The architecture of the Amun temple holds an exceptional significance in the study of ancient Nubia. As in Egypt, kingship in Nubia was strongly associated with the Amun cult; yet, unlike their counterparts in Egypt, the Amun temples of Nubia were consistently built of friable sandstone, frequently located in regions of much higher rainfall, and often inscribed in a Meroitic language not yet intelligible to modern scholarship. As a result, deductions about a given Nubian locale’s political and economic role within the state have often been based heavily upon its public architecture, and the function of that architecture has in turn been inferred from its floorplan in the absence of more explicit inscriptional or iconographic testimony. For a discipline faced with such challenges, Caroline Rocheleau’s Amun Temples in Nubia represents a significant and most welcome contribution.

The core of the book is an annotated gazetteer of all eighteen temples clearly dedicated to Amun across the Nubian landscape and twenty additional temples possibly dedicated to that deity. All examples in both categories are freestanding and were built between the beginning of Egypt’s New Kingdom (ca. 1540 BCE) and the end of Nubia’s Meroitic period (ca. 350 CE). Each gazetteer entry provides the temple’s period of construction, builders, orientation, materials, preservation status, floorplan (when available), measurements of its full length and width, a brief architectural description, and select bibliographic references. Monuments with discernible phases of renovation are given separate gazetteer entries for each phase; those showing multiple extensions over time are given just one entry but attributed multiple periods of construction; and those with more ambiguous stratigraphy are generally given one entry in the gazetteer and assigned to just one period of construction. The allotment of a single page to each entry allows the reader to turn quickly from one floorplan to another for visual comparison. Temple floorplans are then used by Rocheleau to produce a typology that relates form to function. The book’s broadest audience of Egyptologists, Classicists, and art and architectural historians will find the gazetteer a highly accessible and convenient assembly of data, while Nubiologists already familiar with each temple will find particularly useful the synthesis of that data into three tables. Perhaps most valuable to specialists, however, is the section toward the end of the book in which Rocheleau discusses the question of Meroë’s earliest Amun temple; here the results of recent, unpublished excavations are foreshadowed by an archaeologist who has put her own trowel to earth at the site. Throughout the volume, analyses of both architectural typology and historical implications are clearly articulated and judiciously argued.

The book’s limitations have little to do with Rocheleau’s research or argumentation, but are instead merely the limitations of the gazetteer genre. In order to be serviceable for comparative study, gazetteers must be streamlined, with only a modicum of detail and debate. Thus, readers should turn to the chapter immediately following the gazetteer to find explanations of several important points—e.g., how Amun temples have been identified as such, why granite is often listed among the construction materials but never indicated in the floorplans, and why the entries for Umm Soda and Soba East are nearly blank. All are explained and justified cogently in chapter 3. For a discussion of foundation deposits or brick sizes, readers may consult the bibliography provided. Nevertheless, the gazetteer format holds some potential for misuse by the reader. Because of the popularity of gazetteers and catalogues raisonnés in Egyptology, the history of the discipline contains more than a few examples of scholars who erred by relying too heavily upon the summary judgments of another author’s gazetteer or catalogue, while neglecting to pursue its bibliography. In Rocheleau’s Amun Temples in Nubia, a few points of potential confusion and reader misuse are foreseeable and require some qualifying remarks here.

An illustrative case is the book’s analysis of Kushite coronation temples, a discussion that integrates architectural with political history and will therefore be one of the sections most consulted by the broadest readership. On pages 70, 77, and Tables 2 and 3, the Temple of Amun-Re, Bull of Nubia, at Sanam is designated as a temple of “coronation type,” and on page 60, Rocheleau states: “Various coronation stelae of the Kushite kings listed the site of Pnubs as one of the stations of the coronation journey undertaken by the new Kushite ruler after his accession to the throne. The inscriptions were consistent; they all listed the Great Temple of Amun of Napata, the Temple of Amun of Gematon, and the Temple of Amun of Pnubs. The fourth temple, the Temple of Amun, Bull of Nubia, appeared in early stelae but was excluded from the time of Harsiotef onwards.” From this juxtaposition of statements, an unwary reader might reasonably infer that the Temple of Amun-Re, Bull of Nubia, appeared in some early descriptions of the coronation journey. Yet such an assumption would be mistaken. The passages which did mention Sanam did not do so in the context of a coronation journey; instead, Sanam’s status as the site of a coronation temple must be inferred from the marked similarity which its floorplan and hypostyle reliefs share with Temple T at Kawa—a temple that was mentioned as part of the coronation journey. Sanam’s conspicuous absence from surviving accounts of the coronation journey may be explained in at least two ways: either Sanam ceased to function as a coronation temple at some point after the reign of Taharqo, or the sacred landscape of Nubia included a hierarchy of coronation temples, only the most prominent of which were deemed worthy of mention in the coronation accounts. In either case, Sanam’s Temple of Amun-Re, Bull of Nubia, would seem to provide an unmentioned parallel for the much later Amanitore temples and Meroë’s M260, which are proposed by Rocheleau as “Meroitic coronation temples” (78; emphasis in original); each conforms to the floorplan of the known coronation temples, but none are actually mentioned in the translated coronation accounts.

The streamlined, gazetteer format occasionally conceals chronological debates of some interest. For example, the non-specialist reader may well puzzle over why the “Sun Temple” M250 at Meroë is assigned by Rocheleau only to the Meroitic period (ca. 275 BCE–350 CE), even though its initial builder is named by Rocheleau as Aspelta (ca. 593–568 BCE) (40). Here again, the answer lies in an enigmatic discrepancy between the surviving inscriptional and architectural evidence. A comparable problem is posed by Kawa’s Temple B. Rocheleau’s gazetteer assigns the monument unequivocally to the Meroitic period (27). Yet the columns standing in Temple B’s forecourt were inscribed with the nomina of Harsiotef (ca. 404–369 BCE), leading the site’s excavators, Francis Llewellyn Griffith and Miles F. L. Macadam, to place the temple’s foundation centuries before the Meroitic period (Miles F. L. Macadam, The Temples of Kawa II: History and Archaeology of the Site, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955, 17–18, 47, pl. XLII; and The Temples of Kawa I: The Inscriptions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949, 78). Similarly, Temple TRG40 at Soniyat is given two phases of construction in the gazetteer—one Napatan and the other Meroitic. As the gazetteer consistently differentiates Napatan-period constructions from those of Dynasty 25, this classification of Soniyat would imply a terminus post quem of ca. 653 BCE for the temple’s foundation. Yet the principal excavator, Bogdan Zurawski, has entertained a much earlier date for that foundation—observing similarities between the temple’s layout and that of Gebel Barkal’s B500, as well as similarities between a votive deposit at the site and ones found at both Gebel Barkal and the el-Kurru cemetery (Bogdan Zurawski, “Southern Dongola Reach Survey: Archaeological Reconnaisance Near Abkor 1997,” Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean 9 (1998): 183, 190–191; and “Dongola Reach: The Southern Dongola Reach Survey, 2001,” Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean 13 (2002): 220). In this case, the chronological simplification required by the gazetteer format is more unfortunate, as it elides the potential interest of Soniyat to the broader audience of Egyptologists outside of Nubian Studies proper—a readership that may not be intimately familiar with the details of Zurawski’s reports.

Finally, interpreters of Rocheleau’s assembled data must be careful not to place excessive weight upon apparent gaps in the sacred landscape of Nubia, as the archaeology of the region seems now to be rewritten on almost a yearly schedule. During the three years that have passed since Amun Temples in Nubia was published, exciting discoveries by Rocheleau and her colleagues at Dangeil have raised the possibility of an Amun temple there as early as the 25th Dynasty. Likewise, the large religious complex of oval temples recently discovered at Dokki Gel would seem to necessitate a re-assessment of Nubia’s sacral architecture prior to the 25th Dynasty (cf., 84). In fact, given the rapid pace of current development in Nubian Studies and the exceptional value of Rocheleau’s contribution in this volume, it is to be hoped that further editions of the book might appear in years to come.