THE NUBIAN DETECTIVE

A friend asked if I could assist her in an art project about the Nubian people. I had heard of them, but really did not know much about them. So we walked to the library--the Missouri Regional Library in Jefferson City, Missouri--and found...

Nothing.

Not one book about Nubia. Egypt was everywhere. Ethiopia had its share. There were even books on ancient and modern day Sudan. But Nubia?

Nada.

We scored the shelves. Then--buried near the bottom, shoved in further than it had to be, we found a book that did not fit in--as if books too have popularity issues. Too thick with quite a misleading title: The Rescue of Jerusalem--The Alliance Between Hebrews and Africans in 701 BC by Henry T. Aubin, Soho Press, 2002, the book leaped into my hand--or so it seemed--and when I went to the index, I found, oh, yes, "Nubia, see Kush."

And there in the library's data base under the keyword Kush was a children's book: The Ancient Kushites by Liz Sonneborn, Scholastic, 2005.

Were the Nubians the Kush?

I took both books out and...

The art project? History. Nubia? The detection begins.