EXCAVATIONS AT MEROE UNFOLD ETHIOPIAN HISTORY

Excavations conducted in the Sudan during the past three years by Professor George A. Reisner '89 of the University, who is in charge of the Egyptian expedition working under the joint auspices of the University and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, have revealed the main outlines of the history of the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia during a period of over a thousand years, according to a report received from Dr. Reisner.

The excavations at Meroe were begun in 1920, were continued last winter, and may be completed this year, according to the report, which will appear in full in the next Bulletin of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Meroe is in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, not very far from Khartum. It is over six hundred miles south of Luxor and the Valley of the Kings, where the discovery of King Tut-Ankh-Amen's tomb was recently made.

"The great outstanding feature of the history of Ethiopia was that the Ethiopian cultural unit stood as an outpost of Egyptian civilization in Middle Africa," writes Professor Reisner. He shows that Ethiopia had become thoroughly Egyptianized while it was under the sway of Egypt, and the Egyptian influence, though gradually diminishing, remained dominant for hundreds of years. During the Meroitic kingdom,--the period when Meroe was the capital,--Professor Reisner finds that several times Egyptian influences on Ethiopian culture were reintroduced and the Egyptian arts and crafts were revived, possibly through the importation of Egyptian craftsmen. The Ethiopians, however, were not so entirely dependent on Egyptian civilization as this might seem to indicate, for they actually invented a script of their own, as few other nations have done.

Ethiopians Had Their Own Script

"They knew well," says Professor Reisner, "the use of writing from the cumbersome Egyptian hieroglyphics which they had inherited along with the official Egyptian language, and they must have had hints of alphabetic writing from the use of Greek in Ptolemaic Egypt and the use of the Southern Arabic script of Abyssinia. But they made a script of their own,--unique in the form of the letters, adapted only to the writing of their own peculiar language. The cursive was invented first for the practical purposes of daily life and caused an immediate decline in the knowledge of Egyptian; and when the knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphics was lost, they invented a hieroglyphic script of their own.

Find Evidence of Greek Art

"In the debris of a ruined pyramid belonging to a child of the royal family who had made their tombs in the Southern cemetery," says Dr. Reisner, "we found to our great surprise a Greek rhyton of red-figured ware signed with the name of the known Athenian potter, Sotades, who lived about 450 B. C. This was borne on the back of an Amazon mounted on a horse, all beautifully modeled. Whether this masterpiece of the Athenian potter reached Meroe by trade or as a gift brought back by some Meroitic ambassador to Egypt must remain uncertain for the present, but in any case it proves intercourse with the Greeks and an appreciation of Greek craftsmanship.

"The foreign imports were, however, only a small part of the objects placed in the tombs. As always throughout Ethiopia, the burial chambers of every tomb which we excavated had been plundered, and usually very completely plundered. The gold objects actually found by the expedition were therefore only those overlooked or dropped by the thieves, and were only a small proportion of those originally in the tombs.

Only Small Remnants in Sacked Tombs

'There had been elaborate gilded mummy-cases, sometimes with inlaid stones, carved wooden beds and toilet boxes with decorated ivory inlays, rings, carrings, necklaces, bracelets, girdles and crowns of gold on the mummies: vessels of alabaster, glass, bronze, silver and pottery in the burial chambers: mirrors, scepters, wands, bows, arrows, quivers, and even flutes, laid with the mummy. Evidences were found of all of these."

The principal achievement of the Harvard-Boston expedition during the past three years, however, has probably not been the collection of these artistic treasures, but the careful and scientific examination and analysis of the fifty royal tombs in the cemeteries at Meroe, and the resulting determination of the chronological basis for the history of Ethiopia during the Meroitic era.

"The period is a long one, and to the layman the effort to fix the order of fifty royal tombs situated in apparent confusion on two separate hills may appear almost hopeless, although the procedure is really quite simple," says Dr. Reisner. Then he goes on to explain how the tombs, were separated into small groups, the members of each of which were united by contacts, by position, or by similarities of pyramid, chapel, foundation deposits, stairway, burial chambers, and accompanying objects; and how gradually, by the study of every detail, the exact order became clear.

Arrange Tombs Chronologically

"In this manner the tombs of the kings were arranged in chronological order, but the identification of the tombs with the names of the kings and queens buried in them remains a matter of great difficulty. The names of twenty-three of the royal persons buried in the north cemetery are still wanting. The rest have been found by the inscriptions in the chapels, or on the coffin benches or on the altars. However, the work of piecing together the fragments of altars is yet incomplete: a few more names may still be connected with their pyramids, and the task of the identification of the kings promises to reach a fairly satisfactory conclusion."

Dr. Reisner states that in Ethiopia, "Hemitic Libyans from the western desert formed the ruling class, while the mass of the people were probably racially Hamites if not actually of Libyan origin. The whole region involved was inhabited in antiquity, as it is today, by dark-colored races in which brown prevails. They are not, and were not, African negroes, although many individuals in the same region show' a mixture of black blood owing to intermarriage, or are themselves blacks of the slave class."

Sati-Burial Was Customary

The amazing custom of sati-burial, so revolting to moderns, according to which the members of the king's household killed themselves or were killed when he died, and were actually buried in the same tomb, prevailed at Meroe from the second century B. C. onwards, says Dr. Reisner.

An interesting feature of the expedition's work has been in the light it has thrown on references to Queen Candace in the New Testament (Acts VIII, 27) and in the works of Pliny and Strabo. These speak of the Queen Candace as if she were the ruler of Ethiopia.

"From these sources," writes Dr. Reisner, "arose an impression that Ethiopia, especially Meroitic Ethiopia, had been governed by a long line of queens named Candace. Professor Griffith dispelled the greater part of this delusion by proving that the word "candace" is only a title meaning "queen". The excavation of the tombs has served further to make the situation plain.

Most Ethiopian Rulers Were Male

"From 750 B. C., every ruler of Ethiopia was a male. About 160 B. C., the third generation after Ergamenes, the great queen who was buried in Pyramid N. VI seems to have been queen-regent for her son for perhaps ten years. About one hundred and thirty years later. Queen Amanshakhete, who reunited Ethiopia, appears to have been queen-regent under similar circumstances. Her son-in-law. Netekaman, the great builder of temples, obviously came to the throne by the hereditary position of his wife. Queen Amantere, who occupied an unusual position and received burial with the honors of a king. After her two more queens were buried with the honors of a king, but in the poorly-built later pyramids. Altogether, from the time of Ergemenes until the end of the Northern Cemetery, about five hundred and seventy-five years, there were thirty kings and five queens buried in the official royal cemetery of the kings. This fact proves clearly that there was no long line of queens ruling over Ethiopia; but it also proves that five queens occupied a position of unusual influence a position that was recognized by burial in the cemetery of the kings. It appears to me that these were, as a rule, women of the blood-royal who survived their husbands and acted practically as queen-regents during the minority of their sons."