The Archaeology of Late Antique Sudan: Aesthetics and Identity i ...

graves. Although the conceptual line that divides royal from non-royal could itself be open to discussion, it was more appropriate to focus this research on the royal tombs as a discrete group. As such, the research could then focus on intragroup cohesion or variation. Secondly, a very detailed level of recording and analysis was devised for the material from the tombs excavated by Emery, Kirwan, and Farid (the tombs that contained archaeological material), which constitutes a very significant amount of data. Thirdly, the Farid site report is very similar in its layout and content to the original Emery and Kirwan reports, whereas the OINE volume is recorded in a very different manner. Since the 1938 and 1963 site reports recorded the same types of information, they could be more legitimately interrogated as a coherent dataset. The royal tombs, whilst forming a significant body of data for Lower Nubia in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, have not yet been subject to a critical interpretation. This research attempts such a task.

Chapter 1 focuses on the historical and cultural background of Lower Nubia following the decline of Meroitic culture in the mid-fourth century AD (see table 1 for a chronological scheme). Both the written evidence of classical authors and the archaeological evidence from a variety of sites in Lower Nubia provide a contextual backdrop to the development of the cemeteries at Qustul and Ballana (see figure 1 for) a map of the area and many of the sites mentioned in this text). The basis of the chronology of the Qustul and Ballana cemeteries is also outlined here.