The painted house
Nubian wall painting is a real decorative tradition with a geometric and figurative vocabulary — triangles, zigzags, diamond chains, scalloped parapets, palms, fish, crescents, hands and hajj imagery. The tradition is older than the houses carrying it. The saturated blue you see today is not: it came with cheap modern paint and, in the villages visitors reach, with visitors.
Photographs and surveys of Nubian villages before the flooding show whitewashed walls with relief-moulded ornament, inset plates and restrained earth colour. Both that and today’s palette are Nubian. Only one of them is old.
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.
Hajj imagery — a ship, an aeroplane, the Kaaba — is painted on the house of someone who has made the pilgrimage. It is a dated record of one family event rather than a traditional pattern, and it is found across Upper Egypt, not only in Nubian villages.
A crocodile fixed over the lintel is long reported as protective. That is a household object, and a different thing from a live animal kept in a tank for photographs.
The doorway carries the most work — surround, relief teeth, and the lintel. 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.
There is no single fixed key, and anyone who hands you one is simplifying somebody else’s house. Ask the people whose wall it is.
The museum opened in 1997 and was developed with UNESCO to hold and explain material recovered before the flooding.
Reviewed by no Nubian editor appointed yet · We will not mark this section reviewed until a real, named person has read it.