Who Gave Ancient Egyptians Permission To Be So Advanced? with Dr. Kathryn Howley
Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness #195 January 5, 2021
Professor Howley is the Lila Acheson Wallace Assistant Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She is interested in how ancient peoples negotiated their interactions with other cultures through art and material culture, particularly Egypt and its southern neighbor Nubia in the first millennium BCE. As part of this interest she directs the Sanam Temple Project, which undertakes fieldwork at the 7th century BCE Egyptian-style temple of the Nubian King Taharqo at Sanam, Sudan.
You can follow the Sanam Temple Project team’s latest fieldwork discoveries on Facebook @sanamtempleproject.
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- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:00:39] Thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:00:53] Absolutely. Yes. In the Nile Valley, basically, if we want to put it in more geographical terms.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:01:17] Yes.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:01:41] No. So. So, Jonathan, right now he's pointing at the kind of triangular bit at the very north of Egypt. That's actually called the Delta. So that's where the Nile goes into the Mediterranean Sea. But if you go south, basically to the border of modern Egypt and Sudan, you get these really rocky areas in the Nile. And those are called cataracts and they're really important. And they were in the ancient world, because that means that you can't easily sail across them so they're almost like natural barriers in the river. And there's actually six of them. And they stretch from the southern tip of Egypt down to modern day Khartoum in Sudan.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:02:25] Yes.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:02:34] Oh, well, it kind of, so it splits in Khartoum into the Blue Nile and the White Nile. And one of them goes to Uganda, and the other one goes to Ethiopia.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:03:20] Yes. So, so ancient Egypt, we always talk about it as if it's one thing and it's, it's really not. I mean, even from a conservative point of view, you're really talking about three and a half thousand BCE all the way through to around 30 BCE. So you've got a stretch of millennia and actually you can go even further back. And there's human occupation in what is now Egypt back to eight or even ten thousand BCE. So it's, it's really difficult to, to generalize like that. And it's also really difficult to generalize because what a day would have been for an ancient Egyptian would have varied just hugely depending on. Yeah. Your social status, what your position in society was. Were you a man or a woman? This, this would have caused huge differences in, in how different people would have experienced life in ancient Egypt.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:04:33] So if we stick to kind of the traditional viewpoint, then from about three and a half thousand BCE to 30 BCE, which is when Rome, the Battle of Actium, when August-, the Roman Emperor Augustus comes into Egypt and there aren't any more pharaohs after that.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:05:00] Yeah.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:05:01] And then you have the Roman emperors ruling over Egypt instead.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:05:09] Yes, more or less. Yeah.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:05:18] Yeah.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:05:23] No. No, absolutely not. And actually, that's one of the questions that most excites me about ancient Egypt. I'm really interested in what happens when ancient Egypt interacts with other cultures. So that's why I do my work in Sudan. I also find it really interesting when the Romans come to Egypt and how they, how they kind of mix their cultures together and how people deal with that cultural clash. That's something I find really interesting. And it's, it's fascinating to study.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:06:00] Before the Common Era.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:06:17] Exactly. Yeah. BC and BCE is, it, it refers to the same time period. BCE is just a more inclusive way of talking about it. Yep.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:06:39] Yes. Yes.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:07:02] Yes, in fact, that happened numerous times. So if you're going all the way back to 3500 BCE this is in the era before pharaohs even existed. There was no such thing as a centralized Egypt. You had different cultures living in different places in Egypt. And from what we can see archeologically, it seems as if the society was a little bit more egalitarian. So you don't see huge differences between the richest people and the poorest people in society. And then once you get to about 2500 BCE, you get the emergence of kings. And that means that society becomes way more stratified. You have kings at the very top of your social pyramid, and then they are just way more powerful and richer than than everybody else. So when you have these powerful kings, you have a centralized government. And that means there's lots of temple building, there's lots of pyramid building, lots of resources being put into creating art and architecture.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:09:25] Yeah. Well, yeah. So how would we tell that? We, we have to look at the archaeological remains. So what, what can we actually see in the ground from these time periods. I think you could, Egyptologists would probably love to debate this question, but you could, for instance, think about the old kingdom in about 2500 BCE, which is when they built the pyramids. And we know that these are just incredible feats of stone architecture-.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:09:59] Yeah. Yeah. More than 4000 years old, in fact. And not just the kind of immense amounts of labor and effort and money that would have had to have gone into constructing them. But even kind of the mathematical knowledge that was needed in order to, to make them so perfectly. So even at that really early time period, we know that the ancient Egyptians were, were very technologically advanced.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:10:43] Yes. So, I mean, I can tell you, as someone who's learned hieroglyphics myself, it's not the easiest language to learn how to read and write. So it would have created, it would have required like a really long education, in order to actually become literate, I guess, in, in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. So we know that that's, that job would have only been opened to the highest elite people really. So if, if you were a scribe, somebody who learned how to read and write, you would have had a fairly lofty position in, in society. And I'm not sure whether that was really on purpose, designed to control information. But that was the-.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:11:41] That was the effect that it had because even with the most generous estimates, we think only about 1 percent of the Egyptian population would have been able to read and write.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:11:55] Well, it depends on the time period, but there were two main ones. The, one of the big ones is Memphis. So that's up in the north basically where modern day Cairo is. And that's a really great place to put an important capital city because you're really close to the Mediterranean and all these trading routes with, with all these other places. And then the other one is Thebes, which is in modern day Luxor. And that was really a religious center. So if you wanted to go and worship gods at the biggest temples in Egypt, you would have gone a little further south down to Thebes.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:12:45] That's a great question. And in many cases, we actually can't. And that's a problem we have for a lot of Egyptian cities. Ancient Egyptian cities, because they're all, both the ancient and the modern cities are built really close to the Nile. So what happens is the modern cities tend to be built on top of the ancient ones. And then you can't excavate them because someone's living on top of the archaeological site. So that means we don't actually know all that much about ancient Egyptian cities, especially in comparison with burial places and cemeteries.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:14:04] No, the Sphinx is actually by the pyramids in modern day Cairo, but the, for instance, Karnak Temple. That's a really famous one. That's in Luxor. The Valley of the Kings. That's also in Luxor. So Tut's tomb, that's, that's down there as well.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:14:28] Oh, goodness. Untouched. Yeah.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:14:38] Oh, sure. Well, I don't know if you've been following the news about the possible hidden tomb within Tutankhamun's tomb.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:14:47] So that's a possibility that maybe there is a hidden chamber behind one of the walls of Tutankhamen's tomb. And if there was something there, then it's highly likely that that would be untouched. So that's a really exciting prospect as, as we move forward. But, but most tombs have been looted in, in one way or another, because they were full of such precious things that- Yeah. Even in ancient Egyptian times, people just really wanted to rob them.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:15:40] I'm not, it certainly happened occasionally. But we also have very, quite a lot of pharaohs who we know lived for a really long time. So, for instance, I've just been teaching the Middle Kingdom to my, my students and there were numerous pharaohs in the Middle Kingdom who reigned kind of 30, 40 years or more. So. So, if you were a pharaoh, actually, you had a pretty good chance, I think, of living until you were, were old and old and gray.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:16:18] So later in Egyptian history. In fact, at the very end of Egyptian history. Yes. We do know that pharaohs married their sisters on a fairly regular basis, but that seems to have been the exception rather than the rule, thankfully.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:16:37] No, no.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:16:40] Yes.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:16:50] Yeah. So it's, average life expectancies are kind of hard in the ancient world because if you calculate them, it tends to be something really, really low, like, you know, 30 years old. But that's a little bit misleading because so many people in the ancient world died in childhood that that really skews the average. So basically, if you lived through childhood, you had a pretty good chance of making it until you were, I don't know, 50 or something like that. But childhood was obviously a very dangerous time. As for fluctuating throughout time, I'm not sure, but we know that the Egyptians, they, like everyone in the ancient world, suffered from many health problems and many of them were probably in quite a lot of pain when they died. So there's been a lot of anatomical studies of, of mummies and bodies done. Pretty much every Egyptian had really terrible teeth. There was a lot, you know, there's a lot of sand in Egypt and a lot of that sand got into the bread. And then when you eat the sandy bread that wears all your teeth down, lots of tooth decay, lots of diseases like malaria, of course. So that, those kind of things would have been absolutely endemic. So you might have made it to your 50th, even your 60th birthday, but it might have been quite painful to, to be alive a lot of the time.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:18:27] Well. Yeah, no, that's a great question. We, probably the best records we have are for the Kings because we know how long they ruled. So there's one king in the old kingdom, Pepi the Second, he came to the throne as a really young boy. And then he reigned for well over 60 years, I think. And Ramses the Second, who, of course, is the- the really famous pharaoh because of Passover. He also reigned for a really long time. So probably lived into his 80s.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:19:05] Yeah. Yeah.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:19:14] Yeah. Yeah. In fact, being a hairdresser was if you were a hairdresser to the king, then you were set for life. You were someone in the really high elite and you got a really swanky tomb. So, yes, you could be a royal hairdresser. That would be a great job to have in ancient Egypt. We know that both men and women wore makeup and they had some really elaborate hairstyles and they really loved wigs.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:19:46] So generally they actually shave their hair off and then they would put a wig on top of that. You could also be a royal manicurist. That was very important. So if you were, if you were an elite member of ancient Egypt, you would probably have a, an administrative job, maybe even several. So that could be in the royal household. That could be in the army. You probably also had some kind of priestly title as well. So you had some kind of role in the temple. Maybe if you were a little lower down the social ladder, you could be a scribe or a priest, maybe even an artist or an artisan for the, the royal tombs.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:20:37] Well, that's something that we kind of have to guess at really, because the thing is, if you're poor, you don't have many material possessions and that means that you don't show up in the archeological record, unfortunately.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:20:56] Sometimes. Yes, but the writings that tend to talk about poverty, they tend to be one, they're written by the elite. So it's a very biased picture. So a lot of the elite in ancient Egypt, they love to write about how great they were during their life and they'll say, “I fed the hungry and I clothed the naked.” So this basically means that they looked after poor people. But of course, we're only seeing, we're only seeing that then through, through the rich people's eyes. Yeah. And we have a very small number of literary compositions which tell us about kind of farmers, not necessarily really poor people, but people who would certainly lower down the social ladder.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:21:53] Yeah. So I'm not sure whether we'd call it a judiciary, but there was certainly kind of a system of legal process. So one of those literary compositions I just mentioned. There's a, it's a story called "The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant" and the peasant, the farmer, he gets wronged by, by somebody and he decides that he doesn't want to stand for this. So he actually decides to go and see the mayor and then the king in order to sort his problem out and he's able by going through this legal process to actually make sure that justice is served and that he, he gets to keep his, his possessions.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:22:43] Yeah. Basically, yes, that's exactly what happened. So a powerful man, kind of does, does him wrong and beats him with a stake and steals his stuff. And then he decides that he's going to stand up for the little man and make sure that he, he, he gets his, his just desserts.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:23:19] Yep.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:23:30] Yeah. So we do have a few references to gay sex in-.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:23:37] Yes, yes, we do. That's one of the most famous myths in ancient Egypt. It's called the “The Battle of Horus and Seth.” And Horus and Seth are the two gods and they're, they're battling it out to be king of Egypt. And they have lots of different fights. And sometimes one comes out on top. Sometimes the other one comes out on top. And then at a certain moment, Seth decides that in order to try and beat Horus, he's actually going to try and rape him. So, so this is a, an instance of gay sex. And it seems that from, from looking at that reference and also some other references in ancient Egyptian literature, it seems that the Egyptians, they, they were perfectly aware that people with same sex desire existed. But if, if you were the receiving partner, that was somewhat looked down upon. But if you were the, the senior, the active partner, then that wasn't quite so-.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:24:48] Frowned upon in the same way. Yes, I am talking about topping and bottoming, yep.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:24:57] Yeah.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:24:59] I know, I know. But it seems to be somehow tied in with ideas of masculinity and the fact that the man should always be the top in a sexual relationship, whether that's with a woman or with another, another man.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:25:28] I can't think of any examples from kind of real life. But what we do see is actually several gods who have kind of tendency, features of both sexes. So, for instance, as the god Hapi, who is the god of fertility and the Nile, and he's always shown with breasts, for instance. So he has a very androgynous body. And then there is actually one famous king, Akhenaten, who lived in about 1200 BC and he shows himself in a lot of his artwork, also with a very androgynous body. So he has breasts. He has kind of wide hips, which, which look quite feminine. And this probably doesn't talk about his actual body. We are pretty sure that he fathered children. So, you know, he, he was a functioning man in that sense. But it's probably related to these ideas of fertility. And, and in order to kind of show that he was a king who could look after Egypt and ensure its continued success. He chose to show himself with this kind of androgynous body, which really emphasized ideas of fertility.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:27:55] I'm afraid-.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:27:57] We don’t have any evidence for lesbians in ancient Egypt. Unfortunately, yeah. But, like, so many women in the ancient world, they never, almost never get to tell their stories.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:27:14] Now, well, she. She was special. And any woman who actually managed to make it onto the throne in ancient Egypt, like they, they were amazing. In order to get to that position and then be successful. We know that they must've been just forces.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:27:34] Ok.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:20:40] So there's, there's no law, but the problem comes with the religious aspects of the role of Pharaoh. So the the word for "king" is genetically masculine in ancient Egyptian. And there's no feminine equivalent. So if you're a queen in ancient Egypt because you're married to a king, you're actually just called "wife of the king." You're not called "queen." And then there's all sorts of religious aspects of the role, which, which basically means you have to be a guy in order to be a successful king in the Egyptian religious conception. So what that means, my favorite female pharaoh is called Hatshepsut. And she had to do some amazing things in order to be successful. And what she did actually was basically start portraying herself as a man in her inscriptions and in her statues. So it's actually kind of a misnomer to call her Queen Hatshepsut because she was, she was a King. She called herself King. She dressed like a king. She did everything that a king should do. So, you know, we should really call her King Hatshepsut, even though she was, she was a woman.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:29:02] She did not, no, but she did have a trusted adviser by the name of Senenmut, and we know that her relationship with her advisor was a source of gossip, I guess, in ancient Egypt. So there's even a very naughty graffito in, in a place in, in Thebes where an ancient Egyptian has gone and drawn King Hatshepsut having sex with, with Senenmut, basically. So we know that there were scandalous rumors about the two of them, but they were not in fact married.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:29:44] So she did. So she was, she was the reason she came to the throne. Sorry. Is because initially she was married to a king. The king then died and there was no son to, to immediately take over the throne. So what she did was take on the Regency for her stepson, who was at that time far too young to become, to become king. And then she decided she both kind of liked being on the throne and was kind of good at it. So she, she basically stayed on the throne until she died. And not just as regent, but as full blown King of Egypt.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:30:28] He did. Yes, eventually. Yes. And then about 20 years after Hatshepsut died, someone went around Egypt carving her picture and her name out of all of her temples. So it was almost as if they were trying to erase her from history. And there's been a lot of debate in Egyptology about exactly why that was. And a lot of people have liked to think that it was because her son Thutmose, her stepson, he, he did not appreciate having his stepmother on the throne. But we don't know whether that's, that's true or not. It might have something more to do with them, political events, which we don't fully understand.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:31:20] Ok.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:31:49] Sanam. You got the "n" and the "m" wrong, it's fine.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:32:22] So yeah, there's been a lot less archaeological exploration in Sudan than in Egypt. Mostly for practical reasons, because Sudan has been a lot kind of harder to access than Egypt. It's a lot less developed than, than Egypt. But recently, a lot more archaeologists have been starting to work in Sudan instead of Egypt. And the, the archeology is just fabulous. Yeah, really exciting.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:32:55] Yes, mainly, not, not entirely. But in the ancient world, just as today, people, people needed water to live. And there is very, very little rainfall in Egypt and Sudan. So that means if you, if you need a water source, you're really reliant on the river. So that, in a sense, makes our jobs easier, because if we're looking for habitation sites where people lived, we know roughly the area where we need to look. But there's also lots of interesting archeology now going on in the deserts. Sudan had a lot of natural resources, lots of gold and precious materials like that. And that was all quarried out in the desert. So a lot of archaeologists now are doing really interesting work, basically following the ancient trade routes out into the eastern and the western deserts and finding those really remote sites out there.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:34:03] So we normally call it ancient Nubia. And that refers to the other, the northern parts of Sudan, basically from about the level of modern day Khartoum up, up to the Egyptian border. But again, that's also a bit of a simplification, simplification because we know that many different cut, cultural groups were living in ancient Nubia and it was actually a lot less centralized than ancient Egypt. So you always have a lot more cultural variation going on in the, the southernmost parts of the Nile than you do further north.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:34:45] Absolutely. Yep.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:34:51] Yeah. So we know less about it, partly because there's just been much less archeology done, partly because Nubian cultures, for instance, they, they didn't build much in stone. They tended to build in mud brick. And stone, of course, preserves much, much better than mud brick. So it's, it's much harder to find the mud brick architecture in Nubia than it is to find the huge stone pyramids in Egypt.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:35:18] And then the other reason is that the Egyptians, of course, had a written language. They wrote lots down for us. So that really helps us understand the culture. The Nubians for most of their history were a non-literate people. So that means they, they don't have any, any written records. And that means that we're reliant entirely on the archeology. And that really limits the kind of questions we can ask. But it also makes the job much more exciting because, yeah, you don't have it kind of all laid out on a papyrus there for you.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:36:56] So the temple that we're working at is an interesting one. It comes from the middle of the first millennium, BCE. So it starts at about 650 BCE. And it's at a time when the rulers of Nubia actually became really, really powerful and they rose up and they conquered ancient Egypt. So for the first time in Nubia's and Egypt's history, it was the Black civilizations from the south that conquered the Egyptian civilization to the north. And that's super interesting because the Nubian kings, they adopted lots of Egyptian cultural elements. So they became converts to the Egyptian religion. They started building temples in an Egyptian style, just like the ones we're looking at. But they only pick- picked and chose the bits that were useful to them. So what you get is kind of this super interesting culture where on the surface it looks very Egyptian. But if you start just poking a little bit more, suddenly, all of these strange elements come out, which are actually elements of the Nubian culture. And a lot of those elements are things we haven't been able to see before because they've been building in mud brick, for instance, instead of stone. But now they're building like Egyptians. So they build a stone temple. And there's all sorts of interesting, interesting things there about how the Nubians kind of adopted the, the Egyptian culture and also kind of used it to serve their own interests.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:37:48] So the temple where we work is 650, but the Nubians actually invaded Egypt in approximately 720 BCE. But they, first of all, they were just in the south. They went up to Thebes, modern day Luxor, and then King Taharqa, who's the guy who built our temple. He was probably the greatest of all the Nubian pharaohs. He goes all the way up to the Mediterranean Sea. And even further into kind of Syria, Palestine, in, in the Middle East as well. So he, he basically has an empire. So he, he has a lot of territory that he's in control of.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:38:38] Sure. So he's often, because he was king of Egypt. Right? So he, he appears in all of the, the histories of ancient Egypt. But it's really important to remember that he, you know, Egyptian was probably not his native language. He came from a culture which was much further south, which has a lot more commonalities and links to other sub-Saharan African cultures than it, than it also does to Egypt, for instance. So he's, he conquers Egypt, but he is not himself an Egyptian. And I think that's, that's really important.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:39:29] No. So. So, at the time when the Nubian Kings conquered Egypt, they were actually, as far as we can tell, reasonably popular because they, they were really religious. So they came into Egypt and they spent all of this money and resources on building beautiful temples and adding to temples, which already existed and basically giving lots of money to all the temples. So from that sense, I think probably they, they would have been welcomed, at least by certain sections of the population, as kind of true pious adherents of the Egyptian religion. However, after about 100 years, some of the local Egyptian rulers started getting a little bit antsy about the fact that it was Nubians ruling over them. So then an Egyptian king comes back to power. And then just like as happened with Hatshepsut, he sends his craftsmen out with their chisels and they go round all of those lovely temples that the Nubians built and they chop out all of the names. They leave the temples because they were really nicely built. And you don't want to offend the gods, but they just take out the Nubian names.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:40:56] Yes. So initially, it's really interesting to look at how this develops. So. So, first of all, what they do is they borrow the Egyptian language. So they would have been speaking Nubian. But if they wanted to write anything, they would do it in Egyptian hieroglyphic. But obviously, that's not, that's not a great fix because not every Nubian would have spoken Egyptian. Also Egyptian hieroglyphics, it just, like, that's that's a lot of birds to write in a row.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:41:26] You know, it's, it's it takes a long time. So what they did was they then borrowed the Egyptian alphabet, if you like. And they simplified it, and then they used that alphabet in order to write their own language, which was a language known as Meroitic. So this is exactly what I was talking about. They take the bits that are useful to them and then they adapt them so that it actually fits their own needs. So then we have this whole new language, Meroitic, and we have quite a lot of texts written in it. The only frustrating thing is it's still undeciphered. So we have all of these wonderful texts which we're pretty sure are describing kind of interesting historical events, and we can't read them yet.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:42:23] So we know how it sounded because they used the Egyptian alphabet. So we can, the problem is that Merotic doesn't seem to be related to any other language that we know. And that's really a problem for, for translating it. So there's, there's a lot of interesting work being done right now, trying to look at various modern African languages to see whether there are any connections and some connections have been found. So we can read very small parts here and there and be pretty sure we know what, what it says, but kind of the more intricate grammar, longer inscriptions, that still escapes us. And it's just gonna take a really long time, probably. And, hopefully, the more texts that are found by archaeologists, the easier it will become. Because the bigger your, your corpus is, the bigger the number of texts you have, the easier it becomes to decipher a language.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:43:33] Yes. That would be amazing.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:43:37] But nobody has found one yet. It, it might. It certainly could. But we haven't found it yet, unfortunately. I'll keep my fingers crossed.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:44:07] So the Nubian rulers, they, they have a bit of bad luck, really, because unfortunately, they're ruling at a time when the whole Mediterranean region is, is kind of in a, in a bit of, a bit of a rough patch. So you also have the Assyrian Empire in modern day Iraq. And the rulers in the Assyrian Empire also want their own empire to play with. So they invade Egypt and they are really powerful. And unfortunately, that means the Nubians, they can't really deal with it. So they have to, they have to go back south. And they, they are just ruling over Nubia from that point on. But they still have powerful kings and they now have this incredible tradition of stoneworking, of religious ritual. And the longer they, the longer time goes on and they're not ruling over Egypt, kind of the more it diverges from Egyptian traditions. So they continue, for instance, to bury their rulers under pyramid grids. And one really cool fact, which very few people know, is that there are actually more pyramids now in Sudan than there are in Egypt. And that's because of these Meroitic rulers in the last half of the first millennium, BCE, who just go on a pyramid building spree. And all of the kings and all of the queens are buried under these really awesome, very steep sided pyramids. So the, the archeology is fantastic and the archaeological sites in Sudan are fantastic. And it's, it's really worth the visit for anyone interested in archeology because the sites are just amazing.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:46:12] Well, one of the coolest ways in which it differed is that women had a really prominent role in Nubian society and women could be queens, ruling queens in Nubia. So there were lots of really prominent female rulers of Nubia at this time when Egypt is still being ruled by men. And they are shown on, on monuments as these gloriously strong and curvy women holding huge weapons and smiting all the enemies of Nubia and making sure that Nubia is, is doing, doing okay. So, yeah, I think that's my, my favorite aspect of Nubian cultures at that time period.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:47:16] I, off the top of my head, I can't think of any, I'm afraid. Sorry.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:47:25] I know. Yeah, that would, that would be nice.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:47:30] I'll look for it, Jonathan.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:47:51] Yeah. Just. Ancient Egypt is wonderful. And ancient Nubia is even cooler. So I really encourage you. Not many people have heard of ancient Nubia and parts of, parts of the reason why is because it's, it's a Black African culture. So it's never been part of our kind of cultural narrative. But I think it's really important that people know a little bit more about it and they understand how, how, how many cultural achievements ancient Africans actually had. So I would encourage them to go look that up on Wikipedia, learn a little bit more about it. You’ll be glad you did.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:48:36] Oh yeah.
- KATHRYN HOWLEY [00:49:51] It has been my pleasure. I would love to.