3500 to 3200 BCE · Africanspan
Bruce Williams reports Nubian victories over Egypt and is disbelieved
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Bruce Williams began publishing on the Qustul polity about forty years ago. Among the material recovered from the site were pictorial documents showing forces from Qustul making successful incursions into Upper Egypt. The images came out of royal Nubian tombs and they are not ambiguous. His conclusions met resistance in the field, and the resistance rested on a long-standing assumption that ancient Egypt was somehow in Africa without being of it. Under that assumption a Nubian kingdom projecting military power northward into Egypt was intolerable whatever the artefacts showed. More recent work has gone the other way. The Qustul state now appears to have been more influential than Williams first proposed. He was right, and the decades of refusal belong in the record alongside the finding, because they show a discipline deciding in advance which conclusions its own evidence would be permitted to reach.
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