Barry Kemp has usefully suggested that we should regard Egyptian-Nubian relationships as continually alternating, over some three thousand years, between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ periods, oscillating between easy intercourse in some eras, and at others – during the reign of Senwosret III, for instance – an obsessive concern among Egypt's rulers to control Nubian and desert communities (1989, 176–178). Yet evidence of Nubian presence in the Egyptian population is recurrent throughout Dynastic times. David O'Connor has described elite Nubian burials, from the Third or Fourth Dynasty onwards, that may be found throughout Egypt, from Aswan to Memphis (1993, 27). Perhaps because of such a varying, yet continuous social and political proximity between Egyptians and Nubians, Egyptian artists from an early stage developed a distinct ‘Nubian’ type that differed markedly from their representations of both standard Egyptians and people who to the modern eye appear as exaggeratedly ‘Negroid’. In this chapter, we consider who the different ‘Nubians’ that Egyptian Dynastic artists portrayed might have been, and why they were given distinctions that to us might seem startling and even racist.

In New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art there is a quartzite statue, ninety centimetres high, of a striding figure from Sixth Dynasty Upper Egypt (ca 2300 BCE), showing all the archetypal ‘Nubian’ features of subsequent Dynastic renderings of such individuals – round head, short neck, broad mouth, full lips and pronounced naso-facial ‘Kushite’ folds (Bonnet, 1997, catalogue 40). It is, in fact, the idiomatics of physiognomy that the Twenty-fifth Dynasty Kushite kings and their Napatan successors would carefully resurrect fifteen hundred years later to portray themselves – see, for instance, the life-size statue of Anlamani (623–593 BC) now in the Sudan National Museum (Anderson, 2004, figure 33).