Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [58]
We are now at the site known as Kerma, which Reisner excavated in the early 1920s. It is 150 miles south of the Twelfth Dynasty frontier at Semna—150 miles in a straight line, much farther if one follows the bends of the river. But if Reisner was right, the Egyptians were here during the Middle Kingdom. They built the great mound called the Western Deffufa, which looks less like a man-made structure than a peculiar wind-carved formation in a desert region.
I remember reading about Reisner’s work when I was a student, and I remember too that his conclusions were generally accepted. He thought that Kerma was the provincial capital of an Egyptian governor of the far south. Several generations of such governors controlled the area during the Middle Kingdom, died there, and were buried where they died. If Reisner’s theory is correct, Senusert III was indeed a mighty conqueror.
What are the actual physical remains upon which Reisner based his ideas? It is difficult to know the precise functions of the Western Deffufa. The top part, which contained the buildings or rooms, has been worn away by erosion; the lower section is simply a gigantic brick platform. A group of rooms on a lower level survived, and the litter found in these rooms included scraps of imported Egyptian articles and also local products such as ostrich eggshells, rock crystal, and copper oxide.
East of this mound is another ruin called the Eastern Deffufa, beside which is a large cemetery. The bigger tombs consist of a central chamber, where the body of the deceased was laid upon a bed, and a long corridor running through the mound past the central chamber. In the corridor of each of the largest tombs Reisner found the bodies of several hundred people, most of them women and children. They had been buried alive. Some lay with their faces hidden in their hands or protected by a bent arm; one poor girl had crawled under the bed on which her dead lord lay, thus prolonging the agony of death by suffocation.
In one of these big multiple graves Reisner found an object which was of primary importance for his theory. This was the statue of an Egyptian lady who was the wife of a Twelfth Dynasty prince of Assiut named Hapdjefa. The lower part of a life-size statue of the prince himself was found in the same grave-mound. This, said Reisner, must mean that the chieftain for whom this court of the dead was assembled was none other than Hapdjefa himself. Hence the theory of the Egyptian governors of the south, buried in the land they had ruled, with the bodies of their Nubian harem around them. This was “going native” with a vengeance.
Let’s look at the rest of the evidence that bears on the situation. There is a tomb of this same Hapdjefa at Assiut, in Egypt. Some scholars assert that he was never buried in it, but it is a nice tomb—as tombs go—with a particularly elaborate set of mortuary contracts inscribed on its walls. The titles of Hapdjefa do not include any epithet which would indicate he was a governor of Nubia. Last of all, I should mention Reisner’s statement that the statues of the Egyptian prince and his lady were carved from native Nubian rock; they were not, then, imported objects.
Well, there it is, such as it is—the evidence. What can we do with it?
A. J. Arkell, whose work in the Sudan I have mentioned before, was one of the first to disagree with Reisner. The burial mounds differ from standard Nubian funerary practice only in the magnitude of their size. Since only great chiefs could have squandered so many slaves in death, Kerma must have been the capital of Cush (also spelled Kush), a powerful Nubian kingdom after the Middle Kingdom. Kerma was a trading post during the Middle Kingdom, but the