| Chapter 1: | Historical and Cultural Background |
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George Reisner applied the term X-Group to the unfamiliar burials and grave types found in eleven graves that he excavated in cemetery 15 at Gudhi (1910, 149–154). Reisner correctly believed that this newly identified cultural type belonged to a later period in Nubian history than the A- and C-Groups, and so he chose the term X-Group to denote a culture that existed at the latter extent of Nubian history, prior to the arrival of Christianity. It was fully expected that the missing alphabetical cultural groups that were believed to have existed in between the appearance of the C-Group of the mid-third to second millennium BC, and the X-Group of the post-Roman period, would eventually be found. The existence of this newly discovered and mysterious cultural group in Lower Nubia led to a desire to be able to identify this cultural manifestation with a historically attested people. Both classical and local sources exist regarding the various groups in Nubia at this time, although unfortunately, there is no native written source that describes the situation in any depth. The sources that do exist are sometimes fragmentary and were often written with some degree of bias. Numerous classical writers mention the existence of different peoples in Lower Nubia during this time period, such as the Noba, Anouba, Blemmyes, Beja, Nobades, Nobatae, and Nubae. The Aezana stela found at Meroë lists the Mangurto, Khasa, Barya, “the blacks”, and “the red people” (Adams 1977, 386). It has also been possible to identify the names of towns and settlements given in the literary sources with some known archaeological sites. A list of sites was given by Juba II in Pliny the Elder's Natural History, written in the early first century AD, in which the sites of Beqe/Boqh and Amod (Meroitic) may be identified as Ballana and Qustul, respectively (FHN 1998, 805–808). Later in the same work, Pliny describes Petronius’ expedition to Nubia, stating that one of the towns that he conquered was Bocchis, or Ballana (FHN 1998, 877–879). In Ptolemy's Geography of the second century AD, the name Abuncis corresponds with Ballana, but Qustul was not mentioned (FHN 1998, 927–930). In none of these cases is it stated that the towns are inhabited by the Blemmyes or Nobadae, but, as we shall see, this is perhaps due to changes in Lower Nubia subsequent to the writing of these documents. An outline of the details