The Old Nubian Villages Bab and Al-Guwani. Withnesses of[...]

The construction of the British dam (18981902) near Aswan in Upper Egypt and the later erected High Dam (19601971), resulted in floodings of large areas of the Nubian occupied territories on the banks of the Nile through the increased water table. Whereas rescue operations under the auspices of UNESCO concentrated on Pharaonic and Greco-Roman antiquities, little attention was paid to the cultural heritage of the displaced Nubian population. The presented project focused on Material Culture of abandoned Nubian Villages in Upper Egypt, whose construction and abandonment is closely connected to the building of the British dam south of Aswan and its following floodings around 1900. The traditional adobe structures are still in suprisingly good condition mostly preserved up to the roof contruction. A review of early maps and historical photographs revealed that these village structures could not have been built in this location before 1909, yet they were already abandoned in the 1930s, after the second increase in elevation of the British dam had resulted in new flooding. Due to the difficulty in reaching the abandoned villages, plundering or other transformation processes are in general ruled out, whereby these settlements present the extremely rare case of a very short period of usage combined with a systematic abandonment. It must be emphasized that the special nature of this project resided in the close cooperation with the descendants of the village inhabitants and other Nubians still living in the surroundings of the affected area; this was an essential point for the overall success of the project. The project goal was the implementation of a cultural-anthropological case study in these abandoned villages. The documentation of the preserved architecture with its inventory of finds was analysed with regard to the question as to what was left in a settlement which was systematically abandoned and why. A central issue was the matter of the extent to which the material assemblages of the abandoned site reflect the occupation conditions. Furthermore was to be questioned if the location of surface material allows any deduction regarding the living conditions of the inhabitants. After drawing conclusions through archaeological interpretation, these questions were cross-checked in the frame of the cultural- and social anthropological part of the project through interviews with local Nubian inhabitants in the immediate vicinity. By means of an interdisciplinary combination of methods in architecture, archaeology and cultur-anthropology, standard interpretations were scrutinised, adjusted and corrected, resulting in an exceptional documentation of Nubian culture.