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Description
BORDERSCAPE is a multidisciplinary project that aims at investigating how the rise of the Egyptian state at the end of the 4th millennium BCE impacted and transformed the social and spatial landscape of the First Nile Cataract region. A revolutionary process such as that of state formation certainly entailed profound changes in the socio-economic structure of Ancient Egypt, which was the earliest territorial polity of human history, more so at its newly established borders. The project develops along two lines of research, one applying a spatial perspective, including insights from geospatial analysis, the other focusing on ethnicity and identity, an approach in line with an anthropological perspective. The first research objective is to reconstruct the ancient settlement landscape. Through the analysis of sites’ morphology (shape, size, function), and location in the landscape, the project intends to recover patterns of development and growth, with the expectation to provide information on when, how, and why changes happened. The second research objective is to reconstruct the use of the natural landscape, for settlement, economic, and religious/ritualistic purposes, with the goal to define patterns of land use, identify sites interconnectedness and possible pathways, so to detect moments of discontinuity. With the third research objective the project seeks to investigate the social landscape. The research will focus on the group affiliation of the local population, the possible differences in ethnicity (or better, in the ethnicity displayed) between the regional centre Elephantine and its hinterland, and the way the dynastic centralised power coped with identity fluidity and population mobility, in comparison to pre-dynastic times. Another pivotal goal is to comprehend how the changes occurring in Egypt, and specifically at its southern frontier affected the socio-political dynamics in Nubia, as well as the interplay between the two neighbours.
Summary of project results
The BORDERSCAPE Project aimed to understand how the process of state formation in ancient Egypt impacted and transformed the society and landscape of the River Nile’s Fist Cataract region. With the creation of the state at the end of the 4th millennium BCE, this region became Egypt’s southern border with Nubia. Ancient Egypt is known to be the earliest form of territorial state in human history, similar to our modern nation-states but not the same. We still struggle to comprehend how this early form of state came into being and how it functioned. This is particularly true for its boundary regions. The reason is two-fold: 1. we do not have enough sources from the formative stage of Egyptian history to provide us with information about boundary regions and the institution of geo-political borders; and 2. we wrongly assume those borders to have been made, maintained and function as modern borders do. The latter assumption led Egyptologists to look for the wrong evidence. And, when the sources favoured by scholars are mainly of the written kind and, thus, are primarily produced by the elite, more precisely by the king, then it becomes clear how traditional reconstructions are problematic because they are elite-centred, with a top-down view of the process and a centre-periphery perspective. The BORDERSCAPE Project took up the challenge of using mainly archaeological sources from the First Cataract region to counterbalance traditional views. In this way, BORDERSCAPE has, for the first time, provided a bottom-up approach to the process and a periphery-centre perspective. Traditional Egyptological narratives mostly lack theoretical background. The Project has filled this gap by approaching the research through the concept of borderscape: the network of geopolitical, sociocultural, natural, symbolic, and spiritual features that came to define boundaries from the standpoint of human and non-human agents. The term highlights how borders exist within a particular landscape: the place where a border is situated and where the practices that maintain the border occur. But in addition to this spatial perspective, ‘landscaping’ has a second meaning: the host of practices we undertake to shape and mould the landscape around us. The innovative approach, a key feature of the BORDERSCAPE Project, has significantly helped frame its results within a broader theoretical agenda shared by other research fields, such as Border Studies, which is meaningful beyond Egyptology.
The Project’s main goal was to address several research questions: 1. How did the state formation process change the settlement pattern and the land use in the region? 2. How did the process impact the communities? 3. When and why did those changes happen? 4. How and when did the process of border-making start, intensify, and finish? 5. What did the border-making process entail? 6. How did state formation and border-making processes affect Nubian society? To answer all those questions, the BORDERSCAPE Project gathered archaeological, environmental, artistic, and textual data from new fieldwork, implemented with published data from earlier archaeological research. It was examined using traditional archaeological approaches and new methods of analysis and interpretation of remote sensed and space-borne data, all considered in the context of historic and modern topographical and cartographical information. A database was developed to manage the data collected and handled in a geographical information system (GIS) environment. The archaeological data was utilised, together with historical cartographic and topographic maps, aerial photos, satellite images, and a high-resolution digital elevation model, kindly granted by the German Space Agency, central to the analysis of the spatial distribution of each category of archaeological sites and discern how and when their distribution changed. Environmental data were considered to understand when and how the use of the landscape for economic, settlement and ritualistic purposes changed. To analyse the changes in the social landscape, the Project focused on the concept of community structure. A network of communities sharing settlement patterns, burial customs, symbolic artistic expressions, and material culture created what the Project defined as a cultural community. A complex and dynamic system of cultural communities was identified, which evolved and transformed due to the state formation process. With this approach, the inquiry was moved beyond the mere study of group identity, although it produced insights into the identity of those cultural communities. The Project then used the archaeological record to detect what power performances were utilised during the border-making process, by whom and when. A reassessment of the socio-cultural dynamics in Nubia between the 4th and 3rd millennium BCE provided food for thought on how the paramount changes that occurred in Egypt also impacted Nubia.
BORDERSCAPE developed a model that dealt with the two sequential processes of state formation, which in the First Cataract region started at the beginning of the 4th millennium BCE and has the settling down of communities along the Nile as a defining moment, and the borderscaping, which intensified during Dynasty Zero, right before the unification of the land. It reveals a complex interplay of economic, social, and cultural transformations with moments of discontinuity highlighted throughout the almost two millennia analysed by the study. The settlement pattern goes from a distributed presence of small villages along the river at the beginning of the 4th millennium to a gathering of the population into more extensive sites north of the cataract at the time of the state formation to a contemporary depopulation of the area south of the cataract, resettled only later into the 3rd millennium. The extensive efforts that the Pharaonic state made to establish a political and ideological border ultimately resulted along the river in a shift in community structuring: from a shared system of social practices and material cultures before the state to diverging social practices and material cultures and thus identities, in Egypt and Nubia, after that. A nomadic population who constantly interacted with those settled along the Nile created a further cultural community. BORDERSCAPE has identified how rock art was used to display and perform royal action at the state''s inception. Its power to mark the landscape and make it a symbolic space, where ideologically creating and recreating the borderscape according to royal will, was the reason for choosing that medium. It also demonstrates that, at first, the border was developed as an ideological concept that only later became a tangible occurrence by building a fortress and placing rock inscriptions in the landscape. It further confirmed that the border was always permeable. Those facts make it different from modern borders. A WebGIS was developed on its website (https://webgis.borderscapeproject.org/) to effectively convey the changes in settlement patterns to a broader audience. The thematic maps show clearly what happened before and after the state formation at the end of the 4th millennium. In collaboration with the Nubia Museum in Aswan, the Project has also developed an educational program for children centred around the rich albeit undervalued and threatened rock art heritage of the First Cataract region, which has had a crucial role in making the borderscape.