The Kingdom of Kush: An African Centre on the Periphery of the Bronze Age World System

Abstract

The Kingdom of Kush flourished in northern Sudan between 2000 and 1500 BCE. During this period, the capital Kerma emerged as a major economic and political centre in the Nile Valley. After a short review of the application of world system theory and centre-periphery perspectives in archaeology, the author proceeds to a presentation of the Bronze Age societies in northern Sudan and their wide-reaching trade relations. A central argument is that an incentive for the rise of the Kingdom of Kush was its intermediate position in long-distance trade between the north and the south. The article concludes with a discussion of Kush as a centre on the periphery of the so-called Bronze Age World System in Afro-Eurasia.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The first draft of this article was submitted to and presented at the PhD symposium ‘Material Culture, Identity, and Globalization’ in Aarhus in October 2007, and I received stimulating responses from professors Kristian Kristiansen, Helle Vandkilde and Richard Hingley, as well as the other participants. My supervisors, professors Randi Haaland and Tim Insoll, always suggest interesting literature and inspire me to see more than the local context. The National Corporation for Museums and Antiquities in Sudan gave me permissions to visit sites and study the materials in the National Museum. The final version of the article was written during two research trips to Sudan in November 2007 and January–May 2008, financed by the Meltzer Fund at the University of Bergen and the Nordic Africa Institute. I wish to thank the pilot Bjarne Giske for the opportunities to see northern Sudan from a bird's perspective and Nadia el-Maaroufi from Safari Sudan for the excursions. Finally, I am grateful to Alexandros Tsakos for motivation, stimulating discussions, language corrections, distractions and the life-changing journey to Kerma and Tombos.

Notes

¹ bce and ce are abbreviations for ‘before the common era’ and ‘common era’ respectively. The Common Era refers to the most used calendar and year-numbering system world-wide, namely the Gregorian calendar, but without the religious connotations of bc and ad.