3500–3200 BCE: (Bruce Williams and the Qustul Polity — Williams First Turning a Spotlight on This Polity Four Decades Ago, Pictorial Documents at Qustul Depi…

3500–3200 BCE: (Bruce Williams and the Qustul Polity — Williams First Turning a Spotlight on This Polity Four Decades Ago, Pictorial Documents at Qustul Depicting Victorious Incursions by Qustul Forces into Upper Egypt, His Findings Facing Opposition Because of Long-Held Assumptions That Ancient Egypt Was Somehow in but Not of Africa, More Recent Work Revealing the Qustul State Was Even More Influential Than Williams First Proposed): Bruce Williams first began to turn a spotlight on the Qustul polity in his work four decades ago. Included among the materials found at Qustul were pictorial documents depicting victorious incursions by Qustul forces into Upper Egypt. Williams’s findings faced opposition at the time because of long-held assumptions of ancient Egypt as being somehow in but not of Africa. But as more recent work has revealed, the Qustul state, if anything, was even more influential than Williams first proposed. The opposition Williams faced is itself a historical artifact — a record of the discipline’s refusal to accept what its own evidence was showing. Here was a Nubian kingdom, centered in Lower Nubia, that had produced pictorial documents showing its military victories over Upper Egyptian communities. The evidence was not ambiguous. It was not a matter of interpretation. It was a depiction, on an artifact found in a royal Nubian tomb, of Nubian power being projected northward into Egypt. And the discipline’s first response was resistance — not because the evidence was weak, but because the conclusion was intolerable. A Nubian kingdom exercising hegemony over Upper Egypt violated every assumption that two centuries of Western scholarship had built about the relationship between Egypt and its African neighbors. Williams was vindicated, and the Qustul state is now recognized as even more significant than he initially proposed. But the decades of resistance should not be forgotten. They are part of the story — part of the infrastructure of denial that Ehret has been dismantling throughout this book.