87 BIBLIOTHECA ORIENTALIS LXIX N° 1-2, januari-april 2012 88

CHRISTELIJK EGYPTE

ADAMS, W.Y. — Qasr Ibrim. The Earlier Medieval Period.

(EES Excavation Memoir, 89). Egypt Exploration Soci-
ety, London, 2010. (29,5 cm, XIII, 314, 5 colour plates).
ISBN 978-0-85698-191-3. £ 65.00.
The author of this volume, William Y. Adams (henceforth
A.), one of the world’s most widely respected and eminent
Nubiologists, hardly requires introduction.1) He has worked
in Nubia since 1959, was Director of Excavations in Nubia
for the Sudan government from 1959 to 1966, as such play-
ing a major role in the UNESCO rescue project of Nubian
sites due to the building of the Aswan High Dam, and has
published numerous archaeological reports and studies on
ancient Nubia, first and foremost his seminal Nubia. Corri-
dor to Africa.2) Among the key sites on which A. has left his
mark is Qasr Ibrim, situated ca. 200 km south of Aswan,
where excavations by the Egypt Exploration Society have
been carried out since 1963. These excavations have revealed
that Qasr Ibrim, once strategically located on a hill top on the
east bank of the Nile (now reduced to a small island in Lake
Nasser), was an important military, administrative and reli-
gious centre in Lower Nubia for several millennia. A. became
involved in the excavations at this site in 1972 and acted as
its director between 1978 and 1984. He has published the
first final report on these excavations in 1996 covering the
late medieval period (12th to 15th centuries CE).3) The present
volume continues that effort with a final report on the pre-
ceding occupation level, the earlier medieval period (6th to
12th centuries CE).

1
) He was the key-note speaker on a recent symposium about Qasr
Ibrim held at the Netherlands Institute for the Near East (Leiden, 11-12
December 2009), where he was introduced as ‘the doyen of Nubian archae-
ology’. The proceedings of this conference will appear as J.L. Hagen, J.
van der Vliet (eds), Qasr Ibrim, between Egypt and Africa: A Case Study
in Cultural Exchange (Leiden, forthcoming). For his own perspective on
his career, see now his autobiography The Road from Frijoles Canyon:
Anthropological Adventures on Four Continents (Albuquerque, 2009).
2
) W.Y. Adams, Nubia. Corridor to Africa (London, 1977).
3
) W.Y. Adams, Qasr Ibrim. The Late Mediaeval Period (London,
1996).

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 89 BOEKBESPREKINGEN — CHRISTELIJK EGYPTE
As A. explains in the introduction (Part 1, pp. 1-7), he has
already described in detail the history of Qasr Ibrim, the site
and its find circumstances, its excavation history, and the
methods and techniques employed during excavation, as well
as given a historical overview of Christian Nubia in his 1996
volume,4) and hence, in order to avoid repetition, he only
provides a very brief summary here. The two volumes by A.
on the Christian period at Qasr Ibrim should therefore be
seen as companion volumes, a circumstance which is also
underlined by the similar structure of the volumes describing
the architecture (Part 2), artifacts (Part 3) and texts (Part 4),
and providing a synthesis at the end (Part 5) for both periods
in question. This feature makes it easy for scholars interested
in comparing, for instance, the architecture of the earlier with
that of the later medieval period at Qasr Ibrim. The archaeo-
logical record presented in the volume under review is unfor-
tunately less complete than for the later period, as A. states
on pp. 5-6, which has to do with a much more fragmentary
preservation of this occupation level, as well as lacunae in
the recording of the evidence.
In Part 2 (pp. 9-62), A. starts with the architectural record,
describing mainly the developments in domestic architecture
over time and the two churches that were constructed in this
period: the church built in the temple of Taharqa somewhere
in the sixth century (on which see further below) and the
cathedral church, which dates to the second half of the sev-
enth or, more probably, the first half of the eighth century,
as well as the cemetery adjacent to the cathedral. Part 3 (pp.
63-240), the largest part of the book, provides a detailed
overview of the rich variety of 2500 artifacts that have been
found on the site dating to this period. Among these are
many organic finds that have been preserved amazingly well
at Qasr Ibrim, such as the textiles made of different materials
(especially cotton, wool and flax) studied by Nettie Adams
in Chapter 7 (pp. 156-164),5) and the wooden boards with
texts written in different scripts found at various parts of the
site (p. 210). Part 4 (pp. 241-255) gives an idea of the around
500 textual finds, arranged according to their script (Greek,
Coptic, Old Nubian, Arabic). At the beginning of this part,
A. discusses some patterns in these texts, such as their date,
writing material and content, but admits that a large part of
the material remains unpublished. Consequently, in the sec-
tions on the different scripts, he draws heavily on personal
communications and preliminary translations by the special-
ists that are currently working on these materials, and it is
evident that a fuller analysis can only be done after more
material has become available. In this respect, it can be men-
tioned that in the same year in which this volume came out,
the bulk of the Greek and Coptic inscriptions (92 in total)
from Qasr Ibrim was published.6)
In the closing synthesis (Part 5, pp. 257-259), A. attempts
to reconstruct from the archaeological remains what is known
4
) Adams, Qasr Ibrim. Late Mediaeval Period, 1-29 (Chapters 1 and 2).
5
) She also has a contribution on garments at pp. 165-172.
6
) A. ™ajtar, J. van der Vliet, Qasr Ibrim. The Greek and Coptic Inscrip-
tions (Warsaw, 2010). Cf. with pp. 243-244 of the present volume. E.g. the
preliminary translation of the tombstone of Bishop Marianou of Faras on
p. 243 can now be replaced with the full edition of the text given by ™ajtar
and Van der Vliet, Qasr Ibrim. Greek and Coptic Inscriptions, 86-93 (no.
22). See further J. van der Vliet, ‘“What Is a Man?”: The Nubian Tradition
of Coptic Funerary Inscriptions’, in A. ™ajtar, J. van der Vliet, Nubian
Voices. Studies in Christian Nubian Culture (Warsaw, 2011) 171-224,
which is based on the material from Qasr Ibrim.
95302_Bior_2012_1-2_02_Boekbe.indd 75
90
about life at Qasr Ibrim in the period under study. There fol-
low three appendices with detailed records of the finds, and
five beautiful colour plates illustrating some of the textiles
found on site.
The book is well structured and, as can be expected from
A., it contains a detailed and precise recording and analysis
of the archaeological material from the early medieval
period. However, in some cases the author could have
included a fuller discussion of secondary literature, espe-
cially where it concerns studies on Qasr Ibrim itself. For
example, in the description of Church 287, or the church
built in the temple of Taharqa (pp. 41-47), no mention is
made of the excellent recent study by Pamela Rose (and col-
laborators) of the Meroitic temple complex, which lies adja-
cent to it.7) As appears from this study, the sanctuary of the
Meroitic temple may have continued to be in use beyond the
fifth century, and it would have been interesting to hear A.’s
views on its relationship with the restructuring of the temple
of Taharqa for its new purpose as a church, in which parts of
the Meroitic temple complex were reused.8) In the same
study of the Meroitic temple, the reuse of the Taharqa temple
as a church is dated to the first half of the sixth century,
which is in agreement with the one proposed by A. himself,
on the basis of pottery, in his earlier discussion of the tem-
ple-church.9) In the present study, however, A. proposes a
slightly later dating, between 542 and 580 CE, that is, during
the official Christianisation of Nubia.10) Yet, it has been
shown in several recent studies that the process of religious
transformation in Lower Nubia started earlier and was more
complex than the Christian accounts on the conversion of
Nubia (in particular John of Ephesus) suggest.11) In such cir-
cumstances, a direct relationship between the reuse of the
temple of Taharqa and the missions to Nubia would be hard
to defend, and the earlier date in the first half of the sixth
century therefore still seems preferable.12)
7
) P. Rose, The Meroitic Temple Complex at Qasr Ibrim (London,
2007).
8
) Rose, Meroitic Temple Complex, 6.
9
) Rose, Meroitic Temple Complex, 6; Adams, Qasr Ibrim. Late Medi-
aeval Period, 69-73, esp. 69: ‘converted into a church in the very early
sixth century’. Cf. also p. 5, where he assumes that construction of the
church took place before the official Christianisation of Nubia, ‘perhaps
near the beginning of the sixth century’.
10
) Repeated on pp. 4 and 59. An even later date is found in W.Y.
Adams, The Churches of Nobadia, vol. 1 (Oxford, 2009) 22-23 (no. 39B-1:
‘immediately after official conversion to Christianity’), which is not men-
tioned here either. For the date of the first mission to Nubia, 542 CE, he
refers to his Nubia, 438-445 (though the date given there is ‘ca. 543 CE’),
but in fact the event cannot be more precisely dated than between 536 and
548 CE, see J.H.F. Dijkstra, Philae and the End of Ancient Egyptian Reli-
gion. A Regional Study of Religious Transformation (298-642 CE) (Leuven,
2008), esp. 296-298.
11
) As shown, on the basis of archaeological evidence by D.N. Edwards,
‘The Christianisation of Nubia: Some Archaeological Pointers’, Sudan &
Nubia 5 (2001) 89-96 and The Nubian Past. An Archaeology of the Sudan
(London, 2004) 216-217, and on the basis of textual evidence by Dijkstra,
Philae and the End, esp. 293-294, elaborated on, with a specific focus on
Qasr Ibrim, in ‘Qasr Ibrim and the Religious Transformation of Lower
Nubia in Late Antiquity’, in Hagen, Van der Vliet, Qasr Ibrim, forthcoming.
12
) Cf. also the date given for the cathedral in Rose, Meroitic Temple
Complex, 6 (‘begun in the later sixth or early seventh century’), followed in
the recent study of the cathedral by F. Aldsworth, Qasr Ibrim. The Cathe-
dral Church (London, 2010), esp. 132-136 (ca. 600 CE), with the date
assigned to its construction in the present volume, p. 48 (after 650, most
probably in the first half of the eighth century), cf. Adams, Qasr Ibrim. Late
Mediaeval Period, 73 (seventh/eighth century), and Churches of Nobadia 1,
49-50 (no. 39: ‘most probably Early Christian 1’, i.e. 650-700 CE).
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 91 BIBLIOTHECA ORIENTALIS LXIX N° 1-2, januari-april 2012 92

Despite the circumstance that a fuller discussion of the lit-

erature would sometimes have been appreciated, it should be
emphasised that the main aim of this book is to provide a final
report about the early medieval occupation level of Qasr
Ibrim. In this respect the book succeeds admirably, and marks
another great contribution of A. to Nubian archaeology. In his
autobiography, A. notes about his arrival at Qasr Ibrim in
1972 that ‘the excavation was a shambles’.13) It is to A.’s
credit that despite the chaotic record keeping of the earlier
years and the enormous quantity of finds, a meticulous report
like the present one is now available. The two other studies
on Christian material from Qasr Ibrim that came out in the
same year as this final report show that much more can still
be expected from the riches that have been unearthed at this
site.14) Together with its companion volume, this book will
serve as the standard point of departure for any such future
study of one of the most important sites of Christian Nubia.

University of Ottawa, Jitse DIJKSTRA

December 2011

13
) Adams, Road from Frijoles Canyon, 209.
14
) ™ajtar and Van der Vliet, Qasr Ibrim. Greek and Coptic Inscriptions,
and Aldsworth, Qasr Ibrim. Cathedral Church.

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