Bright blue and ochre houses, a language older than Arabic, and a community moved twice by dams.
The Nubian villages on Elephantine Island and the west bank at Aswan are the most photographed domestic architecture in Egypt: houses painted cobalt, ochre, pink and green, often with domed roofs and a crocodile above the door.
The Nubians are not Arabs and their languages — Nobiin and Kenzi — are unrelated to Arabic and considerably older in the region. Nubia was a kingdom that at one point ruled Egypt outright, as the 25th Dynasty, and the relationship between the two has been long and not always comfortable.
The painting tradition is more recent than it looks, and it grew after displacement. Nubian land along the Nile was flooded twice in the twentieth century, first by the Aswan dam and then far more comprehensively by the High Dam, which submerged the homeland of around 100,000 people and moved them to built settlements. The colour is, in part, an assertion of identity in places nobody chose.
Nubia was a kingdom that at one point ruled Egypt outright, as the 25th Dynasty, and the relationship between the two has been long and not always comfortable.
Visits usually include tea in a family house and, frequently, a crocodile in a tank — historically a household guardian. Ask before photographing people, buy something if you are hosted, and expect to be asked about your own family in return.
