Engraved in Stone: The Role of Offering Tables in Meroitic Funerary Religion

Although Greco-Roman Egypt has received more scholarly attention, the contemporaneous Meroitic civilization of Nubia deserves recognition as an important culture in the history of North Africa and the greater Eastern Mediterranean world. This project focuses on the Meroitic civilization of Sudan (ca. 400 B.C.E. to ca. 400 C.E.) in order to examine evolving cultural interaction on the fringes of several distinct world powers (namely Egypt, the Hellenistic World and finally, Rome). The current imperfect understanding of the Meroitic language required focus on art historical analysis of archaeological remains in order to elucidate the funerary traditions of the Meroitic civilization. Previous discussions of Meroitic funerary religion have attempted to address the nature of Meroitic cultural and religious integration. However, the small data sets, geographic specificity, and narrow scope of the various attempts has meant that the entirety of Meroitic funerary religion as currently understood, is in essence based on limited and biased archaeological evidence which led to skewed and incomplete analysis. This study compiled the largest database of Meroitic offering tables to date from both published photographs and first-hand analysis through work at numerous museums including the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven; the British Museum, London; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Neues Agyptisches Museum, Berlin; The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; the Egyptian Museum, Cairo and the Nubia Museum, Aswan.;The resulting discussion first breaks down the offering tables iconographically, then places them in their geographic locations in order to determine the prevalence, distribution and possible origin of novel iconographic concepts. Based on the geographic-iconographic split found through analysis of the Meroitic offering tables, the northern portion of the Meroitic kingdom was a frontier-based periphery of the southern centralized Meroitic state. Due to the high level of contact and interaction with Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, the northern portion of the kingdom developed syncretistic, integrative strategies for negotiating the 'middle ground' between the Meroitic culture and its Graeco-Roman Egyptian neighbors. The appearance of new forms and combinations of iconography and cultural expression within such a paradigm are a natural outgrowth of those same acculturative strategies. In contrast, the result of Graeco-Roman Egyptian and Meroitic interaction in the southern 'core' of the Meroitic state was a program which utilized ancient Egyptian ritual iconographic language to articulate local cultural idioms. By continuing the use of Egyptian iconographic language with individualized culturally-specific adaptations to represent indigenous cultural tropes alongside the integration of Graeco-Roman Egyptian ritual sequences, the Meroitic 'core' further identified itself as unique from Graeco-Roman Egypt while clearly demonstrating knowledge of, and interaction with, its northern neighbors.