And so it begins …

I woke up this morning in a room overlooking the Nile, a bright, clear day. The water glistens.

My son Tariq is asleep, making evident to me that, among the most important things one loses in 34 years, our difference in age, is the ability to sleep uninterrupted for eight or ten hours straight irrespective of jetlag.

It is the first day of a journey that, for the moment, seems more important to me than to him. We are going to Sudan, the first time for me in five years, and the first time for him in perhaps seven. But we’re going further. We’re are going to explore the villages of my now-deceased grandparents and ancestors in Nubia.

Fifty years ago, two years before I was born, the last trains left the villages in Nubia for New Halfa, leaving behind a civilization, a way of life, and a land that sustained a people continuously for seven thousand years.  This emigration, called al Hijra by the Nubians, resulted from the inundation of the homeland of the Nubians by Lake Nasser and the Aswan High Dam. All said, 50,000 Nubians were resettled on the Sudanese side of the border and 70,000 on the Egyptians side.  I have never set foot in Nubia, yet I feel compelled to make this journey, and make sure my son is with me.

Perhaps because Nubians come from Upper Egypt, which is among its poorest regions, perhaps because of their darker complexion, or perhaps because of the traditional role that many Nubian men have played as doormen or servants in the palaces of Ottoman Pashas, the Nubians, in the popular imagination, often seen as simple country folk by the cosmopolitan Cairo or Alexandria crowd.

As a result, Nubia is not understood as a source of civilization, a cradle of history, but as the end of the road – a road on which played out an enlightened Mediterranean civilization of Pharaohs and Moses, Hyksos and Assyrians, Romans and Greeks, Turks and Brits, an Elizabeth Taylor-like Cleopatra and Richard Burton-like Anthony. At the end of this cul-de-sac, in the popular imagination, there is a Nubian house where country folk live, beyond which is a barren landscape, wilderness, primitive darkness and Africa.

But the stones tell a different story. The history of this region is long, and the relationship between Nubia and Cairo has ebbed and flowed like the Nile that glistens below. In Nubia has existed poverty but also fabulous wealth, simple rural lives, and the seats of complex empires. In fact civilization flowed in both directions; Nubia was not a cul-de-sac but an intersection of cultures, trade and ideas.

Nubia’s place in history has been chronicled in the Old Testament, the writings of the Greeks including Homer, Diodorus, and Flavius, in the stones and the clay artifacts unearthed by archeologists. As early as 13,000 BC, organized social structures and a complex civilization emerged, supported by a cattle-based economy, with strikingly modern-looking clay pottery the world’s first cemeteries an unmatched ritual devotion to their gods and kings.

By 3,000 BC, society flourished, and traded with distant lands.  As early as the sixth dynasty (2,300-2,400 BC) there were diplomatic, cultural and economic relations between the capital of Nubia, Kerma, and the capital of ancient Egyptian, called Memphis (near Cairo). Ancient Egypt and Kush vied for supremacy for millennia; Kush grew more powerful when Egypt was weakened by invaders from the north; Kush in turn grew weaker through its conflicts with neighbors to the south.

Around 750 BC the Nubians were in the ascendancy, and finally conquered the Nile Valley in which is now called the 25^th and 26^th dynasties. The Nubian Pharoahs, starting with Piankhy, revived the religious traditions and culture of the Nile Valley and extended Nubian power from Khartoum to the Delta. In fact, the Nubian Pharaohs projected power beyond their borders; it was a battle in support of the Jewish kings of Jerusalem against the Assyrians that ultimately brought down the dynasties.

It is difficult to imagine today. History ended 50 years ago, before we could fill in the details. The better part of Nubia was submerged by the Aswan High Dam.

To discover the truth – the source of the dignity, piety and humility that courses through Nubian blood – requires a journey. As John Garang said at the outset of his speech at the end of Africa’s longest civil war, understanding Sudan requires us to first withdraw, to step back, as a tsunami first withdraws and gathered strength before issuing forth in its full fury. This is our moment of quiet.

The plane takes off and we lift into a dusty Cairo sky, as if into a “Haboob” dust cloud rather than the low atmosphere of a normal day. There are in fact no clouds, but visibility is limited by the winter haze of Cairo, a mixture of burning agricultural waste, pollution and dust from the teeming masses below.

The glaring sun through the window fades into an angry red-orange line across the horizon, splitting the vast grey desert and the deep cobalt sky, in which one star and a crescent moon stand watch. On the other side, a British-Sudanese family makes its way back home with heavy London accents.

Two hours later, we start our descent.