A History Of The Nubian People

What up African world, it's Home Team here and welcome back to another video of African history, culture, and worldview, and welcome back to my series, A Closer Look. Today, we'll be taking a closer look at the Nubian people. By supporting this channel on Patreon, you're helping in the creation of these videos and supporting this content. If you'd like access to full courses and sources, or you simply want to show your support, you may do so by clicking the Patreon link in the description box below. To begin, the term Nubia itself doesn't really have a legitimate historical basis, but it's often used to refer to the various groups of people who live just south of an agreed upon Egyptian border. The idea of a specific Nubian people that we identify today are a people whose identity has been created strictly based on the diversity of Sudanese history. In other words, their collection of the various people groups that began to form an identity mostly after the Arab invasion of the region. The Nubian ethnic group today consists of a people who carry ancient Sudanese ancestry and ancestry from intermarriage with foreigners, largely Arab, so let's keep that in mind. The Nubian people identify their ancestral homeland as a stretch of land along the Nile River that covers hundreds of miles south from the first cataract near Aswan in Egypt to around the fourth cataract in northern Sudan. The Nubian languages are classified as an Eastern Sudanic language, a branch of the Nilo-Saharan group. Nubian-speaking peoples may have started to migrate from the Kordofan and Darfur regions of western Sudan to the Nile Valley about 2,000 years ago, settling in the Kushite Empire. According to a scholar at the University of Cologne, two Nubian languages survive today, Nubin, previously known as Mahas, spoken in southernmost Egypt and northern Sudan, and Kenzi, Dongolawi. Kenzi is spoken north of Mahas in Egypt, while Dongolawi is spoken in the south around Dongolo. Kenzi and Dongolawi are considered dialects of the same language. There are an estimated 605 Nubin speakers and around 1 million Kenzi-Dongolawi speakers. There can be no doubting the antiquity of Nubian people, as they have ancestry deriving from the most ancient Nubian cultures and people in the first African civilization of Tasseri. After the fall of the various Nubian kingdoms and empires in the region, many of the Nubian people in that region first converted to Christianity via their interactions with Christianized Egyptians in the north. Less than a century later, Nubians were resisting Arab dominance in the region and later intermarried with them. Intermarriage with Arabs led to the gradual conversion of the Nubian matrilineal kinship system to the Arab-Muslim patrilineal system. Shifting control of Nubian properties and princedoms to Muslims and the adoption of Islamic religious practices by not only the ruling elite, but by the wider population as well. Nubian villages were built as close to the Nile as possible. Their economy is based on substance farming, animal husbandry, and date production. For centuries, the scarcity of cultivable land, especially in lower Nubia, encouraged the migration of male Nubians in search of work, leaving most of the agricultural work to women, children, and old men. Waterwheels, an invention introduced during Roman times, were used in some areas for irrigation up until the 1960s. Nubian kinship is based around tribe systems. The people favor cross-cousin marriage, in which marriage occurs between the children of two siblings of the opposite sex. Nubians today are Sunni Muslim and adhere to the Maliki school. After Great Britain assumed control of Egypt and Sudan between 1880 and 1900, the Nubians were generally left in peace and for the first time, free of invading armies. But as the Nile waters began to rise after the completion of the first Aswan Dam in 1902, the fate of Nubian people and much of their history was sealed. Despite the destruction wrought by the creation of the Aswan Dam, much of Nubian survived. In particular, Nubian music and dance have become internationally popular. Traditionally, Nubian music integrates percussion instruments such as the bongo and hand clapping. Today, it also incorporates salsa and samba rhythms. Interestingly enough, Nubian musicians have brought on inspiration from Jamaican reggae artists, more specifically Bob Marley. The first dam and its subsequent elevation in 1912 and 1933 crippled Lower Nubia's agricultural system and had a profound social and cultural impact. While Nubian men had always left their villages in search of work either as mercenaries or laborers, the increasing loss of Nubia's very limited agricultural land accelerated the labor migration. By the 1960s, 60% of Egyptian Nubia had been destroyed or rendered unfit for habitation, and 70,000 Egyptian Nubian men and women were living outside of Nubia. Those who had remained in the villages were overwhelmingly women, children, and the elderly. The collective Nubian identity has been celebrated in poetry, novels, music, and storytelling. They use their own writing form and many still practice scarification, even though that tradition is beginning to die down amongst the youth. Well I'm all out guys, if you like these videos and want to help in its continued production, please consider supporting the home team on patreon.com, the link is in the description box below. Know thyself, remember your ancestors, peace.