This paper focusses on the so-called “Pan-Grave” archaeological culture, and the extent to which communities attributed to it can or should be considered “marginal” based on the available archaeological and historical evidence. It will be argued that communities that archaeologists identify as “Pan-Grave” were likely to have been small and hence a minority in terms of population size, but that the wide distribution of evidence suggests that “Pan-Grave culture” was a recognisable component of the ancient Egyptian socio-cultural landscape. The frequency and variety of evidence for contact and exchange between the Pan-Grave and Egyptian cultural spheres points towards close social ties rather than Pan-Grave being marginal to the ancient Egyptian “core”. At the same time, it is proposed that Pan-Grave culture—and Nubian cultures in general—have been marginalised by Egyptology as an academic discipline, which has a tradition of implicitly (and explicitly) using ancient rhetoric to justify its own conception of ancient Egyptian dominance. It is also argued that a re-framing of “Pan-Grave” communities as an integral part of the cultural fabric of pharaonic Egypt would encourage Egyptology as a discipline to question its own perception of what defines “Egyptian” from both ancient and academic perspectives.

For almost a century, many scholars have assumed that the Medjay of the Egyptian textual record can be directly associated with the Pan-Grave archaeological culture. In this article, the authors deconstruct this connection and consider the extent to which the archaeological and textual evidence can be reconciled based on geography and cultural circumstances. Both groups shared pastoral nomadic roots linked to the Eastern Desert, both went through similar processes of acculturation, and both groups had some of their members fight as mercenaries during the wars of the Second Intermediate Period. However, the evidence from the Nile Valley and Eastern Desert of Egypt and Nubia demonstrates that a direct connection between the Pan-Grave culture and the Medjay cannot be supported.

Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) is a photographic technique used to generate digital surrogates of surfaces that can be viewed using virtual lighting coming from interactively set directions, enabling the close structural examination of objects under digital raking light. In this study, RTI was applied to Middle Nubian pottery from sites near the Second Nile Cataract that were excavated by the Scandinavian Joint Expedition to Sudanese Nubia in the early 1960s. The ceramic traditions under investigation are currently known as C-Group, Pan-Grave and Kerma. An overarching aim of the project is to assess the possibility of understanding the relationships between these groups through detailed analyses of their material traditions. Based on the hypothesis that technological traditions may be related to cultural heritage, RTI is applied in this study to observe morphological traces of ceramic vessel forming processes. Two technological groups were identified, one consistent with paddle-forming, and another consistent with hand-building on a mat-lined surface. These technological groups correspond very closely to cemetery distributions, which suggests that the different techniques may be specific to different potterymaking traditions. It is suggested that vessel forming-technology in the so-called C-Group tradition is distinct from that of the so-called Pan-Grave and Kerma traditions, and that the validity of the divisions between Nubian cultural groups should thus be further interrogated.

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This paper considers the extent to which ancient Nubian cultures might be considered ‘Bronze Age’ during the Second Millennium bce and questions the application of the term ‘Bronze Age’ to Middle Nubian cultures in some scholarly discourse. Using evidence from Nubian cemeteries and settlements in the Nile Valley, it is argued that while the Kerma culture and ancient Kush might be seen to participate in Bronze Age networks, other contemporaneous Nubian cultures did not directly participate. The author stresses the important of defining terminologies and a deeper consideration of Eurocentric perspectives when studying ancient northeast African cultures.