Nubia
When the Society ceased excavation at Amarna in 1936, attention shifted to the northern Sudan where an expedition, directed first by Alyward Blackman and later by Hubert Fairman, excavated the Egyptian town at Sesebi which was of the same date as the town at Amarna. In 1938 Fairman and the EES team moved north to another Egyptian town at Amara West. Both Sesebi and Amara were walled towns, containing temples dedicated to Egyptian gods and with largely Egyptian, rather than Nubian, populations.
The Second World War halted the Amara excavations and they were not resumed by Fairman until 1947. The final two seasons (1948-50) were directed by Peter Shinnie but the excavation remained unpublished until 1997. In 1957, when archaeological work was restricted in Egypt during the Suez crisis, the Society returned to the Sudan with an excavation, directed by Bryan Emery, at the site of Buhen where the ancient Egyptians had built impressive brick fortifications on their southern frontier.
The building of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s led to the UNESCO campaign to save the monuments of Nubia and the Society extended its work to include the recording of the temples and shrines of Buhen, Semna, Kumma and Qasr Ibrim, all copied and published with meticulous care by Ricardo Caminos. The sites of Buhen, Semna and Kumma are now lost beneath the waters of the new Lake Nasser behind the High Dam.
The Society also took on the excavation of the fortress site of Qasr Ibrim which was expected to be soon submerged but which has survived as an island in the lake.
The Society is still undertaking rescue archaeology at the site and on the nearby mainland, and publishing the results, and the recent decision to raise the level of the lake for the development of the Tushka region has increased the danger to the archaeological levels of this important site, which was inhabited continuously from antiquity until the nineteenth century AD. Excavation, now under the directorship of Pamela Rose, has produced an unparalleled number of papyrus and paper documents as well as countless well-preserved artefacts.