The first book of Procopius’ Persian Wars'728 729 provides the major documentary evidence for Roman and Byzantine frontier policy toward the Nubian kingdoms of the Noubades and Blemmyes south of Egypt, and also implicitly addresses the interaction between Rome and Meroitic Kush before the political collapse of the Meroitic state in the middle to late fourth century CE. The northern Nubian frontier area known as the Dodekaschoinos (“Twelve schoinos region”), an approximately 135 kilometer-long frontier area running south from Aswan, was a buffer zone established by Kush and Rome in the aftermath of the Roman-Kushite war between 29 and 21 BCE.730 Although it often is interpreted as a unilateral act by Rome, the discoveries in 1910 of the Hamadab stela and a royal complex in the vicinity of Meroe city, the capital of the Meroitic kingdom, provide the Kushite perspective on the war.731 The stela recalls the Kushite queen ameniras and her prince Akindad and their celebration of victory over Rome. For them, the Kushite concession to a Roman presence in lower Nubia was a mutually advantageous victory that permitted their continued patronage of nubian temples in the region.
The Dodekaschoinos functioned as a zone of diplomatic, commercial, religious, and cultural interaction that for over four centuries facilitated the formation of hybrid cultural practices, multiple religious identities, and a plurality of cultural allegiances among the Kushite, Nubian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman inhabitants of the region. These relations challenge the rhetorical and ideological constructions of barbarian and Romans as fixed and rigid categories, for the demarcation between “Romans” and “barbarians” was actually more fluid and indeterminate and the boundaries in terms of religious practices much more porous than traditionally recognized. the region was home to several nubian temples, including the temple of Isis at philae, erected during the ptolemaic era, and the temple of Mandulis at Talmis (modern Kalabsha), fifty kilometers south of Philae, which was rebuilt and expanded by augustus to accommodate both Romans and nubians.732 the temple at Kalabsha, the largest freestanding temple in Nubia, was the major counterpart to Philae for the performance of religious rites and festivals in the Dodekaschoinos. Isis, of course, had become a universal goddess in the mediterranean world, but her roots as an egypto-nubian deity remained pre-eminent.733 Likewise, the solar deity mandulis, a distinctively nubian god, being the nubian form of horus, was a patron of Roman soldiers.734 thus, along with nubian worshippers, both Isis and mandulis also attracted Roman devotees and, for Roman soldiers, these were “barbarian” gods with universal appeal. Other temple centers of the Dodekaschoinos included the cities of Dakka, Maharaqqa, Karanog, Qasr Ibrim, Qustul, Ballana, and Faras, all of which served as religious centers frequented by religious pilgrims and diplomatic officials from both the Roman and Kushite empires.
World History
