Nile Valley Civilizations: History and Legacy

So we travel into Black Africa to learn the story of the Nile Valley, a story generally told from Egypt. Today we're going to tell the story from a place that thrived before Egypt. alongside Egypt and after Egypt. The lands to the south of Egypt, generally called Nubia, had five important golden ages. The first golden age, which was called Tarseti, some people call that in translation the land of the bow. This civilization was older than first dynasty Egypt by about 200 years. They also domesticated animals here first and before Egypt, so pastoralism was very important. Depending on how far back, if you say 9,000 years ago, then you can say yes, it was probably more developed than Egypt. But starting from the 4th millennium BC, the centre really is in Egypt and develops from there. Sudan was often ahead of Egypt in terms of developing technology because it had perhaps a smaller population. In Egypt there's not much need for human economy. You don't need to save on human labour because every time the Nile flooded in midsummer you had a huge reservoir of human labour as long as you were feeding them a living wage. The ancient Egyptians themselves said that they came from the south of Kemet, ancient Egypt, which is further up, higher up the Nile Valley, closer to the source, and they identified the mountains of the moon. which are in modern-day Uganda as their place of origin. Most historians now accept, even the European, Eurocentric ones, that it is the movement of the peoples from the south to the north that gave birth to Kemet. However, what they fail to recognise is not just the movement of these one set of Africans travelling from the south to the north, but also movements of other Africans coming from the west to the east. They met and collected together in what is now Kemet. That's why that civilization was so powerful, because it was a multicultural expression of the African experience. It was several sets of different Africans coming together in one place and creating a civilization. We travel through Sudan. The largest country in Africa to learn about a world that was already old before our world had even begun Ancient land once known as Tarseti, Kerma and Kush home to the Nubians This is a place where early Europeans came to study and learn from Africa and to study from the oldest people in the world Africans When you hear recent discussions on who are the black pharaohs, referring in particular to the Nubian pharaohs or the Cushitic pharaohs, those pharaohs, they often call black pharaohs in a way to try and distinguish them from the others, but they can't be. Because as we said, all the early dynastic and intermediate pharaohs were black. This is home to the world's oldest recorded religion, a place whose kingship and political system continued to bring harmony and prosperity to its people for over 3,000 years. Today, Sudan is the largest country in Africa, rich in oil and other natural resources, but a country culturally split by the Arab African North and the African South. In recent times this country has been greatly affected by the pandemic. by civil wars and droughts. This is a place where the great blue and white Nile meet to form the famous river Nile that runs through Egypt. This is an amazing land that predates Egypt, but for many, it's just another part of our world's hidden history. The question is, what happened? What was this ancient civilization about, and what left it in ruin? Why do we only know the story of the Nile Valley from Egypt? And why do we think that Egypt is somewhere separate from Africa? What do we still have and use today that was connected to this time period? We're going to peel back the pages of time and find out. out. I'm standing here on ancient holy ground in an area that was once part of the Napatan kingdom. Today this place is known as Jebel Baku which is an Arabic term that means holy mountain. It goes by this term because in ancient times, for over a thousand years, this area was the Kemetic and Kushite religious center of the world. Home to the Nubians, ancient Egyptians and other traveling Africans. Jebel Barkal is a very important site both in the history of Kush and in the history of Egypt or Kemet if you prefer. The mountain had a particular shape and both the Egyptians and the Kushites regarded this mountain as the holy mountain. That's what the Egyptians called it, the holy mountain. So at Jebel Barclay you have this great ritual religious complex which is set up in a monumental form that we see first when the ruler of Kemet conquers it, when Thutmose III is building his great temple there, and then it continues, and it's in that area that Napata is. The city of Napata becomes a very important capital during this golden age of Kush. The site has a long history. We can trace it back to the 18th dynasty period of ancient Egypt, where the ancient Egyptians saw it as sacred to their deity Amen. A really remarkable point in the landscape, and again, you have to be in the landscape, you have to have the photograph of the landscape to understand how different it is and why it attracts attention. And people have different theories about that, but they don't tell us, they just call it the Juwa'a. And they saw there a certain kind of form of sacredness. So the influence of the Sudanese Nubians in Egypt is quite clear, but on the other hand, the influence of the Egyptians themselves in traditions, in religion, is still people having different minds of is it originated from there or is it been... acquired or adopted as gods by the Nubians. So here at Jebel Barkou, in between Upper Kemi and Lower Nubia, we find much shared culture. And there's much debate around whether it started deep in Africa. at the heart of the Nile and spread upwards, or if it started in the north of Africa, at the bottom of the Nile, and spread down into Africa. We must have in mind that these political borders were not there. But the boundaries were constantly shifting in any case, and there'd always been a lot of trade between these two separate states, if you like. When you talk about lower and upper Nubia, you're talking about a span of land where people have got blood relations and they have got some sort of... sort of acculturation and acculturation always happening there. There'd always been a very strong relationship, and to me, the more I look at the cultures from these two separate states, the more similar they actually become. And I think we need to try and move away from some of the images that we see that show Nubia in particular as a very different country. We know for a fact that, as I've said, there was a lot of trade between the two, and that also many of the people... would move across the borders effectively over time. So there's always a very strong, close relationship, and at certain times, you know, they were the same thing. They were just one. It's like the relationship between America and England. England is the mother and father of America. The population of America are predominantly English-American. The presidents of America are English-American, even though America is an expression of the European consciousness. The vast majority of people are European. The predominant power is the heritage that England has given it. The Americans acknowledge this. They trace their lineage, if they can, back to England and come back to here. The relationship is a special relationship of power. Though America has power on this earth, England is its mother and father and recognised as such. That is precisely the way that one should look at the relationship between Kemet and Nubia. The religion of the Kushites is quite interesting. One of the important deities was Amen. Now, Amen is the pronunciation that the Hebrews give it, and some scholars agree to use that pronunciation. Amun is the pronunciation given to it by one of the old European scholars, Plutarch. In the language of Kemet, the word for hidden is iman, or amun is the way that we put it in English. And Amun is the name of God as creator who is everywhere and hidden, combined with Ra'a, who's the energy of the sun. That's the metaphor for the creator, so Amun Ra'a. But Amun is the hidden part, very much like the Christian-Jewish-Muslim concept of God as everywhere and invisible. The sun, the symbol of the creator, was reborn every morning. It reached its highest position in the day at noon, where it was known as Ray. Ray represented the Creator, God, the sustainer of life on high, at his highest point. When the sun set in the west, it was known as Amen. Amen is a Kemetic word which means hidden or concealed. Amen was... supposed to be unseen and therefore very all-powerful also because Ammon was responsible for creation. Ammon was responsible for everything, knew everything, understood everything. could foretell everything, and so on, the great omnipotent and omnipresent divinity. At this religious center, one of the main temples that is still here to be seen today was a temple that was dedicated to Amun. The ram was a sign that was always associated to the worship of Amun. It has been claimed that during the time of these temples, it was the astrological age of the ram, what we know as Aries, and that's why the ram was represented. They all worshipped God Amun, who was the same god as in Egypt, the state god of the pharaohs, whose main temple was in fact in Napata. Their deity Amen, they make it quite clear, Amen is a deity coming from Kush. And then during the Kushite golden age, they resurrect that same belief system and then they build monuments sacred to Amen and then Amen's wife or Amen's consort, Mut. Mut was the goddess of Amen. What's important here is that same site, the Egyptians had their belief that that's where Amen and B'mut came from. So that becomes a very, very important centre. Within the African systems, be they in Khemis, be they Nubi or be they Nkush, the male god has an equal and opposite female god. We see this representation in all African cultural systems that flow. Every nature in Kemet. had his female counterpart. So I reference a Tsar and a Tset. They were natural who complemented each other. They were co-equals. They are usually together in families, producing children. We have a man and a woman and a child produced as the union. We tend to think of deities as a family. It's not quite so biological. It's more religious. In the beginning there was only noon, the original ocean of chaos that contained the beginning of everything to come. Ra, the sun, was born and appeared to rise from the surface of the water. Ra then gave birth to two children, Shu, the god of air, and Tefnut, the goddess of moisture. Shu and Tefnut then had two more children, Nut, the goddess of sky, and Geb, the god of earth. And so with them the physical universe was created. From the union of Geb and Nut, four human children were born, and so the story of civilisation began. The Egyptian creation story, in many respects, represents the development of a civilisation and the growing of Egypt, I suppose. And it's coming out of something that's very simple and coming out of nature. And then it's being developed by man and being developed also into... Obviously one of the greatest civilizations that there ever was. The spiritual world represented the physical world. So as it was in heaven, so as it was on earth. The Africans came together in Kemet to build a heaven on earth. So what you see is this combination of a balance and harmony. The essence of what we find within traditional African society is an understanding of the totality of life that is literally... It's massively matrilineal and is paired with the masculine energy in order to maintain its force and its operation throughout society. If you suppress the female, you suppress 50% of the power of the creator. It seems really important and in many respects the male and female seem to represent the two different forces coming together. I suppose it's a bit like the unification of... and Lower Egypt in some respects. Because they understood that it wasn't just about gender. It was about the understanding of the energy and how it moves, how masculine energy moves and how feminine energy moves and how to marry the two, which created balance, life. The idea was to create a land which was like the land that was up in the skies and beneath the earth. And in that sense, they saw... that how they were arranged in families was also how the gods must also be arranged in families and how the spiritual energies of the universe must also be arranged in families because they are arranged in families. Three of the most important neturu in Kemet were Asar, Aset and Heru. Or to give them the more usual names, Osiris, Isis and Horus. These three deities originally came from Kush. These are very, very important triumvirates. Their stories are as much mythology as they are history. Now, according to Diodorus Siculus, who was one of the ancient Greek... historians. Osiris was originally a community leader of very early Kush. He doesn't call him a king of Kush, but he makes it quite clear he was a leader. Asar is regarded as the founding father of Kemet. He unified the two lands. He established the first nation-state in the recorded history of humanity. He is said to have introduced writing, the writing which the ancient Kemetites referred to as Medu Neter, or the writing of God. written or the words of God when it was spoken. He is also said to have introduced agriculture and theology. Osser decided to take civilization to certain parts of the Nile Valley as well as the other parts of the world. Assar married a beautiful Nubian woman by the name of Asset who was his co-regent, not his inferior, his co-regent. And when Assar decided that he was going to the Nile Valley, he was going to the Nile Valley. He was going to the Nile Valley. to travel to other parts of Africa to share his technology with his brothers and sisters on the continent, he left his wife Aset to run their nation. And he was very successful, very admired, and this provoked the jealousy of his brother, Set. And Set then plotted to overthrow his brother Asar. Set, or Sete in ancient Egyptian, murdered his brother. dismembered his body into 14 pieces and then scattered those 14 pieces throughout Kemet. When Aset learned of the murder and dismemberment of her husband, she fled for her life, and then she went searching for the missing parts of her husband's body. Aset found 13 of the 14 parts of Asar's body, and as she found each body part, she cleaned it, she anointed it with oils, and she laid all 13 parts out, and she literally remade them. remembered her husband, wrapped his entire body in bandages, and created the first mummy in the recorded history of humanity. As the set was preparing to bury her husband, she grieved because she was about to bury the man that she loved. She grieved because she was still a virgin. They had never consummated their marriage, and thus she would never bear children by the man that she loved. And according to the story written on many papyri and kimono, carved on several temples in Kemet, the spirit of Asar came and impregnated his virgin wife Aset. And then nine months later, the virgin Aset gave birth to their son Heru. In the case of Isis or Orsat, she is the original virgin mother and she is seen suckling Horus. He is shown as a child suckling his mother and he's wearing the pharaonic headdress, making it clear that he was born a king. Haru is the son of Osiris and he's the embodiment of order. He has to take over the kingship and he has to do that through a struggle. So Heru was born the son of a virgin. He was born with a specific purpose in life. That was to restore his father's kingdom. To do battle with his uncle Set and reclaim his father's throne. Heru would then take up his father's struggle in a way against his uncle Set. One that's classic. Battle's not so much between good and evil, it's more a battle between order and anarchy. And Heru eventually triumphs over Set. At that moment, Heru was transformed miraculously, transformed into a falcon. He flew into heaven to meet with his father, Asar, told Asar of his victory over Set. His father blessed him, and Heru then returned to Kemet as the legitimate heir to the throne. And when he ascended to the throne, the symbol of the Heru, Vedet, the winged... sun disk, was a symbol that was carved above the entrance of every temple in Kemet to serve as a reminder of Heru fulfilling the reasons for which he was born. And at the moment Heru reclaimed his father's throne and was crowned the king of Kemet, his father Asar was resurrected from the dead and took his place on the throne of judgment. According to Plutarch, What he says about Osiris is that Osiris was associated with the moon. And the moon has its lunar cycle and then disappears at the end of the lunar month. And then three days later is then reborn. And this is then the resurrection of Osiris after being dead for three days. So Osiris is then the god of death and resurrection. And Seth, or Zetesh. He's never thrown away. He's an important part of the whole series of gods. He's not the annihilating factor. Seth was not purely evil. Seth represented the forces of discordance. Zetesh still has to be there. If you take him away, you're taking away part of reality. But he shouldn't be king. So that balance between Hor and Zetesh is one where Hor, Heru, is meant to be very much on top. and ruling. Our ancestors were very inclusive and they knew for certain that, as I said, there was a little bit of good in the worst of us and a little bit of bad in the best of us. And they represented that in this way. So the reigning ruler in Kemet and this has taken over to an extent in Kush, the reigning king is Horus because he's managed to take over and rule. I'm here at Naga, at one of the Kushite's most well-preserved sites here today in Sudan. Temples were really important both in Kemet and in Kush. When you begin to look at the development of temples, the temples that we find in Nubia, the temples that we find in Egypt, the temples were universities. In many respects, they were kind of mini-universities. So you have your Egyptian elite living in the temples. They were developing language. they were developing mythology, they were developing the religion. There were places where the so-called priests, who were actually priest scholars, part of a system of learning. And the fact that the temples not only acted as places of worship but places of learning also. One was the house of the book and the other one was the house of life. Per ang, meaning house of the life, house of life. The education was holistic. So you couldn't start from scratch. Study maths without studying geography or biology. Everything was interconnected. These priests that came out of these systems were to be the guardians or the custodians of this cultural practice. They were not theoretical religious people. They were individuals who were both warriors, both scholars and both priests at the same time. It might be important to look at the system of education as a system of formal learning and the system of socialization as a system of learning. a way or a way in which one generation was socialized into the fundamental values and rituals and meaning of life of the community and therefore of the society. The belief was that you weren't born man or born woman, you were born male or born female. And through the process of passage, then you became male or you became female. The passage was intended to be arduous, vigorous. They would have had to have gone. to the temple and gone through certain rites of passage. The socialization has to do with becoming an adult, with knowing your roles as an adult. And the training was both physical, both mental and both spiritual. And a lot of this came to rest in the temple, where you had schools in the temple. The temple itself was not to be worshipped. The people themselves are... understood that they were the most sacred thing, not the temple. All the professions were premised upon somebody having completed what is called scribal training. To become a scribe was really to achieve the platform from which other careers took on. What I also find very interesting and very attractive about the Kushite civilization was that unlike in Egypt, where it was only the educated classes and the priesthood and so on who could read and write, in Kush, they achieved a high level of literacy. That meant that humble people could actually read and write and were encouraged to do so. In actual fact, I don't think there's any modern equivalent to one of these temples. They were both centres of scholarship, but they were also centres of religion. So the custodian, the intellectual custodian, was also a spiritual custodian, was also the warrior custodian. In times of war, it was they that pulled up their cloth and went to war. It was also they that kept the spirit of that nation alive. It was also they who kept the intellect of that nation alive in books and study. So there was no separation. Kemetian philosophy is so, so monotheistic. All of it was part of the one science, the one science, which is life. This science was not separate from religion. So the science and the religion were combined together. And it's that understanding that everything is interconnected, which is the spirituality. everything in the cosmos in the universe is related to everything else we're all interconnected there is an understanding that there is one central energy source but with different aspects the aspects are represented by how we we call in the western world gods but there is never never a thinking that there isn't one monotheistic central source or power there is the understanding whether you're in kemit whether you're in nubia or in kush or in any of these kingdoms in the nile valley or any of the african kingdoms that follow subsequently that there is one central source or energy from which everything comes from Clearly they share the same religious beliefs as with the Egyptians, with some additions, so to speak. Some local gods were worshipped, like god Apadémak, a lion god. And you have to remember that lions were common here up until the early 19th century. These historical sites found here in Africa are all that's left of the Nubian and Kushite cultures of people who lived all along the Nile Valley. These ruins are evidence of some of the world's earliest highly developed civilised cultures. These people had an understanding of astrology, medicine, philosophy. They had mapped out the world. They had circumnavigated and understood the planet that they lived on. We find that the people of the Nile Valley were responsible for developing the first calendar of 365 and a quarter days. Now because of the tropical or semi-tropical condition in the Nile Valley, there were clear nights and people could see the stars and other heavenly bodies. And it is very clear that humanity began to notice patterns. Think about this. How long would it take, for example? for us to understand the movement of the moon. The moon travels around the earth every 27.322 days. Because of this, the ancients based their month around a 30-day cycle. How long will it take for us to work out that the earth goes around the sun once in every 365 and a quarter days? The calendar was utilized as late as 4230 BCE. Now in order to come to that definitive understanding of how long it takes the Earth to rotate on its orbit around the Sun, you have to be able to make celestial observations for at least a thousand years to identify the patterns, to then correct the patterns, to come up with the most accurate calendar that has ever been used by human beings. The ancients of the Nile Valley based their year and months around the natural cycles of the universe. Each of their months was connected to an astrological sign, like our zodiac, and so their yearly calendar became a map of the Earth's human, earthly and heavenly cycles. And this is where the sense of time, the whole question of the calendar, the year, different months. came out of. So you had groups of people who had time on their hand to observe their environment and then to produce great works that recorded their observations. So you had astronomers. In terms of astrology, that was always, again, very important to the ancient Egyptians. And when people were born, they would actually have their charts drawn up. We see water irrigation. We see aqueducts. We see underground heating. Swimming pools, we see heated swimming pools. We have people who study rocks and minerals, geology. These very brightly polished ones, that's again a classic Sudanese. I think that particular colour combination, those happen to be the colours of the modern Egyptian flag, but actually it's a very, to me, very Sudanese combination, that clear white with dark and red. Earlier in the history of Kemet, you get a lot of carnelian, the red stone, coming out of Nubia. Precision drilling, iron smelting, precision iron smelting. You had people who studied plant cycles, agriculture. We see papyrus paper. We see glass making. We see stained glass. We see... use of gunpowder, not in weaponry, but in religious services and religious rights. You had people who studied building, how to build structures, what materials are best used to build structures. This was. This was a great golden age of pyramids, of temples, of writing, scholarship. We see elements and a good deal of evidence, perhaps of electricity. You had artisans who were responsible for creating great works of art. sculptures, paintings. Gold smelting, silver smelting, the creation of refined industries. These are classic faience beads. This is the colour that most of the material in this tray should look. Faience is simply desert sand, it's quartz sand, but it's ground down and fused to... Fairly high temperature and you add the colour from adding ingredients so that that amazing blue will come from copper filings that have been added in. So there's a very close link between the artists who are producing all of this material and the metalworkers because they're using the filings from the metalworkers floor. So the underpinning of order in Egyptian religious art and in the language is a pedestal, it's a block that looks a bit like kind of a carpenter's plane, something to make things smooth. And the word in the language of Kemet is ma'at, ma'at is smooth, and it's trying to make things on a smooth path. So that seems to be the... metaphor they use, and Ma'at almost means what is good. One of the most significant aspects of spirituality in Kemet had to do with the concept of Ma'at. Ma'at represented the ubiquitous powers that flow throughout the universe, that maintain the balance, the harmony, and the order throughout the universe and on planet Earth. Ma'at was represented by a female figure. With wings and an ostrich feather. One later came to recognise this figure of a human being with wings as a prototype for angels within Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Ma'at was fundamental to the Nile Valley because it was its moral code. The ancient Kemetians believed, as did the Africans from the south, that when one passed... from this existence to another, there was a point of spiritual judging. This spiritual judging was to weigh your heart with a feather. The heart had to measure itself and be balanced against the feather. You quite literally get the heart being weighed on scales to see if a person is worthy of going through to the next life. We can actually still see Nubians wearing the feather of Ma'at, showing their connection to this moral order. The people and the pharaohs... try to establish and maintain Ma'at. And they didn't have a word for evil, because that's, I think, what people think, good and evil, light and dark, do you know what I mean? But the opposite of Ma'at was Isfet, which was unbalanced. Ma'at, the feather, would then be weighed against a person's heart. And if your heart is heavy and it tips against the feather, it shows that you have... done things to have a heavy heart, meaning you're a guilty person. The idea of the feather was a representation of the female aspect and also of air, but also of the lightness of being, the idea that your heart was not heavy. We still say it now, my heart is not heavy. My heart was light. I had a light heart, a clean heart, a clean soul. They declared their innocence by reciting the 42 admonitions of Ma'at, some of which would sound very familiar to Jews and Christians. Those 42 admonitions were... I have not stolen. I have not committed adultery. I have not polluted myself. I have not polluted the land. I have not spoken ill of my neighbor. I have not spoken ill against God. I have not defrauded offerings. As a person's heart was weighed on the scale of my heart, as they recited these 42 declarations, if they were true to these declarations, then their heart... would be as light as a feather. This is where the concept comes from. And so it means that they would be pronounced Ma'at Keru, true of voice. The clean soul was the fundamental aspect. We see it represented in all the Kemetian philosophies which they had taken from their mother from the south. So the idea then of Ma'at is she represents keeping the law, keeping truth, keeping justice, keeping righteousness, keeping reciprocity. And what this basically meant is that we had to say that we didn't do these 42 cardinal sins. And once we lived a life that didn't contribute to those, we lived a good life, a righteous life. This event was recorded in the Book of Judgment by Jehuti, and then in the next scene of this very important document, of which thousands and thousands were produced because every person who died wanted to have this document to help them. Be able to recall these 42 admonitions. One of the very last panels shows Heru, the son of Asar, leading the vindicated soul of this person to his father. And it brings to mind the passage in the Bible, I think it's John. So Heru was the way. Heru was the truth, Heru was the light through which the soul of man was brought before the Lord of Judgment and then proceeded to go into heaven or hell to experience the truth. experience the next life. Ma'at is also called Sitra'a, the daughter of Ra'a, the sun god, the creator. And although you find parallels for that in European Christianity, the church is called the daughter of God, so you can see that kind of idea that the great force that protects good is related to the creator. So Ma'at represented the means by which A person can achieve their highest spiritual level of understanding. This wasn't about religion, this was a way of life, of being, of relating to each other, because relationships was our highest value, how we related to ourselves. So before you can relate to somebody else, you have to relate to yourself. It's often used as a kind of unique force you don't find in any other... society and the world. I'm not sure I believe that because I think every society defines itself by what it thinks is right. So in Kemet, the word of the language of Kemet for what is right is Ma'at. All of these ideas and concepts can be traced back to the Nile Valley, to Kemet, to Nubia, at least a thousand years before the advent of Judaism. Talking about the importance of spirituality and of spirituality itself, not only to Kemet, Kush and other places in the Nile Valley, but to all African society that remain African, even until today. And I think it's important for us to understand that to be African is to be a spiritual being, because our ancestors recognized being spiritual as the fundamental of human existence. From the start, whether we look at the Nile Valley during the Tarseti, Kemetan or Kushite period, we see a unifying system of understanding that gave the people their moral core. An understanding that may have changed slightly from generation to generation, but a knowledge of a divine force greater than themselves continued to be at the center of their civilization. Debates still rage about the length and continuation of the Nile Valley cultures and how interconnected they were. What we do know is that over time rulership changed between the different black rulers along the banks of the Nile. It appears that Kemet was roughly 3,000 years old before it had any interference from cultures outside of Africa. Asiatic people known as the Hyksos melted into the northern Nile society at first. and then by chance took full control of Lower Kemet and ruled for roughly 100 years. During this time, Kemet was inflicted with corruption and a depraved form of leadership. There's still debate around whether they were fully kicked out or not. Society in the Lower Nile Valley continued to come under attack from groups outside of Africa. When the Assyrians took over Kemet, they attempted to separate Egypt or Kemet from Nubia. This was a hard thing to do since both sets of people were entwined. Their families, their culture, their religion was part of the same culture and religion. In about a thousand years BC, the Nubians moved in and took full control of Lower Kemet, bringing the whole region under Kushite protection. When Kemet got into difficulties, it was the Nubians from the south who came from the south to the north to rescue Kemet. The Kushites, they decided to go into Egypt and to take control of the situation, to sort things out, to restore traditions, to restore religion, to restore law and order, and to basically remind the people in Egypt who they really were. They were trying to retake Kemet because Kemet was theirs. It was their bloodline. They were not foreign invaders. They were individuals who were part of the original bloodline, attempting to retake the bloodline and the land which was once their own. That line of seven or eight Nubian kings was an attempt to give an African renaissance, to return Kemet back to African hands after the Assyrians were attempting to cut off Kemet from the Sudan or cut off Kemet from Nubia. During the period of Kushite rule in Egypt, the way they administered that country was quite interesting. What would happen is the male pharaohs... would then rule from the city of Napata. Female rulers would then rule from Waset, which is in Egypt. In Africa, women didn't rule and men didn't rule. Men and women ruled equally with a co-rulership with different functions, where the woman was fully vested and the man was fully vested. What I find interesting and very attractive about this civilisation is the fact that women could actually rule in their own right, so they didn't have to be rulers because they were waiting for a boy king to grow up or they weren't ruling behind the scenes while the guy was the king and he was the official ruler. They actually ruled in and of themselves. Now, who were these female rulers? Some people say that they were the wives of the Kushite pharaohs. Some people say that they were the sisters of the Kushite pharaohs. Whichever be the case, they formed a parallel dynasty, and that dynasty would be aunt being succeeded by her niece, and that kind of line. Iron, the centre of that industry, was of course Meriwy. Meroe is already a city, a royal city, when the capital is further north at Napater. The royal city of Meroe is very important to our understanding of the achievements of the Kushites because it was actually a planned city. It was planned, it had a water sanctuary, which are known as the baths, it had temples, and it also had spacious homes on the scale of aristocrats. Today at this ancient site of Miraway we can see the most amazing arrangement of pyramids. Here like in other parts of the Nile Valley it's still debated whether the pyramids were used just for burials or if they were astrological markers and places for holy rituals. The city of Meroe dates back to about the 10th century BC, although this is controversial. If one looks at some of the older writers writing in the 19th century, they argue that Meroe is so old that it even predates ancient Egypt. But let's get with the conservative dates, 10th century BC. Scholars who have been to Meroe have all pointed out the same thing, the huge amounts of iron slag. Meroe was a massive industrial centre of antiquity and clearly a major centre of iron production. There's a production center. It's long before the Industrial Revolution, but in a certain way it's an industrial city. In fact, the early explorers say it's called Birmingham of Africa. Now, why... the Birmingham of Africa. Well, Birmingham, back in the day, was the centre of England's iron-working industry. As an industrial centre, it was very, very important. The main thing that people think about when they talk about Merui is iron. There was iron production there. Some people have even said they had steel production. In this area, it was rich in iron ore, so it allowed Merui to develop, not just as a major political and, with some, contemplative religious centre, but also as a major industrial centre, which perhaps traded with countries elsewhere. There are reports that the kingdom Kush had trade routes going as far as India and that many Nubians settled there, creating an area called Indus Kush. That makes you look at how people inside Moriwai related to one another and to the outside world in a new way. Meroe has a whole series of pyramids in a very good state of preservation. There are at least 84 pyramids and it's quite possible that many more have since been found. I'm standing here at the pyramid complex of Miro. Here in Sudan, there are over 200 pyramids that have been found here to date. This is almost twice as many as its neighbour in Egypt. These pyramids were built by the Nubians. And this is just one of the complexes that can be seen here today. Gold and iron were two most important trading products in Kush. Gold has a... Long history, because the reason why Nubia got the name Nubia in the first place is derived from the ancient Egyptian word Nub, which means gold. And what the ancient Egyptians are saying is that this is the last time. land of gold. This is where we get gold from. There was a reputation that the Egyptians had that gold was as plentiful as dust. Wasn't true, but this was a reputation that it developed. But where did... did the Egyptians get their gold from in the first place? They got them from the Kushite gold mines. They traded with each other. Herodotus mentions that gold was used to enchain prisoners. Now, he may well be exaggerating, but since there are images of even mundane things like golden tweezers, the fact that gold would then be used to make tweezers, that shows that it's not a far stretch of the imagination for her. for Herodotus to say that gold would then be used to enchain prisoners. Many of the things that we think of as advanced culture or advanced technology has its root within Kemet. We know that pottery was first used in Sudan rather than Egypt. The Kushites throughout their whole history were always very good at making pottery. They were very artistic, and their pottery is some of the best in the ancient world. That was also manufactured at Meroe. This is the great glory of Meroe, the pottery. Much of this has been conserved and restored. What's extraordinary is how thin they're able to make this pottery and how they choose every tradition open to them. What's amazing here is this pottery is over two and a half thousand years old and much of it is still usable today. This is much more an Egyptian form. That's a little baby feeding cup. That's just the mud of the Nile. Now the last ruler, Shepenupet II, was on the throne when the Assyrians conquered Egypt. They made their conquest in 663 BC. the last of the Nubian kings, Tawentumeni, for his last conflict with Ashibanipal, who was the Assyrian king in 664 BCE. We see Kemet being split from the African world, or an attempt to split Kemet from the African world. As the subsequent more barbarous invaders took control of Egypt, the kings of Kush were afraid that their central kingdom would be attacked, would be destroyed. So they moved their capital from Napata to Meroe, which is why Meroe grew. when the pattern declines. The kings moved their burial ground, their pyramids, to Meroe, and perhaps they moved the capital city even earlier, around 500-600 BC. So this dividing line that was set up by the Kushite kings was a matter of defence. a matter of safety. After this, there are no more black rulers of Egypt. The rulers are now Assyrians or Assyrian puppets. And essentially, the northern part of Kemet became part of the culture and history and civilisation of Assyria. Assyria became the focal point, the married line, the feminine line, the female line of Kemet, was deliberately usurped by the Assyrian kings. And therefore... or Shepen-Nepet II, was the last independent black ruler of Egypt. As the Assyrian kings took control of Kemet, then we have a resurgence in consciousness in Nubia. The Kushite people, the Nubian people in the south, resurged because after 664, passed by 590 BCE, there were no further attempts by the Nubians, by the Kushites, to retake Kemet. That's why Mero had a second renaissance. It had a renaissance before, but that's why it had a second renaissance. Because the Kushite kings, the Nubian kings, were no longer trying to take back Kemet. That's why the Meriotic script was resurged. Now, during the time of Kushite pharaoh Natasen, the Kushites invent this script, which scholars call Meroitic. And interestingly, they also borrowed from Egyptians the signs for writing their language. But let's be quite clear. Egyptian hieroglyphics themselves date back to the... Tarseti period, which is the first golden age of Nubia. So if we wanted to trace the origin of Egyptian hieroglyphics, we have to go back to very early Nubia. Basically, for the longest time in Kushite history that we find evidence of writing, they were using the same hieroglyphs as the Egyptians were using. Both cultures used the same. But later on, when the kingdom became more centred in Meroe, they devised their own script. But they borrowed... 23 hieroglyphic signs and a number of other demotic signs, to write in their own language, which is the second oldest written language in Africa, Meroitic language. They actually devised two scripts. One is known as the cursive script and the other one is known now as the Meroitic hieroglyphs. The script had 23 letters, of which 19 were consonants and 4 were vowels. There was also a word divider, so scholars know... when the words began, when the words ended. And it's only partly deciphered, so there's lots of mysteries in the work. And there are 900 books and inscriptions written in this old script. In terms of understanding the language, it hasn't been translated yet, and so that really hampers our understanding of the culture and the religion and basically how the people saw themselves and what they'd like to say about themselves. There are a couple of people who are trying to decipher the language and one of the ways that they wanted to do it was to speak to people who today speak what may have been a related language. Time is running out because a lot of the languages of Africa are not spoken by more than literally sometimes a dozen people and as the elders die and people don't capture these languages we won't have that link. People in the landscape won't know what the sound was. It appears that the Nubian Kushites created this new language to protect the last of their secrets from the invading foreigners. In doing so, they created a greater divide between them and their lost gem of the Nile Valley, Egypt. Then Egypt is conquered by the Persians in 525 BC. The Persian kings, like Cambyses, are ruthless and genocidal rulers who took over Persian rulership and then took over rulership in Kemet. This Cambyses attempted to invade Nubia and failed. His army died in the Nubian desert. That which was left was destroyed by the Nubian bows. If you don't know, then you should know that the Nubians were famous for having the longbow. Even before the 14th century Englishman said he created a longbow, I don't know how he came out with creating the English longbow, the longbow was the famous weapon of choice for the Nubian, the Kushite warriors. Then it's conquered by the Greeks in 332 BC. Then, of course, after the Battle of Gargamelia in 323 or 325 BCE, Alexander the Great, a Greek, a Macedonian, defeated Darius III. In defeating Darius III... Alexander the Great then became a pharaoh of Egypt. He took charge of Egypt, which is what we get the name from the ancient Greeks. That's what they called the country. So the Egyptian world becomes part then of the Greek world. And following his death, when his kingdom, which was so big, it had to be divided up amongst his generals, a general called Ptolemy took charge of Egypt. And initially as a satrap, as an official who was ruling there, and then later as a king. The. The Macedonian rulerships, Ptolemy, etc., he was a Macedonian Greek general, married into the Egyptian bloodline, married into the female Egyptian bloodline, producing Egyptians who are Greek and Egyptian at the same time and facing towards Greece. And he founded, really, the last resident dynasty of pharaohs. So then Egypt then became even more divorced and then, of course, there is the classic story. Whether or not there is historical accuracy to it is another matter, although we do have references to it, of Alexander's attempt to invade Nubia and the Candace Amarinus with elephants and warriors preventing him from invading Nubia. We have that recorded under several Greek scholars. The Macedonian rulers of Egypt did not conquer Nubia. Nubia remained essentially intact. The Greeks had had a lot of contact with Kemet and they saw Kemet as a place where they would go to learn. So many of the famous Greek philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, playwrights all went to Egypt to actually learn from Kemet. the Egyptian priests. The Greek rulership did not affect the religious systems in the same way that Christianity and Islam did. The Romans started to interfere with Egypt about 100 BC and that was because this Ptolemaic dynasty, the dynasty, Cleopatra was the last ruler of that dynasty, had started to have a lot of dynastic feuds, so brothers and sisters had been sort of arguing and vying for the throne. One person would be exiled, somebody else would take control. And the Romans were starting to become increasingly powerful and quite often the ruler who'd been exiled would actually run to the Romans and ask them to put them back on the throne. Then it's conquered by the Romans in 30 BC. For the Greeks and Romans, the Egyptians were Africans and when you get depictions of Egyptians, they're always shown people with black skin, afro hair, sort of small noses. Broad faces, full mouths, so they actually sort of have a caricature almost of what they see as an Egyptian. And the Greeks often confused Egypt with Ethiopia, so they'll quite often call the Egyptians Ethiopians. So obviously somebody with a dark face. And when they showed Ethiopians, they showed them in exactly the same way that they showed Egyptians as Africans. So there was no question at all that Egypt was an African country. It certainly wasn't seen to be European by either the Greeks or the Romans. Now the Romans and the Greeks and the Assyrians and the Persians came to Egypt because Egypt was the breadbasket of the world. The control of Egypt and the granaries of Egypt was fundamental to the control of any civilisation that attempted to control the world. Not only that, but Egypt, through its trade relations with the South, had control and access to the minerals of the South, the iron, the copper. The gold, the silver. The Roman system of coinage was based on gold and silver. Therefore, they needed access to the mines of the south. So the control of Egypt was fundamental in getting the trade from the gold and silver from the south to the north. So therefore, the control of Egypt was fundamental. Egypt was the most wealthy nation in the world, and it remains so. Through Assyrian, Persian, Greek, or Roman rulership, Egypt still was the most wealthy, not just in terms of gold and silver, which was tenuous in terms of its... its commodity value. But in terms of grain, wheat, Rome as a civilisation, like the Greek civilisations, did not produce enough food to sustain itself. The Romans saw Egypt and the reason they really wanted Egypt so much was it was a grain source for their armies. When Kemet was invaded by the Greeks and the Romans, they effectively ruined the country. They used it not for itself, they used it for their own country. So, for example, when the Romans were ruling in Kemet, They took all the grain from there and sent it to Rome as dole for their people because the Romans had a dole system where they would give people bread to keep them quiet. That was their dole. And all the grain that made that bread came from Kemet. So basically they ruined the country completely. But they also trade. They did things like animals, obviously for their gladiatorial fights, a lot of the African animals were shipped over to Rome. Because the Romans saw Egypt as this sort of exotic and interesting sort of another world almost. It wasn't just another country, it was a completely different world to the one that they were used to. So when you over-exploit a country like that and you take all of its resources and you use it for another country, obviously there's going to be nothing left for that country. And over time, Egypt became poorer and poorer, and I feel that this ultimately led to the final... downfall. So the relationship between Egypt and Rome was fundamental in Roman survival, not in Egyptian survival, in Roman survival. I think Egypt was crucial to Rome's development, both from a political point of view and that it gave it. it a very important, a very wealthy territory. But also because a lot of people in Rome became very interested in Egyptian religion and Egyptian cults. And also they must have been learning from people in Egypt as the Greeks had learned from people in Egypt. So I think that Egypt was actually very important for Rome, certainly Rome's early development. But all of this means, of course, that Egypt is getting more cut off from its neighbour from the south. It sees its relationship as being north. its connections are northward, not southwards. It sees the south as a trade route, a source of supplies and minerals and grain, and we see further connections between the royalty, the royal families, the political people of Egypt, and we see with the south, because the south has cut itself off and it's been cut off. Now, the conquests of Egypt changed the population, and so Egypt was already moving into an Afro-Asian direction. The calendar was actually adopted by the Romans. They decided to adopt the Egyptian calendar, so we've actually taken that from, obviously, the Romans then spreading throughout Europe. So, actually, Rome's quite a key and important player in us today, learning about ancient Egypt, because it adopted so many different parts of its knowledge and culture and was very, very keen to promote it. So, as Rome tightens its hold... Hold. On Egypt and the failed attempt by Cleopatra and Julius Caesar to produce a line of individuals, that line being destroyed by Octavian or Augustus Caesar. And at that point, finally Egypt loses its last resident ruler, Cleopatra. The line of pharaohs abolished. It's at that point that we have the end of dynastic Egypt under Roman rulership. And it was after that point when Rome takes control that we start to, in many respects I suppose, see the downfall of Egypt and the demise of Egyptian culture. Meanwhile, in Kush, the pharaonic culture continues. One of the great things about the Sudanese Mariritic Kingdom, they're one of these... Kingdoms that keep the Romans out. It's one of the kingdoms that the Roman Empire tried to conquer and failed to conquer. I think also the further south that the Romans went, obviously, the further away they're going from the Mediterranean and from Europe. And so arguably the more difficult that would become for them. I'm standing in the centre of the once great city of Miro. Behind me is a temple dedicated to Amun. Excavations done here in the 90s reveal temples with walls and statues covered with gold leaf, a remnant of Meroe's immense gold trade. At the heart of this ancient city, we find the remains of its spiritual centre. Here, Amun was revered in temples of the highest splendour. When they moved here, they built another temple to this god, the largest, as I said, apart from Napata, in the Sudan, which unfortunately now is in a ruined state, as most of the site is. The royal city was walled with gates and towers, and one of the old sources makes it clear that the population of Meroe supported at least 200... thousand soldiers and four thousand artisans and that would give us some kind of indication of what scale of city that we're talking about. Herodotus the ancient Greek historian made reference to a violet scented fountain where people would wash and they would bathe in these aromatic salts and the Liverpool expedition. at the beginning of the 20th century excavated in Meroe and found that Herodotus was probably talking about this bath that shares affinities with the Roman bath. What's interesting about this capital is that only a tiny fraction of it has actually been excavated. Perhaps I am standing right now on the ruins of the temple which is still to be discovered. In truth, at least 90% of it is still to be found. I hope to do it in the coming years. We did some preliminary sondages and we found again domestic remains but also a fragment of a temple from maybe 300 BC so we hope to find it. So we can only infer from the little bit that we've seen so far. And the little bit that we've seen so far is very, very impressive. Hidden under the desert surface of this ancient temple are the tile remains of its ancient modern beauty. Much of this area is covered with these types of tiles. The modern day neglect of these temples is only equalled... by the invading nations that came in and replaced religions and took over the land of these areas. The Nubian and Kushite culture began to slowly decline as the invading nations took control of the surrounding areas. As Rome became Christian, it began to spread its new world. religion throughout its empire taking religious control of the Nile Valley. For the essential part Kush remained essentially un-Christianized. However, on the eastern side of Sudan, in a place called Aksum, they created a Coptic religious system. This Coptic religious system, though essentially African, had a different philosophy, philosophical base to it, than that which had been there present, and a different thinking process to that which had been there present. The last of the Kushite pyramids is around 300 and something AD and so it would seem that the last burials of the Kushites coincides with the punishing of the Red and the Black Noba. by Emperor Izana of Aksu. This Aksumite kingdom was the kingdom that in 320 AD CE was the kingdom that eventually conquered Kush. The end of Kush brought... the end of roughly 5,000 years of royal culture in the Nubian lands of the Nile Valley. So as we look back over this ancient world, we can say that the ancient Africans of the Nile Valley had a civilization that lasted longer than the society we are part of today. At its peak, it had reached a great level of spiritual, social, economic and structural development. This was a civilization of religion, astrology, medicine, philosophy, architecture, art, engineering, and culture. engineering, mathematics, and much of what was passed down to us from the Greeks and Romans actually came from the legacy of the Africans of the Nile Valley.

The first golden age, which was called Tarseti, some people call that in translation the land of the bow. This civilization was older than first dynasty Egypt by about 200 years. They also domesticated animals here first and before Egypt, so pastoralism was very important. Depending on how far back, if you say 9,000 years ago, then you can say yes, it was probably more developed than Egypt. But starting from the 4th millennium BC, the centre really is in Egypt and develops from there.

Sudan was often ahead of Egypt in terms of developing technology because it had perhaps a smaller population. In Egypt there's not much need for human economy. You don't need to save on human labour because every time the Nile flooded in midsummer you had a huge reservoir of human labour as long as you were feeding them a living wage.

The ancient Egyptians themselves said that they came from the south of Kemet, ancient Egypt, which is further up, higher up the Nile Valley, closer to the source, and they identified the mountains of the moon. which are in modern-day Uganda as their place of origin. Most historians now accept, even the European, Eurocentric ones, that it is the movement of the peoples from the south to the north that gave birth to Kemet. However, what they fail to recognise is not just the movement of these one set of Africans travelling from the south to the north, but also movements of other Africans coming from the west to the east. They met and collected together in what is now Kemet.

That's why that civilization was so powerful, because it was a multicultural expression of the African experience. It was several sets of different Africans coming together in one place and creating a civilization. We travel through Sudan.

The largest country in Africa to learn about a world that was already old before our world had even begun Ancient land once known as Tarseti, Kerma and Kush home to the Nubians This is a place where early Europeans came to study and learn from Africa and to study from the oldest people in the world Africans When you hear recent discussions on who are the black pharaohs, referring in particular to the Nubian pharaohs or the Cushitic pharaohs, those pharaohs, they often call black pharaohs in a way to try and distinguish them from the others, but they can't be. Because as we said, all the early dynastic and intermediate pharaohs were black. This is home to the world's oldest recorded religion, a place whose kingship and political system continued to bring harmony and prosperity to its people for over 3,000 years. Today, Sudan is the largest country in Africa, rich in oil and other natural resources, but a country culturally split by the Arab African North and the African South.

In recent times this country has been greatly affected by the pandemic. by civil wars and droughts. This is a place where the great blue and white Nile meet to form the famous river Nile that runs through Egypt.

This is an amazing land that predates Egypt, but for many, it's just another part of our world's hidden history. The question is, what happened? What was this ancient civilization about, and what left it in ruin? Why do we only know the story of the Nile Valley from Egypt?

And why do we think that Egypt is somewhere separate from Africa? What do we still have and use today that was connected to this time period? We're going to peel back the pages of time and find out. out. I'm standing here on ancient holy ground in an area that was once part of the Napatan kingdom.

Today this place is known as Jebel Baku which is an Arabic term that means holy mountain. It goes by this term because in ancient times, for over a thousand years, this area was the Kemetic and Kushite religious center of the world. Home to the Nubians, ancient Egyptians and other traveling Africans.

Jebel Barkal is a very important site both in the history of Kush and in the history of Egypt or Kemet if you prefer. The mountain had a particular shape and both the Egyptians and the Kushites regarded this mountain as the holy mountain. That's what the Egyptians called it, the holy mountain.

So at Jebel Barclay you have this great ritual religious complex which is set up in a monumental form that we see first when the ruler of Kemet conquers it, when Thutmose III is building his great temple there, and then it continues, and it's in that area that Napata is. The city of Napata becomes a very important capital during this golden age of Kush. The site has a long history. We can trace it back to the 18th dynasty period of ancient Egypt, where the ancient Egyptians saw it as sacred to their deity Amen. A really remarkable point in the landscape, and again, you have to be in the landscape, you have to have the photograph of the landscape to understand how different it is and why it attracts attention.

And people have different theories about that, but they don't tell us, they just call it the Juwa'a. And they saw there a certain kind of form of sacredness. So the influence of the Sudanese Nubians in Egypt is quite clear, but on the other hand, the influence of the Egyptians themselves in traditions, in religion, is still people having different minds of is it originated from there or is it been...

acquired or adopted as gods by the Nubians. So here at Jebel Barkou, in between Upper Kemi and Lower Nubia, we find much shared culture. And there's much debate around whether it started deep in Africa. at the heart of the Nile and spread upwards, or if it started in the north of Africa, at the bottom of the Nile, and spread down into Africa. We must have in mind that these political borders were not there.

But the boundaries were constantly shifting in any case, and there'd always been a lot of trade between these two separate states, if you like. When you talk about lower and upper Nubia, you're talking about a span of land where people have got blood relations and they have got some sort of... sort of acculturation and acculturation always happening there. There'd always been a very strong relationship, and to me, the more I look at the cultures from these two separate states, the more similar they actually become. And I think we need to try and move away from some of the images that we see that show Nubia in particular as a very different country.

We know for a fact that, as I've said, there was a lot of trade between the two, and that also many of the people... would move across the borders effectively over time. So there's always a very strong, close relationship, and at certain times, you know, they were the same thing. They were just one. It's like the relationship between America and England.

England is the mother and father of America. The population of America are predominantly English-American. The presidents of America are English-American, even though America is an expression of the European consciousness. The vast majority of people are European. The predominant power is the heritage that England has given it.

The Americans acknowledge this. They trace their lineage, if they can, back to England and come back to here. The relationship is a special relationship of power. Though America has power on this earth, England is its mother and father and recognised as such. That is precisely the way that one should look at the relationship between Kemet and Nubia.

The religion of the Kushites is quite interesting. One of the important deities was Amen. Now, Amen is the pronunciation that the Hebrews give it, and some scholars agree to use that pronunciation. Amun is the pronunciation given to it by one of the old European scholars, Plutarch. In the language of Kemet, the word for hidden is iman, or amun is the way that we put it in English.

And Amun is the name of God as creator who is everywhere and hidden, combined with Ra'a, who's the energy of the sun. That's the metaphor for the creator, so Amun Ra'a. But Amun is the hidden part, very much like the Christian-Jewish-Muslim concept of God as everywhere and invisible.

The sun, the symbol of the creator, was reborn every morning. It reached its highest position in the day at noon, where it was known as Ray. Ray represented the Creator, God, the sustainer of life on high, at his highest point. When the sun set in the west, it was known as Amen. Amen is a Kemetic word which means hidden or concealed.

Amen was... supposed to be unseen and therefore very all-powerful also because Ammon was responsible for creation. Ammon was responsible for everything, knew everything, understood everything.

could foretell everything, and so on, the great omnipotent and omnipresent divinity. At this religious center, one of the main temples that is still here to be seen today was a temple that was dedicated to Amun. The ram was a sign that was always associated to the worship of Amun. It has been claimed that during the time of these temples, it was the astrological age of the ram, what we know as Aries, and that's why the ram was represented.

They all worshipped God Amun, who was the same god as in Egypt, the state god of the pharaohs, whose main temple was in fact in Napata. Their deity Amen, they make it quite clear, Amen is a deity coming from Kush. And then during the Kushite golden age, they resurrect that same belief system and then they build monuments sacred to Amen and then Amen's wife or Amen's consort, Mut. Mut was the goddess of Amen.

What's important here is that same site, the Egyptians had their belief that that's where Amen and B'mut came from. So that becomes a very, very important centre. Within the African systems, be they in Khemis, be they Nubi or be they Nkush, the male god has an equal and opposite female god.

We see this representation in all African cultural systems that flow. Every nature in Kemet. had his female counterpart.

So I reference a Tsar and a Tset. They were natural who complemented each other. They were co-equals.

They are usually together in families, producing children. We have a man and a woman and a child produced as the union. We tend to think of deities as a family.

It's not quite so biological. It's more religious. In the beginning there was only noon, the original ocean of chaos that contained the beginning of everything to come.

Ra, the sun, was born and appeared to rise from the surface of the water. Ra then gave birth to two children, Shu, the god of air, and Tefnut, the goddess of moisture. Shu and Tefnut then had two more children, Nut, the goddess of sky, and Geb, the god of earth. And so with them the physical universe was created. From the union of Geb and Nut, four human children were born, and so the story of civilisation began.

The Egyptian creation story, in many respects, represents the development of a civilisation and the growing of Egypt, I suppose. And it's coming out of something that's very simple and coming out of nature. And then it's being developed by man and being developed also into... Obviously one of the greatest civilizations that there ever was. The spiritual world represented the physical world.

So as it was in heaven, so as it was on earth. The Africans came together in Kemet to build a heaven on earth. So what you see is this combination of a balance and harmony.

The essence of what we find within traditional African society is an understanding of the totality of life that is literally... It's massively matrilineal and is paired with the masculine energy in order to maintain its force and its operation throughout society. If you suppress the female, you suppress 50% of the power of the creator. It seems really important and in many respects the male and female seem to represent the two different forces coming together.

I suppose it's a bit like the unification of... and Lower Egypt in some respects. Because they understood that it wasn't just about gender.

It was about the understanding of the energy and how it moves, how masculine energy moves and how feminine energy moves and how to marry the two, which created balance, life. The idea was to create a land which was like the land that was up in the skies and beneath the earth. And in that sense, they saw... that how they were arranged in families was also how the gods must also be arranged in families and how the spiritual energies of the universe must also be arranged in families because they are arranged in families.

Three of the most important neturu in Kemet were Asar, Aset and Heru. Or to give them the more usual names, Osiris, Isis and Horus. These three deities originally came from Kush.

These are very, very important triumvirates. Their stories are as much mythology as they are history. Now, according to Diodorus Siculus, who was one of the ancient Greek... historians. Osiris was originally a community leader of very early Kush.

He doesn't call him a king of Kush, but he makes it quite clear he was a leader. Asar is regarded as the founding father of Kemet. He unified the two lands.

He established the first nation-state in the recorded history of humanity. He is said to have introduced writing, the writing which the ancient Kemetites referred to as Medu Neter, or the writing of God. written or the words of God when it was spoken.

He is also said to have introduced agriculture and theology. Osser decided to take civilization to certain parts of the Nile Valley as well as the other parts of the world. Assar married a beautiful Nubian woman by the name of Asset who was his co-regent, not his inferior, his co-regent. And when Assar decided that he was going to the Nile Valley, he was going to the Nile Valley. He was going to the Nile Valley.

to travel to other parts of Africa to share his technology with his brothers and sisters on the continent, he left his wife Aset to run their nation. And he was very successful, very admired, and this provoked the jealousy of his brother, Set. And Set then plotted to overthrow his brother Asar. Set, or Sete in ancient Egyptian, murdered his brother. dismembered his body into 14 pieces and then scattered those 14 pieces throughout Kemet.

When Aset learned of the murder and dismemberment of her husband, she fled for her life, and then she went searching for the missing parts of her husband's body. Aset found 13 of the 14 parts of Asar's body, and as she found each body part, she cleaned it, she anointed it with oils, and she laid all 13 parts out, and she literally remade them. remembered her husband, wrapped his entire body in bandages, and created the first mummy in the recorded history of humanity.

As the set was preparing to bury her husband, she grieved because she was about to bury the man that she loved. She grieved because she was still a virgin. They had never consummated their marriage, and thus she would never bear children by the man that she loved.

And according to the story written on many papyri and kimono, carved on several temples in Kemet, the spirit of Asar came and impregnated his virgin wife Aset. And then nine months later, the virgin Aset gave birth to their son Heru. In the case of Isis or Orsat, she is the original virgin mother and she is seen suckling Horus. He is shown as a child suckling his mother and he's wearing the pharaonic headdress, making it clear that he was born a king. Haru is the son of Osiris and he's the embodiment of order.

He has to take over the kingship and he has to do that through a struggle. So Heru was born the son of a virgin. He was born with a specific purpose in life.

That was to restore his father's kingdom. To do battle with his uncle Set and reclaim his father's throne. Heru would then take up his father's struggle in a way against his uncle Set.

One that's classic. Battle's not so much between good and evil, it's more a battle between order and anarchy. And Heru eventually triumphs over Set.

At that moment, Heru was transformed miraculously, transformed into a falcon. He flew into heaven to meet with his father, Asar, told Asar of his victory over Set. His father blessed him, and Heru then returned to Kemet as the legitimate heir to the throne. And when he ascended to the throne, the symbol of the Heru, Vedet, the winged...

sun disk, was a symbol that was carved above the entrance of every temple in Kemet to serve as a reminder of Heru fulfilling the reasons for which he was born. And at the moment Heru reclaimed his father's throne and was crowned the king of Kemet, his father Asar was resurrected from the dead and took his place on the throne of judgment. According to Plutarch, What he says about Osiris is that Osiris was associated with the moon.

And the moon has its lunar cycle and then disappears at the end of the lunar month. And then three days later is then reborn. And this is then the resurrection of Osiris after being dead for three days.

So Osiris is then the god of death and resurrection. And Seth, or Zetesh. He's never thrown away.

He's an important part of the whole series of gods. He's not the annihilating factor. Seth was not purely evil. Seth represented the forces of discordance. Zetesh still has to be there.

If you take him away, you're taking away part of reality. But he shouldn't be king. So that balance between Hor and Zetesh is one where Hor, Heru, is meant to be very much on top. and ruling. Our ancestors were very inclusive and they knew for certain that, as I said, there was a little bit of good in the worst of us and a little bit of bad in the best of us.

And they represented that in this way. So the reigning ruler in Kemet and this has taken over to an extent in Kush, the reigning king is Horus because he's managed to take over and rule. I'm here at Naga, at one of the Kushite's most well-preserved sites here today in Sudan. Temples were really important both in Kemet and in Kush. When you begin to look at the development of temples, the temples that we find in Nubia, the temples that we find in Egypt, the temples were universities.

In many respects, they were kind of mini-universities. So you have your Egyptian elite living in the temples. They were developing language. they were developing mythology, they were developing the religion.

There were places where the so-called priests, who were actually priest scholars, part of a system of learning. And the fact that the temples not only acted as places of worship but places of learning also. One was the house of the book and the other one was the house of life.

Per ang, meaning house of the life, house of life. The education was holistic. So you couldn't start from scratch. Study maths without studying geography or biology. Everything was interconnected.

These priests that came out of these systems were to be the guardians or the custodians of this cultural practice. They were not theoretical religious people. They were individuals who were both warriors, both scholars and both priests at the same time.

It might be important to look at the system of education as a system of formal learning and the system of socialization as a system of learning. a way or a way in which one generation was socialized into the fundamental values and rituals and meaning of life of the community and therefore of the society. The belief was that you weren't born man or born woman, you were born male or born female.

And through the process of passage, then you became male or you became female. The passage was intended to be arduous, vigorous. They would have had to have gone. to the temple and gone through certain rites of passage.

The socialization has to do with becoming an adult, with knowing your roles as an adult. And the training was both physical, both mental and both spiritual. And a lot of this came to rest in the temple, where you had schools in the temple. The temple itself was not to be worshipped. The people themselves are...

understood that they were the most sacred thing, not the temple. All the professions were premised upon somebody having completed what is called scribal training. To become a scribe was really to achieve the platform from which other careers took on.

What I also find very interesting and very attractive about the Kushite civilization was that unlike in Egypt, where it was only the educated classes and the priesthood and so on who could read and write, in Kush, they achieved a high level of literacy. That meant that humble people could actually read and write and were encouraged to do so. In actual fact, I don't think there's any modern equivalent to one of these temples. They were both centres of scholarship, but they were also centres of religion. So the custodian, the intellectual custodian, was also a spiritual custodian, was also the warrior custodian.

In times of war, it was they that pulled up their cloth and went to war. It was also they that kept the spirit of that nation alive. It was also they who kept the intellect of that nation alive in books and study.

So there was no separation. Kemetian philosophy is so, so monotheistic. All of it was part of the one science, the one science, which is life.

This science was not separate from religion. So the science and the religion were combined together. And it's that understanding that everything is interconnected, which is the spirituality.

everything in the cosmos in the universe is related to everything else we're all interconnected there is an understanding that there is one central energy source but with different aspects the aspects are represented by how we we call in the western world gods but there is never never a thinking that there isn't one monotheistic central source or power there is the understanding whether you're in kemit whether you're in nubia or in kush or in any of these kingdoms in the nile valley or any of the african kingdoms that follow subsequently that there is one central source or energy from which everything comes from Clearly they share the same religious beliefs as with the Egyptians, with some additions, so to speak. Some local gods were worshipped, like god Apadémak, a lion god. And you have to remember that lions were common here up until the early 19th century.

These historical sites found here in Africa are all that's left of the Nubian and Kushite cultures of people who lived all along the Nile Valley. These ruins are evidence of some of the world's earliest highly developed civilised cultures. These people had an understanding of astrology, medicine, philosophy. They had mapped out the world. They had circumnavigated and understood the planet that they lived on.

We find that the people of the Nile Valley were responsible for developing the first calendar of 365 and a quarter days. Now because of the tropical or semi-tropical condition in the Nile Valley, there were clear nights and people could see the stars and other heavenly bodies. And it is very clear that humanity began to notice patterns. Think about this. How long would it take, for example?

for us to understand the movement of the moon. The moon travels around the earth every 27.322 days. Because of this, the ancients based their month around a 30-day cycle. How long will it take for us to work out that the earth goes around the sun once in every 365 and a quarter days?

The calendar was utilized as late as 4230 BCE. Now in order to come to that definitive understanding of how long it takes the Earth to rotate on its orbit around the Sun, you have to be able to make celestial observations for at least a thousand years to identify the patterns, to then correct the patterns, to come up with the most accurate calendar that has ever been used by human beings. The ancients of the Nile Valley based their year and months around the natural cycles of the universe. Each of their months was connected to an astrological sign, like our zodiac, and so their yearly calendar became a map of the Earth's human, earthly and heavenly cycles.

And this is where the sense of time, the whole question of the calendar, the year, different months. came out of. So you had groups of people who had time on their hand to observe their environment and then to produce great works that recorded their observations. So you had astronomers. In terms of astrology, that was always, again, very important to the ancient Egyptians.

And when people were born, they would actually have their charts drawn up. We see water irrigation. We see aqueducts.

We see underground heating. Swimming pools, we see heated swimming pools. We have people who study rocks and minerals, geology.

These very brightly polished ones, that's again a classic Sudanese. I think that particular colour combination, those happen to be the colours of the modern Egyptian flag, but actually it's a very, to me, very Sudanese combination, that clear white with dark and red. Earlier in the history of Kemet, you get a lot of carnelian, the red stone, coming out of Nubia. Precision drilling, iron smelting, precision iron smelting. You had people who studied plant cycles, agriculture.

We see papyrus paper. We see glass making. We see stained glass. We see...

use of gunpowder, not in weaponry, but in religious services and religious rights. You had people who studied building, how to build structures, what materials are best used to build structures. This was.

This was a great golden age of pyramids, of temples, of writing, scholarship. We see elements and a good deal of evidence, perhaps of electricity. You had artisans who were responsible for creating great works of art. sculptures, paintings.

Gold smelting, silver smelting, the creation of refined industries. These are classic faience beads. This is the colour that most of the material in this tray should look.

Faience is simply desert sand, it's quartz sand, but it's ground down and fused to... Fairly high temperature and you add the colour from adding ingredients so that that amazing blue will come from copper filings that have been added in. So there's a very close link between the artists who are producing all of this material and the metalworkers because they're using the filings from the metalworkers floor. So the underpinning of order in Egyptian religious art and in the language is a pedestal, it's a block that looks a bit like kind of a carpenter's plane, something to make things smooth. And the word in the language of Kemet is ma'at, ma'at is smooth, and it's trying to make things on a smooth path.

So that seems to be the... metaphor they use, and Ma'at almost means what is good. One of the most significant aspects of spirituality in Kemet had to do with the concept of Ma'at.

Ma'at represented the ubiquitous powers that flow throughout the universe, that maintain the balance, the harmony, and the order throughout the universe and on planet Earth. Ma'at was represented by a female figure. With wings and an ostrich feather.

One later came to recognise this figure of a human being with wings as a prototype for angels within Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Ma'at was fundamental to the Nile Valley because it was its moral code. The ancient Kemetians believed, as did the Africans from the south, that when one passed... from this existence to another, there was a point of spiritual judging.

This spiritual judging was to weigh your heart with a feather. The heart had to measure itself and be balanced against the feather. You quite literally get the heart being weighed on scales to see if a person is worthy of going through to the next life. We can actually still see Nubians wearing the feather of Ma'at, showing their connection to this moral order.

The people and the pharaohs... try to establish and maintain Ma'at. And they didn't have a word for evil, because that's, I think, what people think, good and evil, light and dark, do you know what I mean? But the opposite of Ma'at was Isfet, which was unbalanced. Ma'at, the feather, would then be weighed against a person's heart.

And if your heart is heavy and it tips against the feather, it shows that you have... done things to have a heavy heart, meaning you're a guilty person. The idea of the feather was a representation of the female aspect and also of air, but also of the lightness of being, the idea that your heart was not heavy.

We still say it now, my heart is not heavy. My heart was light. I had a light heart, a clean heart, a clean soul. They declared their innocence by reciting the 42 admonitions of Ma'at, some of which would sound very familiar to Jews and Christians.

Those 42 admonitions were... I have not stolen. I have not committed adultery. I have not polluted myself.

I have not polluted the land. I have not spoken ill of my neighbor. I have not spoken ill against God.

I have not defrauded offerings. As a person's heart was weighed on the scale of my heart, as they recited these 42 declarations, if they were true to these declarations, then their heart... would be as light as a feather. This is where the concept comes from.

And so it means that they would be pronounced Ma'at Keru, true of voice. The clean soul was the fundamental aspect. We see it represented in all the Kemetian philosophies which they had taken from their mother from the south. So the idea then of Ma'at is she represents keeping the law, keeping truth, keeping justice, keeping righteousness, keeping reciprocity.

And what this basically meant is that we had to say that we didn't do these 42 cardinal sins. And once we lived a life that didn't contribute to those, we lived a good life, a righteous life. This event was recorded in the Book of Judgment by Jehuti, and then in the next scene of this very important document, of which thousands and thousands were produced because every person who died wanted to have this document to help them. Be able to recall these 42 admonitions. One of the very last panels shows Heru, the son of Asar, leading the vindicated soul of this person to his father.

And it brings to mind the passage in the Bible, I think it's John. So Heru was the way. Heru was the truth, Heru was the light through which the soul of man was brought before the Lord of Judgment and then proceeded to go into heaven or hell to experience the truth.

experience the next life. Ma'at is also called Sitra'a, the daughter of Ra'a, the sun god, the creator. And although you find parallels for that in European Christianity, the church is called the daughter of God, so you can see that kind of idea that the great force that protects good is related to the creator.

So Ma'at represented the means by which A person can achieve their highest spiritual level of understanding. This wasn't about religion, this was a way of life, of being, of relating to each other, because relationships was our highest value, how we related to ourselves. So before you can relate to somebody else, you have to relate to yourself.

It's often used as a kind of unique force you don't find in any other... society and the world. I'm not sure I believe that because I think every society defines itself by what it thinks is right.

So in Kemet, the word of the language of Kemet for what is right is Ma'at. All of these ideas and concepts can be traced back to the Nile Valley, to Kemet, to Nubia, at least a thousand years before the advent of Judaism. Talking about the importance of spirituality and of spirituality itself, not only to Kemet, Kush and other places in the Nile Valley, but to all African society that remain African, even until today.

And I think it's important for us to understand that to be African is to be a spiritual being, because our ancestors recognized being spiritual as the fundamental of human existence. From the start, whether we look at the Nile Valley during the Tarseti, Kemetan or Kushite period, we see a unifying system of understanding that gave the people their moral core. An understanding that may have changed slightly from generation to generation, but a knowledge of a divine force greater than themselves continued to be at the center of their civilization.

Debates still rage about the length and continuation of the Nile Valley cultures and how interconnected they were. What we do know is that over time rulership changed between the different black rulers along the banks of the Nile. It appears that Kemet was roughly 3,000 years old before it had any interference from cultures outside of Africa.

Asiatic people known as the Hyksos melted into the northern Nile society at first. and then by chance took full control of Lower Kemet and ruled for roughly 100 years. During this time, Kemet was inflicted with corruption and a depraved form of leadership. There's still debate around whether they were fully kicked out or not. Society in the Lower Nile Valley continued to come under attack from groups outside of Africa.

When the Assyrians took over Kemet, they attempted to separate Egypt or Kemet from Nubia. This was a hard thing to do since both sets of people were entwined. Their families, their culture, their religion was part of the same culture and religion. In about a thousand years BC, the Nubians moved in and took full control of Lower Kemet, bringing the whole region under Kushite protection.

When Kemet got into difficulties, it was the Nubians from the south who came from the south to the north to rescue Kemet. The Kushites, they decided to go into Egypt and to take control of the situation, to sort things out, to restore traditions, to restore religion, to restore law and order, and to basically remind the people in Egypt who they really were. They were trying to retake Kemet because Kemet was theirs. It was their bloodline.

They were not foreign invaders. They were individuals who were part of the original bloodline, attempting to retake the bloodline and the land which was once their own. That line of seven or eight Nubian kings was an attempt to give an African renaissance, to return Kemet back to African hands after the Assyrians were attempting to cut off Kemet from the Sudan or cut off Kemet from Nubia.

During the period of Kushite rule in Egypt, the way they administered that country was quite interesting. What would happen is the male pharaohs... would then rule from the city of Napata. Female rulers would then rule from Waset, which is in Egypt. In Africa, women didn't rule and men didn't rule.

Men and women ruled equally with a co-rulership with different functions, where the woman was fully vested and the man was fully vested. What I find interesting and very attractive about this civilisation is the fact that women could actually rule in their own right, so they didn't have to be rulers because they were waiting for a boy king to grow up or they weren't ruling behind the scenes while the guy was the king and he was the official ruler. They actually ruled in and of themselves. Now, who were these female rulers?

Some people say that they were the wives of the Kushite pharaohs. Some people say that they were the sisters of the Kushite pharaohs. Whichever be the case, they formed a parallel dynasty, and that dynasty would be aunt being succeeded by her niece, and that kind of line.

Iron, the centre of that industry, was of course Meriwy. Meroe is already a city, a royal city, when the capital is further north at Napater. The royal city of Meroe is very important to our understanding of the achievements of the Kushites because it was actually a planned city.

It was planned, it had a water sanctuary, which are known as the baths, it had temples, and it also had spacious homes on the scale of aristocrats. Today at this ancient site of Miraway we can see the most amazing arrangement of pyramids. Here like in other parts of the Nile Valley it's still debated whether the pyramids were used just for burials or if they were astrological markers and places for holy rituals. The city of Meroe dates back to about the 10th century BC, although this is controversial.

If one looks at some of the older writers writing in the 19th century, they argue that Meroe is so old that it even predates ancient Egypt. But let's get with the conservative dates, 10th century BC. Scholars who have been to Meroe have all pointed out the same thing, the huge amounts of iron slag.

Meroe was a massive industrial centre of antiquity and clearly a major centre of iron production. There's a production center. It's long before the Industrial Revolution, but in a certain way it's an industrial city. In fact, the early explorers say it's called Birmingham of Africa. Now, why...

the Birmingham of Africa. Well, Birmingham, back in the day, was the centre of England's iron-working industry. As an industrial centre, it was very, very important. The main thing that people think about when they talk about Merui is iron. There was iron production there.

Some people have even said they had steel production. In this area, it was rich in iron ore, so it allowed Merui to develop, not just as a major political and, with some, contemplative religious centre, but also as a major industrial centre, which perhaps traded with countries elsewhere. There are reports that the kingdom Kush had trade routes going as far as India and that many Nubians settled there, creating an area called Indus Kush. That makes you look at how people inside Moriwai related to one another and to the outside world in a new way.

Meroe has a whole series of pyramids in a very good state of preservation. There are at least 84 pyramids and it's quite possible that many more have since been found. I'm standing here at the pyramid complex of Miro. Here in Sudan, there are over 200 pyramids that have been found here to date.

This is almost twice as many as its neighbour in Egypt. These pyramids were built by the Nubians. And this is just one of the complexes that can be seen here today. Gold and iron were two most important trading products in Kush.

Gold has a... Long history, because the reason why Nubia got the name Nubia in the first place is derived from the ancient Egyptian word Nub, which means gold. And what the ancient Egyptians are saying is that this is the last time. land of gold. This is where we get gold from.

There was a reputation that the Egyptians had that gold was as plentiful as dust. Wasn't true, but this was a reputation that it developed. But where did...

did the Egyptians get their gold from in the first place? They got them from the Kushite gold mines. They traded with each other.

Herodotus mentions that gold was used to enchain prisoners. Now, he may well be exaggerating, but since there are images of even mundane things like golden tweezers, the fact that gold would then be used to make tweezers, that shows that it's not a far stretch of the imagination for her. for Herodotus to say that gold would then be used to enchain prisoners. Many of the things that we think of as advanced culture or advanced technology has its root within Kemet. We know that pottery was first used in Sudan rather than Egypt.

The Kushites throughout their whole history were always very good at making pottery. They were very artistic, and their pottery is some of the best in the ancient world. That was also manufactured at Meroe. This is the great glory of Meroe, the pottery.

Much of this has been conserved and restored. What's extraordinary is how thin they're able to make this pottery and how they choose every tradition open to them. What's amazing here is this pottery is over two and a half thousand years old and much of it is still usable today.

This is much more an Egyptian form. That's a little baby feeding cup. That's just the mud of the Nile.

Now the last ruler, Shepenupet II, was on the throne when the Assyrians conquered Egypt. They made their conquest in 663 BC. the last of the Nubian kings, Tawentumeni, for his last conflict with Ashibanipal, who was the Assyrian king in 664 BCE.

We see Kemet being split from the African world, or an attempt to split Kemet from the African world. As the subsequent more barbarous invaders took control of Egypt, the kings of Kush were afraid that their central kingdom would be attacked, would be destroyed. So they moved their capital from Napata to Meroe, which is why Meroe grew.

when the pattern declines. The kings moved their burial ground, their pyramids, to Meroe, and perhaps they moved the capital city even earlier, around 500-600 BC. So this dividing line that was set up by the Kushite kings was a matter of defence.

a matter of safety. After this, there are no more black rulers of Egypt. The rulers are now Assyrians or Assyrian puppets. And essentially, the northern part of Kemet became part of the culture and history and civilisation of Assyria. Assyria became the focal point, the married line, the feminine line, the female line of Kemet, was deliberately usurped by the Assyrian kings.

And therefore... or Shepen-Nepet II, was the last independent black ruler of Egypt. As the Assyrian kings took control of Kemet, then we have a resurgence in consciousness in Nubia. The Kushite people, the Nubian people in the south, resurged because after 664, passed by 590 BCE, there were no further attempts by the Nubians, by the Kushites, to retake Kemet. That's why Mero had a second renaissance.

It had a renaissance before, but that's why it had a second renaissance. Because the Kushite kings, the Nubian kings, were no longer trying to take back Kemet. That's why the Meriotic script was resurged.

Now, during the time of Kushite pharaoh Natasen, the Kushites invent this script, which scholars call Meroitic. And interestingly, they also borrowed from Egyptians the signs for writing their language. But let's be quite clear.

Egyptian hieroglyphics themselves date back to the... Tarseti period, which is the first golden age of Nubia. So if we wanted to trace the origin of Egyptian hieroglyphics, we have to go back to very early Nubia.

Basically, for the longest time in Kushite history that we find evidence of writing, they were using the same hieroglyphs as the Egyptians were using. Both cultures used the same. But later on, when the kingdom became more centred in Meroe, they devised their own script. But they borrowed...

23 hieroglyphic signs and a number of other demotic signs, to write in their own language, which is the second oldest written language in Africa, Meroitic language. They actually devised two scripts. One is known as the cursive script and the other one is known now as the Meroitic hieroglyphs. The script had 23 letters, of which 19 were consonants and 4 were vowels.

There was also a word divider, so scholars know... when the words began, when the words ended. And it's only partly deciphered, so there's lots of mysteries in the work. And there are 900 books and inscriptions written in this old script. In terms of understanding the language, it hasn't been translated yet, and so that really hampers our understanding of the culture and the religion and basically how the people saw themselves and what they'd like to say about themselves.

There are a couple of people who are trying to decipher the language and one of the ways that they wanted to do it was to speak to people who today speak what may have been a related language. Time is running out because a lot of the languages of Africa are not spoken by more than literally sometimes a dozen people and as the elders die and people don't capture these languages we won't have that link. People in the landscape won't know what the sound was.

It appears that the Nubian Kushites created this new language to protect the last of their secrets from the invading foreigners. In doing so, they created a greater divide between them and their lost gem of the Nile Valley, Egypt. Then Egypt is conquered by the Persians in 525 BC. The Persian kings, like Cambyses, are ruthless and genocidal rulers who took over Persian rulership and then took over rulership in Kemet. This Cambyses attempted to invade Nubia and failed.

His army died in the Nubian desert. That which was left was destroyed by the Nubian bows. If you don't know, then you should know that the Nubians were famous for having the longbow.

Even before the 14th century Englishman said he created a longbow, I don't know how he came out with creating the English longbow, the longbow was the famous weapon of choice for the Nubian, the Kushite warriors. Then it's conquered by the Greeks in 332 BC. Then, of course, after the Battle of Gargamelia in 323 or 325 BCE, Alexander the Great, a Greek, a Macedonian, defeated Darius III. In defeating Darius III... Alexander the Great then became a pharaoh of Egypt.

He took charge of Egypt, which is what we get the name from the ancient Greeks. That's what they called the country. So the Egyptian world becomes part then of the Greek world. And following his death, when his kingdom, which was so big, it had to be divided up amongst his generals, a general called Ptolemy took charge of Egypt.

And initially as a satrap, as an official who was ruling there, and then later as a king. The. The Macedonian rulerships, Ptolemy, etc., he was a Macedonian Greek general, married into the Egyptian bloodline, married into the female Egyptian bloodline, producing Egyptians who are Greek and Egyptian at the same time and facing towards Greece.

And he founded, really, the last resident dynasty of pharaohs. So then Egypt then became even more divorced and then, of course, there is the classic story. Whether or not there is historical accuracy to it is another matter, although we do have references to it, of Alexander's attempt to invade Nubia and the Candace Amarinus with elephants and warriors preventing him from invading Nubia.

We have that recorded under several Greek scholars. The Macedonian rulers of Egypt did not conquer Nubia. Nubia remained essentially intact.

The Greeks had had a lot of contact with Kemet and they saw Kemet as a place where they would go to learn. So many of the famous Greek philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, playwrights all went to Egypt to actually learn from Kemet. the Egyptian priests.

The Greek rulership did not affect the religious systems in the same way that Christianity and Islam did. The Romans started to interfere with Egypt about 100 BC and that was because this Ptolemaic dynasty, the dynasty, Cleopatra was the last ruler of that dynasty, had started to have a lot of dynastic feuds, so brothers and sisters had been sort of arguing and vying for the throne. One person would be exiled, somebody else would take control. And the Romans were starting to become increasingly powerful and quite often the ruler who'd been exiled would actually run to the Romans and ask them to put them back on the throne. Then it's conquered by the Romans in 30 BC.

For the Greeks and Romans, the Egyptians were Africans and when you get depictions of Egyptians, they're always shown people with black skin, afro hair, sort of small noses. Broad faces, full mouths, so they actually sort of have a caricature almost of what they see as an Egyptian. And the Greeks often confused Egypt with Ethiopia, so they'll quite often call the Egyptians Ethiopians. So obviously somebody with a dark face. And when they showed Ethiopians, they showed them in exactly the same way that they showed Egyptians as Africans.

So there was no question at all that Egypt was an African country. It certainly wasn't seen to be European by either the Greeks or the Romans. Now the Romans and the Greeks and the Assyrians and the Persians came to Egypt because Egypt was the breadbasket of the world.

The control of Egypt and the granaries of Egypt was fundamental to the control of any civilisation that attempted to control the world. Not only that, but Egypt, through its trade relations with the South, had control and access to the minerals of the South, the iron, the copper. The gold, the silver. The Roman system of coinage was based on gold and silver. Therefore, they needed access to the mines of the south.

So the control of Egypt was fundamental in getting the trade from the gold and silver from the south to the north. So therefore, the control of Egypt was fundamental. Egypt was the most wealthy nation in the world, and it remains so. Through Assyrian, Persian, Greek, or Roman rulership, Egypt still was the most wealthy, not just in terms of gold and silver, which was tenuous in terms of its...

its commodity value. But in terms of grain, wheat, Rome as a civilisation, like the Greek civilisations, did not produce enough food to sustain itself. The Romans saw Egypt and the reason they really wanted Egypt so much was it was a grain source for their armies.

When Kemet was invaded by the Greeks and the Romans, they effectively ruined the country. They used it not for itself, they used it for their own country. So, for example, when the Romans were ruling in Kemet, They took all the grain from there and sent it to Rome as dole for their people because the Romans had a dole system where they would give people bread to keep them quiet.

That was their dole. And all the grain that made that bread came from Kemet. So basically they ruined the country completely. But they also trade.

They did things like animals, obviously for their gladiatorial fights, a lot of the African animals were shipped over to Rome. Because the Romans saw Egypt as this sort of exotic and interesting sort of another world almost. It wasn't just another country, it was a completely different world to the one that they were used to. So when you over-exploit a country like that and you take all of its resources and you use it for another country, obviously there's going to be nothing left for that country. And over time, Egypt became poorer and poorer, and I feel that this ultimately led to the final...

downfall. So the relationship between Egypt and Rome was fundamental in Roman survival, not in Egyptian survival, in Roman survival. I think Egypt was crucial to Rome's development, both from a political point of view and that it gave it.

it a very important, a very wealthy territory. But also because a lot of people in Rome became very interested in Egyptian religion and Egyptian cults. And also they must have been learning from people in Egypt as the Greeks had learned from people in Egypt.

So I think that Egypt was actually very important for Rome, certainly Rome's early development. But all of this means, of course, that Egypt is getting more cut off from its neighbour from the south. It sees its relationship as being north. its connections are northward, not southwards.

It sees the south as a trade route, a source of supplies and minerals and grain, and we see further connections between the royalty, the royal families, the political people of Egypt, and we see with the south, because the south has cut itself off and it's been cut off. Now, the conquests of Egypt changed the population, and so Egypt was already moving into an Afro-Asian direction. The calendar was actually adopted by the Romans. They decided to adopt the Egyptian calendar, so we've actually taken that from, obviously, the Romans then spreading throughout Europe. So, actually, Rome's quite a key and important player in us today, learning about ancient Egypt, because it adopted so many different parts of its knowledge and culture and was very, very keen to promote it.

So, as Rome tightens its hold... Hold. On Egypt and the failed attempt by Cleopatra and Julius Caesar to produce a line of individuals, that line being destroyed by Octavian or Augustus Caesar.

And at that point, finally Egypt loses its last resident ruler, Cleopatra. The line of pharaohs abolished. It's at that point that we have the end of dynastic Egypt under Roman rulership.

And it was after that point when Rome takes control that we start to, in many respects I suppose, see the downfall of Egypt and the demise of Egyptian culture. Meanwhile, in Kush, the pharaonic culture continues. One of the great things about the Sudanese Mariritic Kingdom, they're one of these... Kingdoms that keep the Romans out.

It's one of the kingdoms that the Roman Empire tried to conquer and failed to conquer. I think also the further south that the Romans went, obviously, the further away they're going from the Mediterranean and from Europe. And so arguably the more difficult that would become for them.

I'm standing in the centre of the once great city of Miro. Behind me is a temple dedicated to Amun. Excavations done here in the 90s reveal temples with walls and statues covered with gold leaf, a remnant of Meroe's immense gold trade.

At the heart of this ancient city, we find the remains of its spiritual centre. Here, Amun was revered in temples of the highest splendour. When they moved here, they built another temple to this god, the largest, as I said, apart from Napata, in the Sudan, which unfortunately now is in a ruined state, as most of the site is.

The royal city was walled with gates and towers, and one of the old sources makes it clear that the population of Meroe supported at least 200... thousand soldiers and four thousand artisans and that would give us some kind of indication of what scale of city that we're talking about. Herodotus the ancient Greek historian made reference to a violet scented fountain where people would wash and they would bathe in these aromatic salts and the Liverpool expedition. at the beginning of the 20th century excavated in Meroe and found that Herodotus was probably talking about this bath that shares affinities with the Roman bath. What's interesting about this capital is that only a tiny fraction of it has actually been excavated.

Perhaps I am standing right now on the ruins of the temple which is still to be discovered. In truth, at least 90% of it is still to be found. I hope to do it in the coming years. We did some preliminary sondages and we found again domestic remains but also a fragment of a temple from maybe 300 BC so we hope to find it.

So we can only infer from the little bit that we've seen so far. And the little bit that we've seen so far is very, very impressive. Hidden under the desert surface of this ancient temple are the tile remains of its ancient modern beauty. Much of this area is covered with these types of tiles. The modern day neglect of these temples is only equalled...

by the invading nations that came in and replaced religions and took over the land of these areas. The Nubian and Kushite culture began to slowly decline as the invading nations took control of the surrounding areas. As Rome became Christian, it began to spread its new world.

religion throughout its empire taking religious control of the Nile Valley. For the essential part Kush remained essentially un-Christianized. However, on the eastern side of Sudan, in a place called Aksum, they created a Coptic religious system. This Coptic religious system, though essentially African, had a different philosophy, philosophical base to it, than that which had been there present, and a different thinking process to that which had been there present. The last of the Kushite pyramids is around 300 and something AD and so it would seem that the last burials of the Kushites coincides with the punishing of the Red and the Black Noba.

by Emperor Izana of Aksu. This Aksumite kingdom was the kingdom that in 320 AD CE was the kingdom that eventually conquered Kush. The end of Kush brought... the end of roughly 5,000 years of royal culture in the Nubian lands of the Nile Valley. So as we look back over this ancient world, we can say that the ancient Africans of the Nile Valley had a civilization that lasted longer than the society we are part of today.

At its peak, it had reached a great level of spiritual, social, economic and structural development. This was a civilization of religion, astrology, medicine, philosophy, architecture, art, engineering, and culture. engineering, mathematics, and much of what was passed down to us from the Greeks and Romans actually came from the legacy of the Africans of the Nile Valley.

Transcript for:Nile Valley Civilizations: History and Legacy

Transcript for:
Nile Valley Civilizations: History and Legacy