Cyeneum: A Lost Country And The Roman Expedition To Find The Source Of The Nile River
Written by Bior Malual
Intro
Trade with Meore & Axum:
The district of Cyeneum is 1st mentioned as a place eastward of the city of the Axumites beyond the Nile that served as a place for trade, providing them (the Axumites) with a lot of Ivory during the 1st century ad.
Quote:
They used formerly to anchor at the very head
of the bay, by an island called Diodorus, close to the
shore, which could be reached on foot from the land; by
which means the barbarous natives attacked the island.
Opposite Mountain Island, on the mainland twenty stadia
from shore, lies Adulis, a fair-sized village, from which
there is a three-days' journey to Coloe, an inland town
and the first market for ivory. From that place to the
city of the people called Auxumites there is a five days'
journey more; to that place all the ivory is brought
from the country beyond the Nile through the district
called Cyeneum, and thence to Adulis. Practically the
whole number of elephants and rhinoceros that are
killed live in the places inland, although at rare inter-
vals they are hunted on the seacoast even near Adulis.
Perioplus of the Ethryen Sea
The alleged location of this district is generally associated with modern day Sennar, and generally placed in the Gezira, a region in Sudan sitting south of Khartoum in between the White and Blue Nile confluence. This area seems promising also because if multiple sites within this region showing trade with the Meroitic kingdom, and as well as evidence for cattle pastoralism and historical record for contact with the Meroitic, elite, specifically during a Roman Expedition to discover the source of the Nile.
Roman Expedition:
Many expeditions beyond the White and Blue Nile confluence have happened and bright the southern tribes of the Sudan into direct or fleeting contact with representatives with Mediterranean civilization. Besides evidence for trade in the Gezira during the earlier parts of the common era, we can tell that the people of the Gezira had close and friendly contact with the Elites of the kingdom of Meroe (see the Archeology section for more info). Which would prove useful in one expedition when Roman explores would be lead by these people as far South as the Sudd near the modern day city of Malakal in South Sudan.
Other than this, explorations done by a King of Alodia down the White or Blue Nile report that the King ran into a cattle rearing people, living in “cave like” dwellings. These people may have been western nilotes, and could also suggest that a few centuries later, the “Damadim” mentioned for attacking the Kingdom of Aldoia may have been living on the White Nile.
Objectives of these expeditions where as follows (Romans)
- Figure out how and why the Nile Floods
- Find the Source of the Nile
Greek Philosophers had already had theories on how the the Nile would flood since the 5th and 4th centuries bc.
However, none of them would be confirmed until maybe the time of Aristotle. A Latin translation if a text that he wrote on the matter tells us that Aristotle confirmed these earlier theories claiming that discoveries from an expedition made by men to back them up.
Quote:
Aristotle confirms earlier theories. The Nile flood, he points out, coincided
approximately with the season of the Etesian summer winds. These and earlier
summer winds carried clouds over Ethiopia, the name which the Greeks gave to
northeast Africa south of Egypt. When these clouds struck the mountains, rain fell
'into the swamps through which the Nile flows' (Burstein, 1976). This conclusion was
by no means based on theory alone. It had been confirmed, he claims, by observations
made by men on the ground.
Identifying the exact place that these exploers may have traveled to isn’t easy, however the 2 main theories are that they either reached the highlands of Ethiopia or the Sudd land Marshy swamps of the Southern Sudan.
Possible Peoples
People today with of interest and likely connection would obviously be the people living there today. Including the ethnic “Arabs” who inhabit much of the Gezira today (who are likely just arabized Alodian Nubians), and some northern-western Nilotic groups who are documented to have had historical interactions in the area, and possibly living as far north as Jebel Moya during the time of Cyeneum’s mention in the 1st century. What we do know is that much of the people would’ve been of a Sub saharan type.
Scholars seem to suggesting a multitude scenarios, connecting many of the neighboring peoples (including the Western Nilotic communities of Souther and Central Sudan, & the Nuba of Southern Kordafan) of the area to the people who once inhabited the Gezira since ancient times. However, there is no one set theory on who exactly these popes may have been , or who they were ancestral to.
Archeology
Archaeological sites of interest are Jebel Moya, which showed evidence cattle pastoralism, in addition to trade and contract with the Meroitic and Napatan Empires. In addition to this, it has also been suggested that there was a Merotic trading station near modern Sennar, which is where the District of Cyenuem was hypothesized to be. Meaning that the most likely location of Cyeneum was the Gezira.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4856204
Quote:
The southern Gezira, therefore, formed a dynamic zone of interaction on the Meroitic state's southern frontier, with settled and semi-settled agro-pastoralists, at least one Meroitic station at Sennar, and a large pastoral occupation at Jebel Moya. The peoples were likely an integral component of the Meroitic trade network both down the Nile and--if the interpretation of the Periplus identifying Sennar is correct--across the Butana and the Eastern Desert, including the southern Atbai and Aksum, to the Red Sea. The social configuration at this time included the emergence of an elite at Jebel Moya, detectable in the mortuary realm through the spatial neighbourhood in its northeast sector. Differences in social organisation between these communities and those in the Meroitic political heartland can be elucidated by briefly outlining the mortuary behaviour exhibited at non-elite cemeteries in the Shendi Reach
(Page 22)
Quote:
Archaeological studies suggest a Nilotic presence in central Sudan many centuries ago. During the Meroitic period (c. 300 B.c.E. to 300 A.D.) the plains between the White Nile and its tributaries were rich corn-growing regions; the most fertile was that between the Blue and White Niles, the Gezira. It was covered with a dense forest of mimosa thorn and plentiful in rain. In this region 270 kilometers south of present-day Khartoum (at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles) there is archaeological evidence at Jebel Moya (in the center of the Gezira) of the Nilotic trait of evulsion of the lower teeth practiced by 12.8 pereent of the males and 18.1 percent of the females. Evul-sion, or removal of the lower incisors and sometimes of the upper is a custom practiced in the ethnographic present overwhelmingly by all the Western Nilotic people (Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, etc.). Lipstuds, another Jebel Moya trait, are also worn by some Nilotic peoples today! More persuasive are a number of ar-chacological studies from the Southern Sudan strongly supporting the view that the Dinka culture was not indigenous to this region.
(Nilotes)
As the proto-Nilotes or their immediate ancestors are most likely to have
obtained their domesticates from the north, a case can be made for a homeland immediately south of the Eastern Sudanic block, perhaps on the White Nile lake that extended north of the Bahr el Ghazal confluence during the period in question (Wickens, 1975, p. 62, fig. 5). (Of possible relevance here is the characteristically Nilotic trait of evulsion of lower incisors practised by some of the population of Jebel Moya [Addison, 1949, pp. 53-5]. Jebel Moya is only 270 km south of Khartoum and within the orbit of Meroe, though occupation is known to go back at least into the late third millennium bc [Clark and Stemler, 1975]). Adaptation of economic strategies to allow pastoralist exploitation of the wetland savannah, especially east of the White Nile, is surely a critical but as yet archaeologically undocumented factor in the first phase of Nilotic expansion into an area previously inhabited, if at all, only by hunter-gatherers. The linguistic evidence does not appear inconsistent with the concept of a dialect chain within which from north to south the Western, Eastern and Southern branches were beginning to diversify. Such a reconstruction differs only in emphasis from that of Ehret and his colleagues, but it avoids the need to postulate a not easily explicable reflux movement of proto-Western Nilotes back to the north. Moreover the archaeological evidence seems to favour a late survival of hunter-gatherers in the drier savannah of the extreme southeastern Sudan
Nilotic and Surmic Migrations from Lower Wadi Howar (according to Wadi Howar Diaspora theory)
(Nuba)
The fact that the Negroes who came into Nubia were in the majority of cases,
perhaps always before Ptolemaic times, of the short relatively broad-headed type'
may have some bearing on the Barabra problem. At the present day the nearest
representatives of the short mesaticephalic Negro is to be found in the south of the
Bahr el-Ghazal Province, in the neighbourhood of the affluents of the head waters
of the Bahr el-Ghazal and the Congo, perhaps extending ilorthwards to the head
waters of the Shari affluents. Thus between these Negroes and Nubia there
intervene the Dinka and allied tribes in the swamps of the Bahr el-Ghazal and
White Nile, and the Nuba and Arab tribes of the steppes and jibal of Kordofan
and the southern portion of the Libyan desert. This cannot have been the case in
the third millenniunl B.C. when all, or almost all, the Negroes who canme into Nubia
were short and relatively broad headed. In other words, at the time when Nubia
was exerting pressure on Egypt, the tall Nilotes, the most northern Negroes of the
Nile Valley at the present time, had not occupied the area in which they are found
to-day. We may indeed infer that the coming of the tall Nilotes to their present
territory occurred during or later than the second millennium B.C., indeed, I believe
that cultural evidence could be adduced to show that they were not in Nubia before
this time. I would even suggest that it was the pressure exerted by the tall Negroes
of the south that led to the centuries of fighting on the southern border of Egypt.
But even if this view be regarded as fanciful there can be no doubt that in
Ptolemaic times there were tall, relatively long-headed Negroes on the hills in the
[10:31 AM]
neighbourhood of the Blue Nile some 150 miles south of Khartum. Mr. H. S.
Wellcome, digging at Jebel Moya, has discovered one or more large cemeteries of
these people whose physical characters have been described by Dr. Derry in a paper
read before the Anthropological Institute.' Although several hundred graves were
opened only a few bodies were in sufficiently good condition to allow an adequate
osteological examination to be made. These, however, enabled Dr. Derry to
determine that he was dealing with the remains of a tall, coarsely-built Negrro race
with extraordinarily massive sktills and jaws. Dr. Derry considered that in general
appearance these folk resembled the coarser type of Nuba of South Kordofan, and
compared them with the men (Nos. 8 and 9) shown in Plate XXXV of my paper
on the Nuba2 who, like the Jebel Moya skeletons, appear to have particularly large
faces in relation to the size of the skull. I agree with Dr. Derry in these
conclusions the more readily as I had on quite other grounds concluded that the
population of the hills between the White and Blie Niles at one time closely
resembled the present-day Nuba of Southern Kordofan. Moreover, there is no
special reason to suppose that the black tribes who occupied the Nile Valley in
the neighbourhood of the confluence of the White and Blue Niles in the eighteenth
dynasty were closely akin to the Shilluk and Dinka of the present day. The fact
shown in numerous contemporary paintings that they were bowmen seems to
differentiatehem from the Nilotes, while their use of throwing-sticks such as are
still found among the Negroes living in the hills in the difficult hilly country north
of the Sobat, rather suggests that the Negroes, whom Senusert III. forbade to pass
his frontier and who were conquered by his successors, were akin to these' and to
the Nuba of Kordofan.
Artifacts:
Succeeding Periods (Alodia)
In succeeding periods we would see the rise of the Christian Medieval Nubian kingdoms, and in particular to the area of interest, the Kingdom of Alodia, which was 1st mentioned only a few centuries later (6th century ad). And after this period we also had the Fazuhgli, Funj, and Shilluk kingdoms in the late Middle Ages and early modern periods. These peoples and peoples related to them are again likely the descendants of them ancient inhabtitants of the area from these times, and may give some help and conext as to who and how statehood developed in the area.
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