Dotawo/content/issue/dotawo9.md

---
title: "Dotawo 9: Nubian Homescapes from Antiquity to the Present"
editors: ["annaboozer.md", "annejennings.md"]
has_articles: ["boozerintro.md", "hamdeen.md", "yvanez.md", "fulcher.md", "sadeq.md", "asmaataha.md", "tsakoswelsby.md"]
keywords: ["homescape", "home", "homeland", "household", "homelife", "diaspora", "displacement", "tahgeer" ,"Nubia", "Nubian", "Aswan High Dam Campaign", "war", "genocide", "resettlement", "Kom Ombo", "stereotype", "longue durée"]
---

# Introduction

This volume goes to press as a war once again threatens homelife in
Sudan. This conflict, which began in April 2023, has created the largest
internally displaced population in the world -- well over one million at
this stage, although firm numbers are difficult to come by. In addition
to displacement, some communities, such as Darfur, face genocide. And
yet this conflict has escaped international attention and outrage. This
war is not remote to the individuals who contributed to this volume,
some of whom were themselves displaced by warfare. Others search for
information to support friends and colleagues who remain in Sudan. And
still others give us optimism while they work with diaspora communities
to heal the trauma of war, displacement, and genocide. Themes of
homescape and displacement weave through these contemporary experiences,
demonstrating the continued relevance of these topics today.

This volume takes a long-term perspective on Nubian houses and
households to explore the distinctive material, visual, and
phenomenological worlds of Nubian homescapes. Nubia extends from the
area around Aswan in Egypt to the contemporary town of Debba in Sudan, a
region that roughly corresponds to the area between the first and fourth
cataracts along the Nile. Nubians have existed as a distinct
ethno-linguistic group since ancient times.[^1]

Contributors to this volume of *Dotawo* explore homelife during periods
when there were changes in the political and social organization in
Nubia. By exploring a range of case studies that include objects,
bodies, households, floral remains, workspaces, houses, and art we aim
to understand how ordinary people made and continue to make their homes
and livelihoods during periods of systemic change. In the process, we
consider how these same sources reveal the power of everyday activities
to transform broad social organizations from the bottom up. We also
explore how some ancient social practices in Nubia might live on and
continue to structure life in the present.

Many of our contributors have explored homescapes creatively, remaining
attentive to the multisensory, embodied, and intersectional ways that
people experienced the home. We have encouraged these creative
approaches because they capture the essence of homescapes better than
academic prose alone. For this reason, this volume of *Dotawo* includes
photographic essays, artwork, and fiction in addition to sociological,
anthropological, archaeological, and linguistic approaches to the topic.

This introduction situates the themes that structure this volume --
homescapes, resettlement, and the *longue durée*. A brief history of the
Nubian diaspora provides insights into this step change in Nubian
lifeways and suggests comparisons for how contemporary displaced
communities can move forward. And, finally, I introduce the twelve
contributions to this volume, which range from ancient to contemporary
Nubian society and span a range of disciplines -- archaeology, art,
sociology, history, linguistics, and cultural anthropology among them.

**Homescapes**

People often define *home* as a place where one lives permanently,
usually as a member of a family or household. But home is more than a
physical place and the people contained within it. Home is also where
people tend to feel most at ease because they are familiar with the
sounds, smells, and patterns of life within and beyond house walls.

Meanwhile, *homescapes* may be defined as the physical or symbolic
landscapes of one's home or homeland. In this way, a homescape may be as
palpable as a house and its surrounding environs. Or it might be more
ethereal. For example, an individual's accent might evoke feelings of
home and inclusion to a native speaker who hears them speak, as Asmaa
Taha describes in her contribution to this volume.

Tim Ingold invented the term *taskscape* as a play on the word
*landscape*. In his words, "just as a landscape is an array of features,
so -- by analogy -- is the taskscape an array of related
activities.[^2]" We define our own term *homescape* in a similar manner
-- as an array of features related to the home. A homescape, then, is a
socially constructed space of human activity, understood as having
spatial, conceptual, or emotional boundaries and delimitations. Of key
importance to Ingold's definition of taskscape was that it be understood
as perpetually in process rather than in a static or immutable state.
We, too, consider the malleability of homescape to be a key component of
its definition. Concepts of homescape thus contain a dichotomy within
them -- they rely on both deep histories of connection as well as fluid
processes of formation and reformation. People actively make their
homescapes as they go about their everyday lives. They forge a home from
the land, imbuing it with memory, meaning, and significance.[^3] This
agency within everyday life, even amid circumstances of forced movement,
is at the forefront of many contributions to this volume.

Diasporas, whether voluntary or enforced, rupture concepts of *home* and
*homescape.* The dispersion of a people from their original homeland
creates scattered communities that combine their homeland with their new
place of residence. These amalgamations between homeland and new home
are complicated by the circumstances surrounding the relocation.

People who have been forced to leave their homeland due to war,
persecution, or natural disaster cannot make a new home so easily.
Displaced people, and especially those who are displaced within the
borders of their own country (known as Internally Displaced Persons or
IDPs), are among the most vulnerable people in the world. They are often
trapped in a protracted temporary housing status for years or even
decades. Although they remain within the borders of their nation state,
they rarely receive the assistance they require to make a new, stable
home. Instead, many continue to flee from one place to another in a
quest for adequate shelter, water, food, and medical care. This
situation is the case for displaced persons who remain in Sudan at the
moment this volume goes to press.

Displaced persons are usually severed from their original vocations,
communities, and even families. In such precarious conditions, such
individuals are left to forge new identities with each new residence --
each locale they encounter offers them new opportunities to pursue while
closing out others. The hope that Khalid Shatta offers with his artwork,
outreach activities, and long-term perspectives, helps assuage some of
the hopelessness that may arise when considering these circumstances.
His painting "Boozer/Shatta Figure 14" depicts a crowd of people who
have fled the war in Sudan for Cairo. Their minds appear to be
preoccupied with their homes and the war they have left behind. This
disembodied rumination on homescape captures the essence of forced
resettlement and diaspora more succinctly than any words I can put down
here.

Even those who move home under less violent circumstances have to cope
with ruptures of making a new home in a different physical space as
Amany Sadiq, Maher Habbob, Menna Agha, and Armgard Goo-Grauer describe
in their articles. It also involves confronting linguistic differences
and even offensive stereotypes, as Asmaa Taha describes. There is hope
as well as struggle when finding a new place in the world, as Khalid
Shatta described during the course of our interview. Although far from
home, Shatta explained how feelings of home have never evaporated for
him. Instead, visions of homescape endure and adapt, allowing
individuals to forge new senses of self and home as they remake their
lives.

**Nubian Homelife and the Nubian Diaspora**

Concepts of home, homelife, and homescape have been present since
ancient times, as Hamad Hamdeen, Kate Fulcher, Sarah Shrader, and Elsa
Yvanez demonstrate in their contributions to this volume. It is
challenging to identity emotional and conceptual relations to home in
the material residues of past lives. These contributors tackled this
challenge by using a wide range of methodological and theoretical
vantages.

Meanwhile, the Nubian diaspora has complicated easy encapsulations of
early modern and contemporary Nubian homescapes. The Nubian diaspora is
itself complex. While many Nubians were involuntarily displaced from
their homes, others dispersed of their own volition in pursuit of
opportunities beyond their homeland. This is certainly true of the
Nubians of southern Egypt. Many Egyptian Nubian men had sought
employment outside of Nubia for centuries, returning to their homeland
only periodically. In her photo essay, Anne Jennings discusses this
traditional Egyptian Nubian economy prior to the erection of the first
dam along the Nile in 1903 as well as the impact of this and other
modifications over the years. The raising of the High Dam in the 1960s
led to significant changes in Nubian homescapes. That construction
completely flooded the area between the First and Second Cataracts, and
forced approximately 50,000 Nubians to resettle in the thirty-three
villages built to accommodate them near the town of Kom Ombo. Several
villages near the town of Aswan were not in danger of inundation and so
the villagers were not removed.

The new villages near Kom Ombo were a shock and a disappointment to
those who resettled there. Nevertheless, they did their best to recreate
their old environment, homes, and lifeways. Some traditions survived,
while others shifted, as Menna Agha, Argard Goo-Grauer, Maher Habbob,
and Amany Sadeq describe in their contributions to the volume. Anne M.
Jennings reminds us that significant changes took place even among those
who were able to remain in their villages near Awan. Homescapes are
always in a state of flux, even though they are deeply entangled with
endurance and memory.

Many Nubians, both male and female, are now living internationally, in
countries such as the United States (especially in New York and
Virginia), England (especially in London), France, (especially in
Paris), Switzerland, and Germany, as well as in Egypt (namely, in Cairo
and Alexandria in addition to the Kom Ombo region).[^4] Some of these
communities struggle against racism and pressures to conform to local
cultures at the cost of preserving their own lifeways. Others have
identified new opportunities and advantages unavailable to them in their
homeland. Past homescapes continue to haunt how individuals perceive and
act in their new settings.

**Contributions**

The contributors to this volume approach homescapes from broad temporal,
geographic, and disciplinary standpoints. Despite these differences,
common themes arose among the contributions, such as the value of the
surrounding landscape in creating homescapes (e.g. Sadeq, Tsakos,
Fulcher, Hamad) and the need to describe and interact with the home
creatively in the form of words or images (Fulcher, Shatta, Jennings,
Goo-Grauer). Given the rich connections between them, these papers could
be grouped in any number of ways. Here, however, I decided to focus on
themes of craftwork, displacement, and the *longue durée* since they
repeated in so many of the contributions.

*Craftwork and labor*

Many contributors explored craftwork and labor, demonstrating how work
helps to define and make a homescape. Hamad Hamdeen delved into the
plant remains found in the mudbricks used to construct Christian sites
in Nubia. Brickmakers added these plant remains and other debris --
collectively known as chaff -- to mudbricks to increase their strength
and durability. These plant remains are small, sometimes invisible to
the naked eye. And yet they contain within them a wealth of information
about the materials people used in and around the home. These remains
shed light on pharmacy, food and drink consumption, home construction,
and fodder among other aspects of everyday life. Hamdeen makes a strong
argument for making mudbrick analysis a mainstay of archaeological
research through his careful analysis of four significant Christian
sites in the Mahas region of Sudan.

While bioarchaeology has been a mainstay of archaeological research
since its inception, Sarah Schrader takes a unique vantage on human
remains. Using bioarchaeological methods, Schrader demonstrates the
frequency with which individuals assumed a squatting position. People
squatted while working -- cooking, cleaning, taking care of children --
as well as when they drank tea or chatted with a neighbor. In other
words, ancient Nubians spent a lot of time in a squatting position.
Schrader's approach offers us a peak into the everyday postures people
assumed in and around their homes in antiquity.

Elsa Yvanez delves into the world of work in her exploration of textile
activities in Sudan during the Meroitic Period (*ca.* 300 BCE -- 400
CE), a time when Meroë served as the capital of the Kingdom of Kush. She
draws together the surviving material signatures of weaving -- spindle
whorls, and loom weights most particularly -- to understand where and
how people incorporated textile work into village and city life during
the Meroitic Period. Her analysis reveals that this craftwork took place
in domestic spaces as well as more formalized multi-use industrial
areas. She found that textile production was ubiquitous, taking place
in, around, and outside of the home. This result underscores the
centrality of textiles to the social, economic and work lives of people
living in Meroitic Nubia.

Finally, Kate Fulcher explores painting materials used in ancient and
contemporary Nubia as a way of accessing the complex entanglements of
everyday life. She explains how people see the landscapes around them as
palettes for decorating their homes. She found ancient evidence of color
harvesting in the form of raw pigment lumps, the paintings themselves,
and the residue found on grinding stones. Fulcher's ethnoarchaeological
research compliments this material evidence since informants provide
insights into the decisions and practices linked to acquiring and using
pigment to decorate their homes. Fulcher gathers together this suite of
evidence into a fictional narrative aimed at making past lives palpable
and accessible.

*Resettlement*

Feelings of displacement, due to architectural, social, and linguistic
differences pulse throughout the contributions that describe Nubian
resettlement in the wake of the Aswan High Dam construction. Although
there had been dams and diasporas before the final raising of the dam,
this last raising served as a key turning point for Nubian
homescapes.[^5]

Menna Agha explores the deep disappointment many Nubian settlers felt
when they beheld the unfamiliar houses offered to them in what they
called "*Al* *Tahgeer,*" the "place of displacement". The Egyptian State
refers to *Al Tahgeer* as "New Nubia," a considerably more optimistic
term that evades common Nubian sentiment. Evasion can be found
throughout the resettlement process, as Agha describes in her essay. The
Egyptian state prized optimization and productivity in their house
designs rather than understanding the home as the fulcrum of everyday
Nubian life. They left the views of Nubian women, who were deeply
involved in placemaking, completely out of their planning. Agha shows us
how villagers refashioned these prefabricated domestic spaces in a
"Nubian way" once they took over the barren houses offered to them.

Maher Habbob delves into a comparison of architectural and landscape
features before and after the resettlement. He does so by looking
closely at the legal, economic, social, and architectural upheavals that
took place at the village of Tūmās wa 'Afya during the various
constructions of the Low Dam and High Dam at Aswan. The resettlement of
this village resulted in a radically different environment and alien
houses -- neither of which accounted for traditional Nubian social
understandings of homescapes. It was left to the villagers to remodel
their new houses to make them into homes.

Amany Abdelsadeq Sayed Hussein explores how the people of Abu Hor, a
Kenuz Nubian village, remade their homes and homeland in the aftermath
of their displacement in December 1964. In doing so, she also examines
her grandfather's house. Sadeq's interest in her family's experience of
resettlement and making a home resonates with her theoretical framework
about senses of home. Her work underscores the importance of the social
and emotional components of homescapes as well as the materiality of place
and landscape.

Although these individuals creatively remodeled domestic space to better
suit traditional Nubian ways of dwelling in their new homes, some
traditions inevitably fell by the wayside. Armgard Goo-Grauer's
photographic essay of bridal rooms explores one of these traditional
practices that was lost with the resettlement. Bridal rooms had served
as a form of female self-expression at a critical time in a Nubian
woman's life course. Women carefully selected, created, and combined
objects and images in a single room as a hypnotic symbol of their new
roles as wives in a household. Considerable emotional and creative labor
went into the creation of these rooms and yet the practice ended
abruptly with the resettlement of Nubians into pre-fabricated houses.
These houses had no space for such rooms and Goo-Grauer describes how
female decorative ambitions refocused onto furnishings more commonplace
across Egypt more broadly.

Meanwhile, the photographic essay by Anne M. Jennings reminds us that
not all Egyptian Nubians were resettled. Jennings shows us the houses
Nubians still occupy in the villages around Aswan. Although these houses
have deeper roots in the Nubian community, they too have been
refashioned over the years to accommodate the changing needs and desires
of their occupants. For example, in the five years between her 1981 and
1986 visits to Gubba, Jennings witnessed the transition from traditional
materials such as mud brick and mud plaster, to stone and tin. This
change, while less comfortable, allowed families to add a second storey
to their house, which is itself another departure from traditional
Nubian house design. By 2007, these Gubba houses had acquired tile
floors, air conditioning, glass windows, and modern appliances in
kitchens and bathrooms. These homes offer a powerful account of
incremental change driven by individuals in contrast to the ruptures
experienced by the uprooted Nubian communities described by other
contributors in this volume.

Finally, Asmaa Taha's article examines how Egyptians characterize
Nubians by the way they speak Arabic, their mannerisms, their dress, and
other visual signifiers. Egyptian media, particularly in the form of
accessible soap operas and songs, fuel negative stereotypes of Nubians.
Taha spoke with Native Nobiin speakers to understand their perception of
these visual and linguistic stereotypes. Her informants offered a
diversity of views on these stereotypes -- age and gender seemed to have
critical influences on how they understood these representations.

*Longue durée*

In his review of Derek Welsby's edited volume, *Archaeology by the
Fourth Nile Cataract*, Alexandros Tsakos takes up two themes that pulse
through many of the contributions to this volume -- the *longue durée*
of Nubian homescapes and the loss of homelands. Archaeological work in
the region of the Fourth Cataract, like much of Nubia, came into being
as a salvage expedition. Such expeditions have advantages and
disadvantages -- they take an enviably wide-ranging cultural and
disciplinary scope, but are painfully limited by time and resources.
Tsakos describes how these limits are noticeable in both the research
conducted and in the eventual volume. Tsakos dwells in particular on the
homescapes of the Manasir, which were documented before their ancestral
lands were flooded. He makes a strong argument for careful documentation
and sensitive publication given the ruptures created by this
indescribable loss.

In my interview with Khalid Shatta, he often took a long-term
perspective on Sudan, on his artwork, and on himself. He mused on the
enduring issues in Sudan that create repeated patterns of loss and
resilience over the course of thousands of years. Shatta's reflection on
his own life as a Sudanese expatriate illustrates the emotional
complexity of homescapes and diaspora. His present home allows his mind
and body the freedom to produce art in a way that was not possible for
him in Sudan. Meanwhile, Sudan remains deeply embedded in his artwork --
individuals from his hometown, emotions about the current war, and
symbols of both ancient and contemporary life appear and reappear
throughout his works. While his art does not avoid undercurrents of
violence, unrest, or displacement, it is also beautiful, haunting, and
even comforting. Here, Shatta shows us how one might harmonize between
the before and after of the homescapes that have been ruptured by war,
resettlement, and everyday change.

**A Home for *Nubian Homescapes***

When approaching a topic like Nubian homescapes, it is necessary to tear
down the walls between disciplines and genres. The complex emotional and
material terrain of homescapes requires art, photographic essays,
fiction, and a suite of academic approaches to navigate it. *Dotawo: A
Journal of Nubian Studies* is an appropriate home for these intertwining
perspectives. *Dotawo* has been open access since its launch in 2014. It
welcomes contributions from a diverse range of disciplines, languages,
and genres. I cannot imagine publishing a volume such as this one
anywhere else, both because I firmly believe that accessibility is an
ethical issue and because most journals remained siloed by discipline
and genre. I am grateful to *Dotawo* for making this volume possible, to
the contributors for pursuing unique vantages on Nubian homescapes, and
to the people of Sudan who are on our minds and in our hearts now more
than ever.

**References**

Ingold, Tim. \"The Temporality of the Landscape.\" *Conceptions of Time
and Ancient Society/World Archaeology* 25, no. 2 (1993): 152-74.

Janmyr, Maja. \"The Nubians of Egypt: A Displaced Population.\" In *An
Atlas of Contemporary Egypt*, edited by Hala Bayoumi and Karine Benafla,
96-7. Paris: CNRS Éditions 2023.

Yao, Alice. \"The Great Wall as Destination? Archaeology of Migration
and Settlers under the Han Empire.\" In *Archaeologies of Empire: Local
Participants and Imperial Trajectories*, edited by Anna Lucille Boozer,
B.S. Düring and Bradley J Parker, 57-88. Albuquerque, NM: SAR & UNM
Press, 2020.

Youssef, Maaï, and Mayada Madbouly. \"Displaced People and Migrants in
Cairo.\" In *An Atlas of Contemporary Egypt*, edited by Hala Bayoumi and
Karine Benafla, 32-3. Paris: CNRS Editions, 2023.

[^1]: For a basic geographic and temporal introduction to Nubia, see
    Janmyr, \"The Nubians of Egypt: a displaced population.\"

[^2]: Ingold, \"The Temporality of the Landscape.\"

[^3]: Alice Yao described this process for the people who were relocated
    to live along the Great Wall in Han China. See Yao, \"The
    Great Wall as Destination? Archaeology of Migration and Settlers
    under the Han Empire.\"

[^4]: For an overview of the four main waves of Nubian settlement in
    Cairo from 1902 until 1964, see Youssef and Madbouly,
    \"Displaced People and Migrants in Cairo.\".

[^5]: The High Dam (*as-Sad al-\'Aali*) was completed in 1970. The
    reservoir reached its full capacity six years later.