IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 296

For more than a thousand years the kingdom of Kush was one of the most powerful states in the Nile valley. Its earlier centre had been at Kerma, further downstream, where rulers had traded with Egypt and buried their kings beneath enormous earthen mounds. In the first millennium BC the kingdom's heartland lay further upstream, in the district around Napata, in the region the Egyptians called Nubia. Its wealth rested on cattle and on crops watered by the Nile, and on trade in goods that the Mediterranean world prized: gold from the eastern desert, ivory, ebony and incense. Control of these routes made Kush a rival of Egypt, and for a period a ruler of Egypt as well.

From about 1500 BC, pharaohs of the New Kingdom brought Nubia under Egyptian control. The province was administered by an official with the title King's Son of Kush, in effect a viceroy who answered directly to the pharaoh. Egyptian temples were founded along the river, most importantly at Jebel Barkal, a sandstone hill near Napata that was identified with the home of the god Amun. Kushite elites adopted Egyptian writing, royal titles and religious practice, yet Nubian burial customs and pottery styles survived. As the New Kingdom weakened, Egyptian authority in the south contracted, and by about 1070 BC it had come to an end.

The rulers who emerged at Napata were buried in steep-sided pyramids at El-Kurru, and they continued to honour Amun at Jebel Barkal, where they enlarged the temple and decorated its walls with reliefs. In the eighth century BC a line of kings began to look northwards. The first to extend his authority into Egypt was Kashta, who seems to have reached as far as Thebes. His son Piye went considerably further.

Around 728 BC Piye led an army down the Nile and laid siege to Memphis, the old northern capital, which eventually surrendered. Piye had his account of the campaign carved on a granite stele set up at Jebel Barkal; the text, which survives, presents the conquest as the restoration of proper worship after a period of disorder. His successors ruled Egypt as its twenty-fifth dynasty, and the kings of this line, above all Taharqa, built and restored temples at Karnak, at Kawa in Nubia and at many other sites. For roughly seventy years Kushite kings were pharaohs.

Kushite rule in Egypt ended through invasion from the east rather than through local rebellion. In 671 BC the Assyrian king Esarhaddon defeated Taharqa and took Memphis, and a few years later, around 663 BC, his successor Ashurbanipal sacked Thebes. The Kushite king Tantamani withdrew upriver, and Egyptian rulers thereafter governed without Kushite overlordship, though the kings of Kush retained their independence in the south.

Kings continued to be buried at Napata for another generation or two. Then, early in the sixth century BC, an Egyptian army under Psamtik II campaigned far upriver towards Napata. It is generally thought that the royal court then shifted to Meroe, some hundreds of kilometres to the south-east, near the point where the Atbara joins the Nile. Whether this was an abrupt transfer forced by invasion or a gradual movement of the kingdom's centre of gravity is disputed among historians.

Meroe stood in a savannah of summer rain, country that could support agriculture without irrigation, and it lay within reach of trade routes running to the Red Sea and to the Ethiopian highlands. The kingdom's wealth appears to have rested mainly on farming and on the export of luxury goods. Meroe has often been described as a great iron-working centre, on the evidence of large heaps of slag found beside the town, but some archaeologists doubt whether the scale of production was anything like as great as that description implies, and the question remains open.

The Meroitic period produced a distinctive culture. The kings and kandakes, as the ruling queens were called, were buried at Begrawiya, east of the town, beneath pyramids far steeper than those of Egypt. The Meroitic script, adapted from Egyptian writing, has never been fully deciphered, so that almost everything written in the kingdom's own language remains closed to us. One of the kandakes, whose name is recorded in Greek sources as Amanirenas, fought a war against Rome in the last decades of the first century BC, and a Roman army under Gaius Petronius raided as far as Napata before a peace was agreed.

The kingdom declined slowly. By the fourth century AD its authority had shrunk, and an inscription of Ezana, king of Aksum in what is now Ethiopia, records a campaign against a people of the Nile valley in about 350. After that the organised kingdom disappears from the record, and Christian kingdoms emerged in Nubia in the following centuries. European interest in Meroe was at first destructive: in 1834 an Italian treasure hunter, Giuseppe Ferlini, demolished the upper parts of many of the royal pyramids in search of gold. Systematic excavation began only later, and much of the site has never been examined. Visitors today see a landscape of low hills studded with broken pyramids.

Ask how long it took to travel from London to York in the year 1300 and the honest answer is that nobody can say precisely, because it depended on who was travelling and how. The distance is roughly 300 kilometres. A train now covers it in under two hours, and a lorry driver takes most of a day. In the Middle Ages the same journey might have taken a royal messenger the better part of a week, a merchant with a train of packhorses a fortnight, and a drover taking cattle to market considerably longer. What interests historians is not the fastest time ever recorded but the ordinary range of speeds, and how those speeds shaped trade, government and the spread of news.

Four things determined the pace: the means of transport, the load, the season and the road. A fit person on foot can walk 30 kilometres a day and keep doing so for weeks, which made walking the commonest way of covering long distances. A rider on a single horse might manage 40 or 50 kilometres in a day, but could not repeat that performance day after day without wearing the animal out. Oxen pulling a loaded wagon rarely exceeded 15 or 20 kilometres a day, and in winter, on roads that were little more than mud, they often went much less far. Only messengers, who rode in relays and changed horses at fixed stages, could sustain 60 kilometres or more over several days, and they carried almost nothing but letters.

Reconstructing such speeds from documents is painstaking work. The richest source is the royal charter. Charters were dated, and they recorded the place where the king or his officials happened to be, so a sequence of them allows a historian to plot the court's movements day by day and to calculate the distance covered between one dated document and the next. Itineraries reconstructed in this way show that medieval kings were often on the move and that on some days they covered impressive distances; they also show long pauses, when business or weather kept the court in one place for weeks.

Letters provide a second kind of evidence. A merchant writing from Bruges to his partner in Venice would date the letter and describe his plans, and if a reply survives, the interval between the two gives a minimum time for the post. The archive of the Tuscan merchant Francesco di Datini, who died in 1410, preserves thousands of business letters and has been used in exactly this way. Letters are less straightforward than they look, however: the date written at the top is the date of composition, not of sending, and the day of arrival is often unknown. An itinerary of a different sort survives from the tenth century, when an archbishop of Canterbury returning from Rome left a list of the places where he stopped each night, some eighty stages in all.

Household and manorial accounts add detail of another kind. They record payments for ferries, tolls, horse hire, lodgings and the wages of guides, and sometimes the purchase of new shoes for the horses before a long ride. From such entries it is possible to see how a great household travelled — slowly, in a long column, with carts and with frequent stops — and what a journey of that kind cost.

Every one of these sources has limits. Records survive for a small minority of the population: the literate, the propertied and the institutions that kept archives. Journeys undertaken in bad weather, or by people who could not write, left no trace at all, and the journeys that were recorded are often exceptional ones — a king's progress, a papal mission, a pilgrimage by a wealthy merchant. Chroniclers, meanwhile, liked a good story and were not above exaggerating the speed of a famous ride.

For a long time historians assumed that medieval people were rooted in their villages and travelled hardly at all. More recent work has questioned this. Court records, tax lists and wills show labourers moving between parishes in search of work, peasants taking produce to distant markets and families scattered across a wide area. Travel was slow, uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous, but it was not rare, and the picture of a population that never left home now looks too simple.

At sea the pattern was different again. In the fourteenth century the Venetian state began to organise its great galleys into convoys that sailed to a fixed schedule, escorted by an officer of the republic, and the same vessels carried pilgrims and merchants as well as goods. But a sailing ship could not guarantee an arrival date. A vessel might lie at anchor for days waiting for a favourable wind, and a crossing that took three weeks in one year might take six in another. Sea travel could be swift and it could be maddeningly slow, and no timetable could hide the difference.

Why does any of this matter? Because the speed at which people and information moved set the limits within which government, trade and war were conducted. A ruler who could not learn of a rebellion for three weeks governed differently from one who could learn of it in a day. The history of transport is, in that sense, also a history of power, and of the ordinary lives lived within its constraints.

On almost any summer evening, the cathedrals, castles and ruins of Europe are picked out by floodlights, their outlines traced in white or amber against the dark. The practice has spread steadily over the past few decades, encouraged by the growth of city tourism and by competition between towns for visitors. Many site managers, running buildings that cost far more to maintain than their ticket sales provide, see in the evening a few extra hours in which to earn. Yet the same lights that make a ruin beautiful may also be working slowly against it, and the argument over whether they are worth having has become one of the livelier disputes in the heritage world.

The case in favour is not frivolous. Opening after dark extends the working day of a site and draws visitors away from the crowded hours around midday, while those who cannot come during office hours are given a chance to see a building they might otherwise never enter. Tourism officials make exactly this point when they ask for later opening, and it deserves to be taken seriously. In many towns the evening economy around a lit monument — restaurants, hotels, guided walks — supports jobs that have nothing directly to do with conservation. And the pleasure that floodlighting gives visitors is real: a façade lit from below can appear more dramatic and more memorable than it does in flat daylight.

Against this stands a body of evidence about materials. Light is energy, and energy absorbed by a surface produces chemical change: pigments fade, varnishes yellow and some stones alter at the surface. Museum practice shows how seriously conservators treat the problem, since the illumination of sensitive objects such as textiles, watercolours and manuscripts is usually held to a small fraction of ordinary room lighting. Outdoor conditions are different, because the sun is far brighter than any lamp, but conservation scientists point out that the effect of a floodlight is cumulative and extremely difficult to measure, being slow, uneven and dependent on the particular stone. There is no simple test that a manager can run to prove that a façade is safe.

Then there is the effect on living things. Artificial light attracts insects in vast numbers, and the bats and birds that feed on them alter their habits accordingly; birds migrating at night can be disoriented by illuminated towers. Ecologists have argued for years that the cumulative loss of darkness is a conservation problem in its own right, quite apart from the energy it consumes. Campaigns in several cities now persuade the managers of tall buildings to switch off unnecessary lights during the weeks of migration, and campaigners report that a good deal of the harm can be avoided at modest cost.

The argument is also cultural. A cathedral lit every night becomes, in a sense, a stage set, complete with queues, a ticket desk and a café with an illuminated sign. Some architectural historians maintain that floodlighting flattens a building, replacing the subtle modelling of daylight with a single dramatic wash, and that a monument seen this way is reduced to a backdrop for entertainment. Others disagree, and lighting designers reply that a well-aimed scheme can reveal carving, texture and structure that daylight conceals, and that in northern latitudes the winter dark makes such illumination a genuine public good.

Money lies at the centre of the dispute. Site operators commonly argue that evening opening pays for conservation, but few of them publish accounts that would show whether this is true, and where a site is run by a commercial tenant the income may pass to the tenant rather than to the fabric of the building. Nor do the figures usually include the cost of electricity, of maintaining the equipment and of the monitoring that any responsible scheme would require. In the absence of such numbers, the claim that light pays for stone remains a claim rather than a finding.

What would responsible lighting look like? Fixtures that throw light downwards rather than into the sky, low levels, timers that switch everything off after a fixed hour, and a clear plan for monitoring both the surfaces and the wildlife. In some places the sensible answer is to light the outside of a building and leave the interior, with its paintings and textiles, in darkness. Consultation matters too, because residents who live beside a lit monument may find their bedrooms bright at midnight.

My own position is that there should be a presumption against floodlighting, which can be overturned but only by evidence. Some places, I would argue, should stay dark altogether: burial monuments, sites whose surfaces are known to be fragile, and landscapes valued precisely for their darkness. Elsewhere, a scheme might be approved if those responsible can show that the harm is negligible and that the income will be spent on the building itself, and the decision should then be reviewed at intervals rather than settled once and for all.

The question, in the end, is not whether a lit monument is beautiful — it often is — but who the light is for and who pays for it. A town that lights its cathedral to draw visitors should be able to say what those visitors bring, what the light costs and what it is doing to the stone. Where that case cannot be made, darkness is the more honest choice.