Nubia is older than the border it sits on.
Nubia is the stretch of the Nile valley running south from Aswan into what is now northern Sudan. It has been home to its own kingdoms, its own writing systems and its own languages for more than four thousand years, and for about seventy of those years it ruled Egypt. Nubians still live in Aswan and still speak Nubian languages. Much of the land those communities came from is under Lake Nasser.
Two things follow from that, and they shape every page in this section. Ancient Nubia and living Nubian culture are related but they are not the same subject. And a community is not an attraction.
Kingdoms, not a province.
Egyptian sources call the land immediately south of Aswan Wawat and the land beyond it Kush, and they describe a relationship that swings between trade, tribute, occupation and outright conquest — in both directions.
A powerful state centred on a city in the Dongola Reach, strong enough at its height to threaten Egypt from the south.
New Kingdom Egypt holds Nubia and builds the temples that later had to be rescued — Abu Simbel among them.
Kushite kings from Napata rule Egypt for the better part of a century. Taharqa is the best known of them. This is the part most itineraries never mention.
A kingdom with its own script. Meroitic can be read aloud and still cannot be fully understood — one of the few ancient writing systems in that position.
Nobadia, Makuria and Alodia, writing Old Nubian in a Greek-derived alphabet. Nubia was Christian for something like eight hundred years.
People, in the present tense.
There are Nubian neighbourhoods in Aswan city, Nubian villages on Elephantine, Nubian towns north of here around Kom Ombo, and a large Nubian population in Cairo and Alexandria. Nubian Egyptians are Egyptian citizens with a distinct language, history and identity — the way Amazigh communities are in the Maghreb, or Welsh speakers are in Britain.
Nobiin and Kenzi are living languages. They are taught mostly at home, they are not written in most households, and both are considered at risk. You will hear them in the street here.
Also called Fadicca or Fadija. Spoken in the southern part of Egyptian Nubia and across the Sudanese border. A descendant of Old Nubian.
Also Kunuz or Matoki. Spoken nearer Aswan, and closely related to Dongolawi further south. Not mutually intelligible with Nobiin.
Words this site does not use about living people: tribe, primitive, exotic, untouched, frozen in time, authentic. They are not neutral descriptions that happen to be old-fashioned. They are the vocabulary of describing people as scenery, and this site is not going to.
Modern Nubian AswanWhat the water covered. What was saved.
Before the lake
A narrower river between villages, fields and palm groves. The valley was home to communities, not simply a backdrop to temples.
The rescue campaign
Temples were moved to higher ground or new sites. Qasr Ibrim stayed in place: the water turned its hilltop into an island.
The landscape today
Open water and widely separated archaeological sites. The rescued temples tell a different story from the villages that remain beneath the water.
Follow the monuments
- Abu Simbel
- Raised roughly 65 m and moved about 200 m back.
- Qasr Ibrim
- Not moved; the hilltop became an island.
- Amada
- Moved to nearby higher ground.
- Wadi es-Sebua
- Dakka and Maharraqa were relocated to this area too.
- Kalabsha
- Moved north, beside the High Dam: New Kalabsha.
- Four temples abroad
- Debod → Madrid · Dendur → New York · Taffeh → Leiden · Ellesiya → Turin.
This happened within living memory.
This happened within living memory. There are people in Aswan today who were born in villages that are now under two hundred kilometres of water, and families for whom "where are you from?" is answered with the name of a place that no longer exists.
Published figures for how many people were displaced differ by tens of thousands depending on what is being counted and when. We give the order of magnitude and say that it is contested, rather than picking the tidiest number.
Whether the compensation and the resettlement were adequate is still argued about, publicly and in Egyptian politics. We report that it is argued about; we do not settle it.
The valley floor, the villages, the palm groves and the cemeteries were not moved. The monuments were, and the people were. That distinction is the whole reason this page exists alongside the salvage-campaign page.
Published figures for how many people were displaced differ by tens of thousands depending on what is being counted and when. The order commonly given is around fifty thousand in Egypt and a similar number in Sudan. We give the order of magnitude and say that it is contested, rather than picking the tidiest number.
The dams and the displacement- 1898–1902 · raised twice
- 1960–1970
- 1960–1980
- 20+ · 4 sent abroad
- ~500 km · into Sudan
- c. 100,000 — contested
Opened in 1997 and developed with UNESCO, largely to hold and explain what came out of the valley before it flooded. It is the single best hour in Aswan, and almost nothing else on this page makes full sense without it.
The one major site in Lower Nubia that was never moved. The water rose around its hill and it survives as an island — reachable only by permitted expedition, not by visitors.
The painted house.
Almost every Nubian house you will see around Aswan was built after 1964. The villages they replaced are under the lake. That does not make the decoration on them any less Nubian — the painting is older than the walls carrying it — but it does mean you are looking at a living practice that moved, adapted, and in the places visitors reach has grown considerably louder.
This is the one section of Aswan101 where colour is the subject rather than a signal. Everywhere else the site is deep Nile on off-white. Here it is not, because the walls are not, and drawing them in grey would be a different kind of dishonesty.
Published accounts of what each motif “means” disagree with one another, and often with the family who painted the wall. Some shapes are protective, some commemorate a journey, some are there because the painter’s mother painted them. If a guide hands you one fixed reading of every symbol on a street, they are simplifying somebody else’s house.
A Nubian house, detail by detail.
Choose a number on the house or a feature below. Look closely at plaster, timber and ceramics, then explore the painted motifs.
The worked doorway
The entrance brings several kinds of work together: moulded plaster, a painted arch, a timber door and a stepped threshold. The crocodile above the lintel is a household detail sometimes encountered; it is not a feature of every home.
Look closelyFollow the nested arch, then the relief teeth, wood panels and paired door rings.
Choose a motif. Read its details.
Eight illustrated studies. Select one to enlarge the drawing and read its context.
Triangles and zigzags
The commonest band, and the oldest-looking. It runs under the roofline, around openings, and along the base of the wall.
Six colours enter the system as fills in a drawing, exactly as sandstone does. Five of them measure between 1.50 and 3.56 on the light grounds and may never carry type; only the deep blue is an ink. And they live inside this section — the moment one appears on a cruise card or a practical guide, the system has stopped explaining and started decorating.
The blue is recent. The painting is not.
Photographs and surveys of Nubian villages before the flooding show whitewashed walls with relief-moulded ornament, inset plates and restrained earth colour. The saturated blues and greens you see today came with cheap modern paint and, in the villages visitors reach, with visitors. Both are Nubian. Only one is old.
Above the door, and in a tank in the yard.
A crocodile fixed over the lintel is long reported as protective, and is a different thing from a live animal kept in a tank for photographs. The first is a household object. The second is a visitor attraction that grew out of it, and we do not list it as a thing to do.
Look up, and ask whose wall it is.
The doorway carries the most work, so start there. Ask the household about their own house rather than asking a guide about the village — you will get a better answer and a truer one. And the wall belongs to somebody: the photography rules in the next section apply to it exactly as they apply to a face.
Visiting respectfullyNot traced from a photograph
A community is not an attraction.
Go where you are actually invited, pay the people whose day it is, and put the phone down for the first ten minutes. Nubian hospitality is real and it is not fragile — none of this is about tiptoeing. It is about the difference between being a guest and being an audience, and about the fact that a standard "Nubian village tour" is a commercial product whether or not it is presented as one.
Ask before photographing anyone identifiable
And accept a no without negotiating it. Assume a child cannot consent; an adult responsible for them can.
Do not photograph inside a house or courtyard uninvited
And do not treat a painted wall as a backdrop that happens to have a family behind it. The wall belongs to somebody.
A home does not become public because a tour goes there
Ask your guide whose house it is and what the arrangement is. Pay for tea, food and hospitality properly and directly, and it is reasonable to ask whether the household is being paid a fair share by whoever sold you the trip.
Buying
Favour crafts made locally and ask who made a piece. Accept "it is imported" as an honest answer — plenty of stock in every souq is. Do not repeat a provenance claim you cannot check, and neither do we.
The crocodiles
Some houses keep Nile crocodiles in tanks for visitors to photograph and handle. Tanks are typically small, animals kept this way cannot express normal behaviour, and handling stresses them and carries a real bite risk. We do not list it as a thing to do and we do not sell it — and we also do not accuse individual families of cruelty, because it is a livelihood built on what visitors have asked for.
Go where you are actually invited, pay the people whose day it is, and put the phone down for the first ten minutes.
That is most of it. The rest of this page is detail for people who want it, and none of it is a reason to stay away — Nubian Aswan is one of the genuinely good reasons to spend an extra day here.
This section is reviewed by a Nubian editor before publication · appointment pending
Found something that changed? Tell us and we will re-check it.