The Illustrated Desert: the origins of writing in the Egyptian Deserts
Although the Western Desert of Egypt is now-apart from the oases that lie island-like within its great expanse-a marginal and uninhabited area, the region was once a hub of international trade and interaction between widely dispersed human populations. Interacting both with other groups and with their environment, the early inhabitants of the Western Desert employed an increasingly complex system of rock art images to create places in the desert expanse, and began to communicate with other people separated from them by both space and time. These early images, cosmographs that described and thereby supported the solar cycle and cosmic order, ultimately gave birth to the hieroglyphic writing system. During a later period of increased desert activity, non-Egyptian auxiliaries of the Egyptian military borrowed Egyptian signs and rock art techniques and created their own writing system, the earliest precursor of the alphabet as we know it. The precursors of Egyptian scripts, the earliest proto-hieroglyphic inscription, and the oldest alphabetic inscription, are located in the Western Desert, and developed out of activities in that hinterland of the Nile Valley. Although now a seemingly marginal area, the desert hinterlands of Egypt were the points of contact between different cultures, and places of intense human interaction with a harsh environment; these qualities of Egypt's deserts make them of pivotal importance for understanding the origins and development of pharaonic civilization, and reveal the importance of looking outside of the traditional center of a civilization to find the origins of important cultural developments.The Inscription of Queen Katimala at Semna
Though much discussed, the inscription of Katimala at Semna is often said to be illegible, even barbarous. In fact, the inscription is written in good epistolary Late Egyptian, and the text and iconography of Katimala’s Semna tableau fit together to tell the story of an embattled Nubian realm, a disabled and despairing king, and a militantly religious queen. These events appear to have occurred early during the roughly three centuries of seeming archaeological and epigraphic darkness that settle over Lower Nubia following the period of civil war that in Egypt troubles the reign of the last Ramesses. At some point during the Twenty-First Dynasty, when Egypt turned in upon herself, sharing power between a northern pharaoh and a high priest of Amun ruling the south, all the while looting the tombs of the great rulers of the glorious and only recently ended New Kingdom—while Egypt repaired the scars of political and military decay and economic collapse, and cannibalized the eschatological well-being of her own ancient dead, queen Katimala appears to have set Nubia on the road to political unity, military power, propelled by a personal and crusading devotion to the god Amun. After the depredations of the Amarna Period, and the renewal of piety under the more successful, Ramesside “doctrine” of the solar religion, during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties in Egypt, Nubia under Katimala became the home to a new and brashly militant Amunism.
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