ABSTRACT
The Nile Valley south of ancient Egypt’s traditional southern border at Aswan isknown as Nubia.1 The Greeks and Romans called it Aithiopia (‘Land of Burnt Faces’), and throughout much of their history the ancient Egyptians called it variously Ta-Seti (‘the Bow Land’) or Kush. In recent decades, as archaeologists have more intensively explored this ‘Middle Nile’ region and its borderlands, they have enlarged the definition of Nubia to include all of modern Egypt south of the First Cataract and all of the modern Sudan north of the equatorial provinces, including the adjacent Sahara and eastern deserts to the Red Sea.
