Symbolic equids and Kushite state formation: a horse burial at Tombos

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Abstract

The recent discovery of a well-preserved horse burial at the Third Cataract site of Tombos illuminates the social significance of equids in the Nile Valley. The accompanying funerary assemblage includes one of the earliest securely dated pieces of iron in Africa. The Third Intermediate Period (1050–728 BC) saw the development of the Nubian Kushite state beyond the southern border of Egypt. Analysis of the mortuary and osteological evidence suggests that horses represented symbols of a larger social, political and economic movement, and that the horse gained symbolic meaning in the Nile Valley prior to its adoption by the Kushite elite. This new discovery has important implications for the study of the early Kushite state and the formation of Kushite social identity.

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Radiocarbon Calibration/Comparison Records Based on Marine Sediments from the Pakistan and Iberian Margins

Laetitia Licari, Edouard Bard, Guillemette Ménot … (2013)

We present a new record of radiocarbon ages measured by accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) on a deep-sea core collected off the Pakistan Margin. The 14 C ages measured on the planktonic foraminifera Globigerinoides ruber from core MD04-2876 define a high and stable sedimentation rate on the order of 50 cm/kyr over the last 50 kyr. The site is distant from the main upwelling zone of the western Arabian Sea where 14 C reservoir age is large and may be variable. Many independent proxies based on elemental analyses, mineralogy, biomarkers, isotopic proxies, and foraminiferal abundances show abrupt changes correlative with Dansgaard-Oeschger and Heinrich events. It is now common knowledge that these climatic events also affected the Arabian Sea during the last glacial period through changes in the Indian monsoon and in ventilation at intermediate depths. The stratigraphic agreement between all proxies, from fine- to coarse-size fractions, indicates that the foraminiferal 14 C ages are representative of the different sediment fractions. To build a calendar age scale for core MD04-2876, we matched its climate record to the oxygen isotopic (δ 18 O) profile of Hulu Cave stalagmites that have been accurately dated by U-Th (Wang et al. 2001; Southon et al. 2012; Edwards et al., submitted). Both archives exhibit very similar signatures, even for century-long events linked to monsoonal variations. For comparison, we have also updated our previous work on core MD95-2042 from the Iberian Margin (Bard et al. 2004a,b,c), whose climate record has likewise been tuned to the high-resolution δ 18 O Hulu Cave profile. Sophisticated and novel statistical techniques were used to interpolate ages and calculate uncertainties between chronological tie-points (Heaton et al. 2013, this issue). The data from the Pakistan and Iberian margins compare well even if they come from distant sites characterized by different oceanic conditions. Collectively, the data also compare well with the IntCal09 curve, except for specific intervals around 16 cal kyr BP and from 28 to 31 cal kyr BP. During these intervals, the data indicate that 14 C is somewhat older than indicated by the IntCal09 curve. Agreement between the data from both oceanic sites suggests that the discrepancy is not due to local changes of sea-surface 14 C reservoir ages, but rather that the IntCal09 curve needed to be updated in these intervals as has been done in the framework of IntCal13 (Reimer et al. 2013a, this issue).