When building in dry-stone, Nubians and Egyptians used different techniques to construct walls. Wadi es-Sebua has been used as a type-site for C-Group Nubian settlements. Its exterior wall exhibits courses of stones laid at an angle, a technique I associate with Nubians. The Egyptian fortified mining settlements at Wadi el-Hudi, el-Hisnein, and Dihmit use dry-stone architecture, similar to the architecture at Wadi es-Sebua. Texts and pottery support that many Nubians also worked for contemporary Egyptian mining expeditions in the Eastern Desert during the early Middle Kingdom. I suggest that Nubian workforces carried out much of the architectural construction of these fortified settlements using their own traditional building techniques, but following an Egyptian design, and I argue that the so-called ‘loopholes’ found in these exterior walls were not for military defence, but rather were windows. These construction techniques point to a latent Nubian agency within the operation of Egyptian mining settlements.

Our current understanding of the ancient Nubian people called the Medjay has been informed by textual and artistic representations created by the ancient Egyptians. By studying these sources, Egyptologists have argued that the Medjay were an ethnic group living in the Eastern Desert near the Second Cataract. Yet these studies exhibit an Egyptocentric bias, in which the Egyptian sources have been interpreted literally. This paper reexamines Egyptian references to the Medjay before the New Kingdom and demonstrates how the Egyptians conceptualized and fostered the creation of a Medjay ethnicity. The Egyptians perceived the people of the Eastern Desert near Lower Nubia as one unified ethnic group. Yet these people were not politically unified and did not identify themselves as Medjay until the middle of the Twelfth Dynasty. Increased interaction between the Egyptians and the people of the Eastern Desert caused certain pastoral nomads to adopt the term “Medjay.” Whatever role ethnicity may have played in their society previously, ethnogenesis of a “Medjay” ethnic group began towards the middle of the Twelfth Dynasty.

Evidence for the system of written communications used in Egypt’s administration of its forts is sparse. Of the papyri that exist, the “Semna Dispatches” has provided most of the information available about this system as it existed in Lower Nubia during the late Middle Kingdom. In 1945, Paul Smither posthumously published P. Ramesseum C (bm ea10752) as “The Semnah Despatches.” Smither was unaware of two fragments, framed with P. Ramesseum 19 (bm ea10772.2). This study edits the unpublished fragments and incorporates them into the larger discussion about the Semna Dispatches. They provide clarity for the document as a whole. They show that the dispatches were, primarily, used to coordinate surveillance around the Semna Gorge and, secondarily, to record security concerns for other fortresses. Furthermore, they were written in a surveillance office at Semna West and not in Thebes. This study resolves several debates about the dispatches and the control of Lower Nubia in the late Middle Kingdom.

Ancient Egypt was located at the crossroads between Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean. This location favored the development of a multicultural society. Although foreigners lived, worked, and traveled in Egypt throughout its history, monumental Egyptian records often project an ethnocentric attitude. If Egyptians commonly held ethnocentric attitudes, as Herodotus reported ( Histories esp. 2.41–3), there may have been a strong compulsion for foreigners to acculturate to Egyptian standards. Foreigners who wanted to be accepted into elite or bureaucratic positions actively espoused Egyptian behaviors and material culture in public spheres. The extent to which first generation foreigners mentally acculturated cannot be known.

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