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royal tombs at Qustul and Ballana, a find that fundamentally altered our understanding of the archaeological landscape of Lower Nubia (Emery and Kirwan 1938a, 1–3).
Seventy years after the first publication of the finds from the royal tombs at Qustul and Ballana, what value is there in returning to the material from those cemeteries? Other excavations have been completed (Farid 1963; Williams 1991c), the sites now lie under the waters of Lake Nasser, and the material has found a new home and a new audience at the Nubian Museum in Aswan. The broad chronological scheme for the cemeteries is generally accepted (Török 1987a), the pottery has been analysed and seriated (Török 1987a; Rose 1992), and the importance of the cemeteries as a vital reference point in the archaeological framework of Lower Nubia in the post-Meroitic period remains unchallenged.
There is, however, yet more to be said about the sites and their remains, which begins with a debate that has framed the discipline of Nubiology from the start. When Emery and Kirwan found the remains at Qustul and Ballana, they rightly surmised that they belonged to the historical period following the fall of Meroë, but prior to the official adoption of Christianity in Nubia in the mid-sixth century AD. As a consequence of both this chronological hook and the nature of the archaeological remains that they uncovered, Emery and Kirwan suggested that the remains at the site must have been created by either the Blemmyes or Nobadae “race”, ultimately preferring the interpretation that it was the Blemmyes who had created the cemeteries (Emery and Kirwan 1938a, 18). This question of the identity of the people buried at Qustul and Ballana is a foundational aspect of my research as well. It is our approaches, and the theoretical frameworks from which we proceed, that differ.
It is certainly necessary to engage the classical sources upon which the Blemmyan/Nobadae designation is based—not to do so would be to ignore an important evidential source (see my discussion in chapter 1). I do not, however, consider that evidence to be as fundamental and valuable to an understanding of X-Group identity as the material culture that those individuals at the cemeteries chose, produced, used, and deposited.