about a hundred years ago American archaeologist George Reisner excavated many cush monuments and discovered the tombs of its most important kings George Reiser was an amazing pioneer of archaeology and cush he started in 1908 he worked into the 1930s very difficult conditions and yet he managed to establish a basic chronology not only of the broad archeological periods but of all the kings of cush he put them all into order and it's an order that we still basically use today at ELQ uru Reisner got to the bottom of every pyramid even as he was awed by the pyramids he excavated he refused to believe they could have been built by the ancestors of the black africans he saw all around him his prejudices even seemed to have clouded his eyesight in 1916 when he discovered beautiful black granite statues of the great ku shite kings he argued they were not real likenesses instead he proposed that the kings and the builders of all the co shake monuments had actually been light-skinned foreigners I think it just challenges so fundamentally some of his personal views about what people in the Sudan were capable of and that he finds it really difficult to suddenly read the evidence such a huge challenge that he can't get over it reissner's writings about the Kushites are a window into his warped racial beliefs it's very race appears to be a product of its poverty and its isolation a negroid Egyptian mixture fused together on a desert riverbank too far away and too poor to attract a stronger and better race Reisner wasn't the last or the first to disparage the Kushites [Music]