repetitions and, in cases, also because I am no more fully in agreement with what I have written in the omitted sections. Changes to Chapter I, III, and VI are less substantial: I have corrected a number of mistakes and misprints, but otherwise their text corresponds more closely with the original versions.