ABSTRACT
O ne of the great civilizations of Africa was the Meroitic state, or empire, which had its capi-tal at Ancient Meroe, south of the Nile’s Fifth Cataract, from the 4th century B.C.E. to the 4th Century C.E. It was a polity contemporary with the Hellenistic empire of Alexander, and his Ptolemaic successors in Egypt, as well as the Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Axum in Abyssinia. (For overviews of the Napatan and Meroitic era, see Edwards 1996, 2004; Shinnie 1967; Török 1997; Welsby 1996.) e Meroitic civilisation of the Sudan was an expansive and long-lived empire that left its distinctive archaeological mark on the landscape of the Middle Nile. e Meroitic period (ca. 350 B.C.E.– 350 C.E.) shows general cultural and political continuity from the Napatan period, which began with Egyptian 25th-Dynasty rulers, who had come as conquerors from the south around 727 B.C.E.; then after roughly a millennium the Napatan-Meroitic tradition came to an end. Subsequent centuries provide evidence for three regional successor states-Noubadia, Makuria, and Alwa-at rst pagan but Christianized in the 6th and 7th centuries (Figure 14.1). e transformation of the Terminal Meroitic period, often termed a collapse, remains a subject of scholarly speculation and debate. is chapter contributes to this discussion, not by discussing the chronology
of the last Meroitic royal pyramids or temples, the role of military invasions from Axum (in modern Ethiopia), or the archaeology of the abandonment of Meroe city itself, but by considering the agricultural component of the Meroitic economy.
