Biblical Archaeology of Nubia-The Land of Cush – a South Africa interest event taking place on 2016-09-18 13:00:00 in United States
In 2014, I visited modern Sudan, ancient Nudia or the Biblical Land of Cush. Modern Sudan is the land of the Black Pharaohs of Nubia (biblical Cush), which ruled as the 25th Dynasty of Egypt between 750-664 BC. This was contemporaneous to the time of the first writing prophets of Israel, who were also ruled by the five Black Pharaohs starting with King Piye until Taharqa was defeated by Assyria's Ashurbanipal, whose statue stands at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2003, after 40 years of excavating at the old Nubian capital of Kerma, Charles Bonnet of Switzerland discovered seven large stone statues of Nubian pharaohs. In January, I visited the Nubian kingdoms of Meroe, Kerma and other medieval Byzantine Christian kingdoms in the deserts of the Sudan. Three standouts surprised I did not know about until I landed in the Nubian desert of the Sudan 1. The fantastic remains of the Byzantine churches, the existence of the three Christian kingdoms of Nobatia, Merkuria and Alwa which lasted for 1000 years, the monasteries and the Coptic Church at Dongola. Both monophysite and dyophysite churches were represented, sent by competing missions by the dynamic duo husband and wife non-team of Emperor Justinian and the awesome Empress Theodora. Elizabeth Isichei's history of Christianity in Africa offers exactly one sentence of their existence and Adrian Hasting's World History of Christianity offers one page in his 600-page tome. Diarmard McCulloch's 1200 page History of Christianity offers exactly zero page on this subject. The Polish archaeologiats have been digging since the 1950s. How it is possible for major Church historians to miss out on the long unbroken history of Christian witness in one of the greatest and most widely attested empire on earth – EGYPT! 2. Meeting the excavator at Jebel Barkal and discovering the identity of Thutmoses III as its primary builder. How was he related to the biblical Moses, who shares his Egyptian name? Could he have been the stepbrother of Moses at Court or even the unnamed pharaoh in Exodus? The jury is still out and much of the area remains unexcavated. 3. Discovering the prehistoric rock art at Soba, some going back to around 40,000 years old. That's contemporaneous to the Ice-Age Cave art of Spain and France that I visited last May. Who are these humans in the light of salvation, God and religious cognitive apprehension? They clearly compose of the same quarks. atoms, elements and human cells as we do – what makes them different from us in terms of cognitive belief? Talk about Deep Time in human history. Yet, even these 40,000 year old human activity pales by comparison to the 100,000 old art of South African Homo sapiens, or the 3.18 million-year old fossil of Lucy in Ethiopia, or the 7 million-year old fossil of Chad in central Africa. The three Christian civilizations of medieval Nubia (modern Sudan) were the kingdoms of Nobatia, Merkuria and Alwa. Nobatia was situated in the area between the Nile’s 1st and 2nd cataracts, with its capital at Faras or Pachoras. Makuria stretched from the 3rd cataract to the Butana. Its capital was Old Dongola. It was amalgamated with Nobatia in the seventh century. Alwa was centred on its capital of Soba far to the south. Alwa is its Arabic name. The Greeks called it alodia. The remains of small churches and burials suggest that there may have been a settled Christian presence in Nobatia in the early 6th century before the conversion of the pagan temple of Dendur into a church by the king Eirpanome in 550 AD. The Nobatian church was monophysite, like the modern Egyptian Coptic Church, which believes that Christ only had a single, divine nature. The Makurian church, however, was dyophysite. Like the modern Greek and Russian Orthodox, Roman Catholic and European Protestant churches, it believed that Christ had two natures. He was both human and divine. Little is known about Alwa, but the Armenian traveller Abu Salih described it as possessing 400 churches. One of the very earliest churches in Nubia was in Qasr Ibrim, which was created by the local Christian community in the 5th century through the conversion of the Meroetic temple of King Taharqa, dating from the 7th century B.C.
at South Presbyterian Church 4 E Henrietta Rd Rochester United States – Add your South African Event here.
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