Word: nubian
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...laid out on the sand. The newly discovered blocks, he believes, once made up the vaulted ceiling of a passageway that led to a temple dug into a 300-ft.-high hill known today as Jebel Barkal. It was there, Kendall thinks, that rulers in the ancient Nubian kingdom of Napata and Meroe, which dated from 900 B.C. to A.D. 350, practiced their coronation rites, climaxing in a crowning by the god Amun...
Archaeologists aren't the only ones who are rediscovering Sudan's ancient treasures. One of the greatest exhibitions of Nubian art ever assembled is currently touring France, Germany and the Netherlands. The show, which will continue into next year, features statues, pottery, jewelry and other artifacts that were recovered in excavations dating back to 1842, when Karl Lepsius, a Prussian archaeologist, first surveyed the region known in the Old Testament as Kush, in Greek literature as Aethiopia and by the Romans as Nubia (possibly a corruption of the Egyptian word for gold...
...that far. But there is now enough evidence for a scientific consensus that ancient Nubia, beginning in the Stone Age, developed its own distinct civilization--or rather, a series of overlapping civilizations--influenced by Africa, Arabia and the Sahara as well as by Egypt. Moreover, many scholars believe these Nubian kingdoms hold even more clues to the origins of African culture than does Egypt, which, because of its unique position abutting Asia and the Mediterranean, is regarded by many archaeologists as having developed independently from the rest of the continent...
Theroux's ethnic snobbery is a tired act by now, but his his eyes remain open to beauty as well as squalor. The sensuous Alexandria of old, he notes, was a city "so purple, with Nubian slaves, child brothels, and cabals and nearly always someone in the Casbah wailing with meningitis." One can almost forgive the racist undercurrents of a writer who can pen a sentence like that...
Yuppies (or are we now "yuppies emeritus"?) find the whole subject a minefield of embarrassment, as the remains of 1960s values rub against 1990s bourgeois affluence. And leaving home is no escape. Hotels, in particular, seem intent on making you feel ridiculous, with their doormen dressed up like Nubian slaves and their insistence on having someone else carry your bag even if you're perfectly capable of carrying it yourself. You, meanwhile, follow along making desperate small talk and wondering nervously how many singles you have in your wallet. Who needs this...