The Middle East, July-August 1994 n236 p35(3)
A lost ancient land. (Nubia) (Mosaic) Helen Miles.
Abstract: The decision of former Egyptian Pres. Gamal Abdul Nasser to construct the massive Aswan
High Dam in Egypt in 1964 has led to the flooding of the tiny country of Nubia. The displaced Nubians,
who at that time numbered around 120,000, were placed in settlement areas in Egypt and Sudan. Despite
the physical loss of their heritage, Nubian customs and traditions have been preserved, thanks to the
efforts exerted by its people to teach their young about Nubian culture.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT IC Publications Ltd. (UK) 1994
The decision by former Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser, to construct the High Dam at Aswan
meant the end of the country known as Nubia. Before the land was flooded international efforts were
made to relocate a number of pharaonic monuments. With much less fanfare the people who occupied the
region, the Nubians, suffered a similar fate. They were forced to leave their homes and relocate
elsewhere. Helen Miles reports on the latest initiatives to allow them to return to the shores of the lake,
which now covers their original homes and villages.
The ancient land of Nubia is gone. The mudbrick walls of the villages once dotted along the banks of the
Nile from Aswan in Egypt to Dongola in Sudan have disintergrated into the silty bed of Lake Nasser. The
fields, the date palm groves, the water wheels, the ancestral graveyards, even the dogs which stood
barking on the shore as the last boats pulled away, have left no traces.
All gone, as surely as if it never existed. In its place is the world's largest artificial lake stretching for
nearly 500km and covering 6,000sq km.
In the 1950s, Egypt's then president, Gamal Abdul Nasser pledged to build a new dam near Aswan to
increase the area of arable land in Egypt. His aim was to help feed the country's burgeoning population, as
well as supplying all the electricity Egypt needed.
The High Dam, which harnessed the waters of the mighty River Nile, was one of the greatest
technological feats of all time and brought incalculable benefits to the Egyptian people. But it also
sounded the death knell for the kingdom of Nubia, which had been inhabited for thousands of years, yet
had largely escaped the attention of invaders and casual visitors because of its paucity of natural resources
and isolated position.
When plans were being mooted for the building of the High Dam, Nubia was just a sleepy backwater, a
collection of Nile side villages, with no electricity or roads to link it to the rest of Egypt. Nubians spoke a
different language and practised different customs and traditions from their Egyptian and Sudanese
neighbours. However, when it became apparent that Nasser's promise to build a dam would become a
reality, the area was suddenly thrust into the international spotlight. Most of the world's attention focused
on UNESCO's effort to save the Pharaonic monuments of Nubia.
Nubian culture, however, was equally at risk from the flood waters perhaps more so because it could not
be plucked from the rising waters and plopped down somewhere safely out of harm's way, unlike the
rocks of Abu Simbel temple. For this reason social researchers rushed to document the villagers' every
move.
In some places there was no living memory of an outsider's visit before the research team's arrival. "When
the Nubians talk about a lost paradise they are not exaggerating," said Nawal El Missiri Nadim, who took
part in a massive ethnological project undertaken by the American University in Cairo at the time of the
villagers' exodus.
"It was an extremely beautiful place, with the Nile and the trees and the houses. They were a very neat
and clean people. They may have been poor but everything was perfect. You wouldn't see a bed with an
ordinary sheet, it would have to have an exquisite embroidered border."
In June 1964, this traditional way of life ceased to exist as the last Nubians packed their bags and headed
for new purpose built settlements in Egypt and Sudan. In all about 120,000 Nubians were displaced,
including nearly 50,000 Egyptian Nubians who were given alternative houses at Kom Ombo, near Aswan.
These people, who had been famous for their spacious and handsomely decorated houses where extended
families lived communally, were moved into government issue housing laid out in grids. In exchange for
the Nile-fed land which they had farmed for millenia, the Nubians were given 25,000 feddans of newlyreclaimed desert. The river which had been central to every ceremony in village life from birth to death,
was substituted with a canal.
"No matter what the government did it was impossible to make it easy," said Nadim. "I remember one old
lady when we arrived in the new settlements standing in front of the house that she had been given and
crying. She did not know how to open it because there was a door knob and she had never seen a door
knob before."
Forty-eight-year-old Amr Ya'quoub was a 19-year-old student at the time of the exodus. "It was very
difficult," he recalled. "We had to leave our dead, our memories and everything we had ever known -- the
trees, the Nile, the houses, and the places where we used to play.
"When we arrived at the new village we missed everything, even the smell of our old land. There was no
cultivated land, no shops, no transportation, no vegetables, we had to get everything from outside."
Thirty years later the settlements are still bleak, cheerless places; rows of single storey buildings with
nothing to protect them from the withering sun but a net of electric cables. Many of the houses are already
riddled with cracks and bricked up. "Their owners have gone to Cairo," say the villagers, clearly not
expecting their return.
Those villagers that remain make the best of what they have got but none is satisfied with their lot. The
young people say they can't find jobs locally and the old reminisce constantly about the good old days.
Traditional Nubian customs have also been eroded by the exigencies of life in the settlements.
"Things are changing now. The new generation which has grown up since the dam are forgetting their
language and starting to speak Arabic. Their houses are different and they wear Western clothes," said
Abdallah Hassan Mohamed, head of the new settlement of Tumas Afya.
"We are also experiencing crime and social problems, maybe similar to other communities but nothing we
ever had before, like murders and stealing. In the past everyone knew each other and there were no
strangers among us."
The shortcomings of life in the new settlements is inspiring many villagers to return to their traditional
land, capitalising on a $25.3 million project funded by the Egyptian government and the World Food
Programme which has been set up to lure settlers to the shores of Lake Nasser.
The aim of the project is to increase Egypt's agricultural land by reclaiming the desert area adjoining the
lake. Nubians, and anyone else prepared to accept the isolation and sizzling heat, are being given grants to
establish farms on the lake's shores.
Beneficiaries of the scheme are quick to point out that their move back was governed more by cultural,
than economic factors. "Here we preserve our customs and traditions, like wedding ceremonies, and our
solidarity," said Ga'far Ya'qoub, who has a lake side farm. But although the project offers Nubians a
chance to be as near as they can ever be to their drowned land, the project cannot replace Old Nubia. Even
in the winter months, when the climate is at its best, this shiny new Nubia does not bear any resemblance
to the lost land. There is just desert and sand and tarmac roads shimmering in the heat.
Clumps of marigolds and rows of youthful eucalyptus trees have been planted at strategic intervals,
especially along the routes of tourist buses, but they only succeed in mocking the memory of the pre-High
Dam, lush Nile side landscapes.
That's not to say that life before the dam was perfect. Far from it. Long before its submersion the area
could not support its inhabitants, forcing generations of young men to leave the villages and find work in
the cities. As early as the mid-1800s Edward Lane writes in the book Manners and Customs of the
Modern Egyptians that Nubians were commonly employed as doormen in Cairo.
By the time the area was flooded, an estimated 71,000 Nubians were living outside the area. Abdel Razik
Mohamed from Elephantine Island in Aswan left his home when he was 13. He did not return until 43
years later. Now aged 70, he first worked as a cook on the railways before securing a government job in
Cairo. "When I left home I spoke very little Arabic," he said. "My father was a farmer and I had to leave
in order for the family to survive. There was very little money here. I worked in the government and
earned E!pounds^4.50 a month and sent E!pounds^2 a month back to my family."
Urban Nubians formed a home away from home during their extended exile, sticking together and
reinforcing their Nubian identity by establishing social clubs and living in the same districts. At first the
Nubians, fabled for their honesty and reliability, took jobs in the service industry as cooks and servants,
door-keepers and guards. Nowadays, however, they increasingly hold down white collar jobs and many
have risen to positions of importance in the community.
After the High Dam was built many Nubians found themselves stranded in the cities with no home to
return to. These people have been among the most active in preserving Nubian traditions.
In Cairo a Society for the Revival of Nubian Traditions has been formed to drive home the tenets of
Nubianness and to encourage young people to learn the language. Meanwhile, Nubian social clubs
continue to provide a focus for community life, offering many activities ranging from seminars about
Nubian life and customs, to financial help for the poor.
"It isn't that we don't love Cairo, we do," said Fathyha Mohamed Soliman, president of the women's
branch of the General Nubian Club in Cairo. "Cairo is our home, often the place where we were born and
the place where we work, but Nubia is inside each one of us."
The fact that Nubians stick together in the cities is almost totally a natural collorary of being a minority
group. Prejudice is not the issue, said all the Nubians interviewed by The Middle East. "There has never
been any prejudice towards us with getting jobs or anything else," said 29-year-old Magda Omar, who
works in a bank. "In fact some employers prefer to hire Nubians because of our reputation for honesty."
Despite the fact that most Nubians in the cities have spent more time outside their homeland than in it,
their feeling of Nubian identity remains strong. Hatem Mahfouz Gasser, a 22-year-old accountant,
summed up popular opinion when he explained: "I love Nubia. I never lived in Old Nubia but I hear
stories from my grandmother about what a beautiful place it was. I visit the new settlements every year,
but I completely refuse to go and live there because the reality of New Nubia doesn't fit the stories."
One cannot help but wonder, however, whether Old Nubia ever could or would have existed without the
High Dam. At some point a road would have been necessary and electricity, telephones and television
would inevitably have arrived.
It is not hard to imagine an alternative scenario, with a trip to a "traditional Nubian village" being offered
on the tourist itinerary to spice up a comfort stop during the weary drive to Abu Simbel. The experience
of the islanders of Elephantine in Aswan is a salutary reminder of what Old Nubia might have become.
Although Nubia officially starts at the first cataract as Aswan, five villages north of the dam are counted
as Nubian because their inhabitants speak the language and share many of the customs.
The island Nubians, doubtless encouraged by the guidebooks' blurb, have cottoned on to the fact that their
way of life is a saleable commodity in the competitive world of modern tourism.
"See," said my island guide, "the natural way we live. See the domed houses and the way we cook the
bread. Look at the storage jars, where we used to keep the grain and look, isn't it charming the way the
hens, the goats and the dogs live together in harmony in this pen just like the Nubians have always lived
on the island." Elephantine Island has become a sort of unofficial theme park, albeit with washing
machines next to the water jars and TV aerials marring the aesthetic outlines of the domed rooves. Its
quainteness seems to have as much to do with what the tourists want as with the islanders' wishes.
Islander Ahmed Mohamed Ahmed is a 26-year-old tour guide. Not long ago he wanted to pull down his
traditional family home with its cobbled courtyard and small whitewashed rooms with thick walls and
tiny, high windows and build something a little more up to date but an Australian friend convinced him of
the advantages of the old architecture. Nonetheless Ahmed believes it's time for old attitudes to change: "I
think we should be forgetting the past and getting on with the future."
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