Sunken Cities Lecture Series - Egypt and Kush: Superpowers of the Nile Valley

hello everyone and welcome if you're just coming on in now you're here for the first of our sunken cities lecture series at the virginia museum of fine arts thank you so much for joining us this evening we have a fantastic audience with us tonight so i just want to give enough time for everyone to get in and settled so welcome again everyone to the first of our sunken cities lecture series hosted by the virginia museum of fine arts my name is izzy fuqua i'm the adult programs coordinator for the museum and i've had the pleasure of working with the coordinating curator for the special exhibition dr peter schertz to select five fantastic scholars for our sunken cities lecture series the first of which is tonight so thank you all for tuning in so with that i'm going to turn it over to vmfa director alex margis well thank you izzy and welcome everybody uh as izzy mentioned this is the first of a five-part lecture series uh that's going to explore the themes in the this special exhibition treasures of ancient egypt sunken cities uh we're going to have scholars and archaeologists and conservators uh who are gonna present topics that shed new light on the fascinating discoveries uh behind this great treasure now if you have not been to the exhibition uh you are in for a treat uh sunken cities uh is one of the most fascinating shows of antiquities i've ever seen and of course i started out my career as an archaeologist so we want to say thanks to dominion ng as the presenting sponsor and all of our sponsors for allowing us to bring this from the egyptian museum in cairo uh to virginia this is the last stop on its american tour it's already been to the british museum and other museums around europe uh in several museums in the united states in los angeles minneapolis and st louis and now uh finishing in richmond virginia uh and so this is going to this lecture tonight uh which is going to be quite fascinating explores the complex relationship between the two superpowers in the ancient nile valley the kingdom of cush down in nubia and then obviously the egyptian kingdom itself um and so i want to say thank you izzy for all of your hard work to to get this queued up but also to peter schertz and our entire curatorial and exhibition team all the people that made it and i will tell you this uh a couple of weeks ago uh the secretary general uh of the supreme council of egyptian antiquities this is the the person who is in charge of all of the archaeological sites of everything around ancient egypt he came to tour the exhibition he was stunned of all of the places that this exhibition has toured he thought this installation the lighting the design the flow the colors everything were absolutely perfect by far the best on its tour so to our team and to peter who's been our coordinating curator here on this end uh thank you very much uh because obviously and that was that was not uh you know praise uh except in earnest uh and the chem from somebody uh of his stature was heartwarming to to all of us um tonight we have dr caroline uh rusholo uh who is the curator of ancient art at the north carolina museum of art down in raleigh and if you've not been down there lately they opened a new building uh 10 years ago just about the same time in fact a month earlier than us and they have a splendid collection of ancient material from the 18 mediterranean as well as the ancient americas and she's the curator overseeing all of those collections caroline has a phd from the university of toronto she's originally from quebec and her phd is in egyptology and newbiology uh she's focused on art architecture and archaeology of the ancient uh sudan and egypt uh and tonight she's gonna be uh talking about these two kingdoms uh and two superpowers in the ancient nile valley uh in her spare time in addition to lecturing across the country and abroad she's a board member of the international committee for egyptology and she is also a member of the international council of the museum's icon so it's my great pleasure to introduce our colleague and our neighbor dr caroline richelle thank you for this wonderful introduction and also thank you for inviting me to a lecture for this wonderful program as alex mentioned i will be talking about the superpowers of the nile valley um i think this is very relevant today to remind ourselves that ancient egypt is an ancient african civilization and i think also um it's perhaps um even more important to note that egypt is not the only ancient civilization along the nile that there is another one uh the kingdom of kush that is very often left uh out of the history books so today what i would like to do is explore these two civilizations um uh side by side see how they uh interact with each other and as i go through the slides with you as i talk about uh egypt and kush what i would like you to do is try to view nubia and kush on their own terms as cultures um different from ancient egypt and not to see them through a lens that is biased by ancient egypt and if you are able to do that you're actually a whole lot better than the archaeologists and explorers who uh explored nubia a hundred years plus um ago so nubia many of you might associate uh the ass one damn and the transfer of the superb temples that we have there um caroline i'm so sorry to interrupt i'm not sure we're seeing your powerpoint if you have if you're wanting it to be up right now uh yes it is up let's try again if any of our participants would like to jump on the chat and let us know if they're seeing it that would be great okay i'm seeing it now caroline thank you so sorry that's all right there we go we call this the curse of the pharaohs okay so as i was saying um nubia which i hope now you can all see uh you may uh know this because uh of the as1 uh dam and the temples that were removed so to save them from the flooding of nasser and lake nubia is the land of the cataracts and cataracts are these rapids along the nile uh river that make um sailing a little bit more arduous than it does in egypt proper now the ancient egyptians uh called this land the land of the bow in reference to the uh phenomenal archers that came from uh south of the border and here we see two lovely images a model from the middle kingdom and a relief from the old kingdom showing the nubian archers with their bows and their arrow this was the general term for this part of south of the border um kush specifically is upper nubia and we will be talking about three main areas three major cities in the kingdom uh of kush kerma napata and maraway that you see on the map here um so kush is really that big s bend of the nile right here that is the kingdom of kush uh this is the modern uh the ancient frontier border with uh egypt this is the modern one right here so nubia is actually a geographic region both in egypt and in sudan so in our um excursion today we will be following this chronological uh framework um comparing and contrasting egypt and sudan you're more likely to be familiar with egypt than sudan so i want to use that as sort of your base to introduce these important cultures from nubia during the old kingdom which is the age of the pyramids we know that uh the egyptians sent expeditions um to nubia we know this from the two inscriptions biographies of uh people who were sent down there um as expedition leaders uh from even before the old kingdom uh the egyptians had realized that nubia had great uh resources minerals lots of gold incense oils ebony animals that were not living in egypt so the egyptians basically go shopping in nubia to get all this material so we see some of these examples here ostrich eggs ebony wood some gold here's a cute little monkey some ostrich feathers incense down here elephant tusk we have leopard skins and traveling to nubia is not necessarily easy but as you can see on the map there are desert routes that you can take to get there because the nile is hard to navigate because of these cataracts in the middle kingdom clearly something is happening down south because suddenly the kings of this period uh start building forts in the second cataract region so there is a power sort of a phantom menace if you will that the egyptians know is there and there that makes them very weary and they start building these forts and when you look at the map it really brings the point home you have a dozen forts right there or lookouts and signaling posts uh of all all over the second uh cataract and some of these like the fort at bu hen is absolutely massive this enormous mud brick structures keeping an eye on what's going going on south of the border is what the egyptians um they're they're doing they're still trading but there's something that that is actually worrying them and that phantom menace is the kingdom of karma situated near the third cataract it's a rather large city 25 hectares is about uh 62 football fields so that's quite um large and i'm giving you some information here about the excavations it's been dug up in the 19 teens and is still being explored today by the swiss mission since the 70s this is a plan of the city if you were to visit the national museum in khartoum you see it's a very large city this does not include the cemeteries and the center of this city is this large mud brick um building called a de fufa which actually means mud brick building um and so this is really at the center at the core of this ancient city it has multiple uh phases of construction and um as you if you were lucky enough to go on top as i did oh first let me show you this is what it looks like on the inside uh if you go uh on top you'll see the surrounding landscape and the buildings that are there and one thing we do notice about the kermit our architecture is that you have a lot of circles or arcs in the buildings that's not just square buildings and you find this actually in other parts of sudan and modern sudan and modern african countries um as well but it is quite noticeable here how different this actually is from ancient egypt if you look at the city here you can see those uh huts and some of them are fairly large the one on the drawing is probably where the king uh held court and where um people came in to uh talk to him there is there are actually two de fufa's in kerma the second one is located in the cemetery and it has this one room um inside this is also surrounded by tombs and the tombs the burials and the kerma culture are tumuli so these uh dome uh shaped uh burials um over this um structure in the ground where you put the body of the deceased now what you see here on the screen is one of the most remarkable of these tumuli uh a royal tomb and this is um something that you do not see in egypt at all whatsoever this uh array of skulls of bovines uh so basically cattle you have also some rams and sheep on there the karma culture very much like some modern sudanese culture like the dinka for example um their wealth is uh in cattle um and you see this as um really this person was extremely wealthy just like the egyptians uh the nubians uh put grave goods in their burial and uh you'll notice it's much more sparse than what you find in egypt but nonetheless some ceramics usually a few tools jewelry um something that's quite noticeable is the bed on which the deceased lies what you will notice here for example you also have other individual buried with the main person and these are actually human sacrifice the egyptians stopped doing that pretty early on but it does continue in karma culture here is an example of a reconstructed reconstructed bed with these wonderful inlays in ivory sometimes also in micah even today in modern sudanese society the bed is very important um this is what people sit in and this is what people uh lie on when they're going to sleep this is also where a person is laid for a funeral is um a bed caramel produced some absolutely phenomenal ceramics these here are typical classic kerma um pots beakers um absolutely fantastic they're handmade not made with a wheel hand made super fine super thin absolutely amazing and it makes the egyptian slightly older uh red uh black top red wear rather coarse in um comparison so the the cushite potters at kerma are extremely skilled in the cemetery george reisner who was the excavator discovered a bunch of egyptian things and this led him to believe that the great de fufa in the city was the residence of the governor of this uh colony and that egyptians resided there and that these were uh their um burial uh this did not acknowledge the fact at all that we are in a completely different uh part of um the nile valley with a different culture this had to be egyptian these accomplishments could not be anything but now let's travel to back to egypt for a moment during the second intermediate period that's what the sip sip um means and we're now between the middle kingdom and the new kingdom and during the intermediate periods usually egypt is divided up in different um sort of rival factions ruling different parts of the country the royal central power um is not as defunct um so the country was divided up and um during several um decades we see um people coming from um palestine from the near east coming in and settling into egypt um so these these immigrants have come in and with this sort of fractured uh rule uh gain power enough to actually start ruling that part of egypt by themselves and these are called the hixos who are set up at a virus in the north as you can see on the map here so you have the hixos in the north you have the nubians in the south who because the power is fractured have moved up to where those uh fortresses are and the king of or the prince maybe i should say of the egyptian uh who's trying to bring the country back under one rule he's complaining that he's wondering why and why is why am i supposed to be king there are the foreigners in the north the cushites in the south i'm i'm splitting this country with them and he ponders um this in a second stila that we have he tells us that he actually captured a spied that was sent from a virus from the hixos to kush asking them to join forces so that they could sandwich the egyptians between the two um parties and so of course people like oh yeah the spy was captured and nobody ever thought that kush would even do anything about this had they received the message well about 18 years ago the world was shocked and by the world i mean more the scholarly world as this inscription was revealed during some conservation treatment in the tomb of a governor called sober at el cab and i will read this uh inscription what it says and it's basically sobek sober telling us what happens and he says listen you who are alive upon the earth cush came arouse along its length it having stirred up the tribes of wawat the land of punt and the mejao they swept over the mountains over the nile without limit and basically that tells us for the first time ever that a second spy was sent and that kush actually had the power and the might in its army to actually go up to egypt to squish the egyptians out between them and the hixos and when that small tiny inscription just 22 lines basically changed how we perceive kush and kerma because nobody thought that this could actually even happen that this was even um possible now with just this little bit of information when you look at these images again what you have should be a different story altogether what this is is actually war booty this is the cushites going up to egypt creating havoc scaring the bejesus out of the egyptians and coming back home with things that they have plundered the cush is not an egyptian colony it is a separate kingdom and this is what they brought back after the expedition to egypt during the new kingdom things uh go a little bit uh worse for nubia uh because uh egypt decides that uh they don't want to be ever ruled by foreigners again don't want to be threatened by anybody south of the border or in the levant and decides to basically create an empire of sorts and nubia is colonized that also gives the egyptians direct access to all the resources that we talked about um earlier and as you can see from this map on the right of your screen if you look this is the border between the two uh areas there's about just two mines on this map here gold mines if you look at what nubia has this is the mother lode of gold mines and the new kingdom all the riches that you see in um the tombs um really that all comes from nubia and i think none of the other uh kingdoms old middle and later have as much gold as egypt has during this period the egyptians also justified their march onto nubia and conquering the territory um because of this mountain in general the pure mountain because this mountain reminded them of the eurayus the snake worn on the crown of the king of egypt this pinnacle here reminds them of that they also say that this is where the god amun resides in this uh mountain and the goddamn is the god of creation or it should say a god of creation of fertility he's also a sun god and he is the god of kingship he came to prominence during the middle kingdom but in the new kingdom he is really the god of egypt and um he's the god of kingship he lives in this mountain therefore the egyptians have every right to be there and so they colonize nubia what happens to you with the image of the goddamn at this time is interesting uh because in egypt he's depicted as a man wearing a flat crown with two tall uh plumes and a sun disc and nubia if you look on the right suddenly he doesn't have a human face anymore he has a ram head instead and this is probably the only thing that the egyptians borrowed from the ancient um civilizations of kush from kurma was discovered many years ago um this contraption made out of ostrich feathers attached to iran's head you see this even earlier than kerma a prehistoric rock carving where you see a ram with this sort of contraption sort of like a solar disk on its head and this is how the ram version of the moon in nubia came to be or that's the most likely um explanation uh you might say oh well i've been to egypt i've seen all this rams and from the of the temple of emin at karnak these are actually not rams these are ram headed sphinxes so a ram head with the body of a line in sudan the temples of vamoon all have these wonderful really fat and fluffy rams in front of their temples and it is a full uh ram it is not a cryo sphinx now going back to karma really really quickly so during this uh period uh the egyptians um while they raised kerma to the ground and about 10 kilometers away have the city of dukey gale where you see the juxtaposition of both type of architecture again those circular motifs from kerma and you have these egyptian style temples right there you see them right here um you look at this this is absolutely stunning uh you don't see things like this in egypt um just a quick word here i'm pulling up this slide because tombows is actually a colonial town of egypt egyptian colonial town i should say in fortification but um excavations at the cemetery tell us that um there was uh the people who the local people and the egyptian actually were friendly with each other they tried to make the best of the situation and in the cemeteries you have people who are buried in purely egyptian or purely nubian burials but you also find people who have perhaps a mostly nubian burial with some egyptian features or the reverse this is not quite a hybrid it's more like a cultural entanglement but people are inspired uh by different things from both cultures and basically uh use that um in their burial goods and their daily life as well so the egyptians and the nubians can be friendly and have been friendly for most of their history um and this here really tells us now you might have thought that so far my narrative has been really more all about egypt telling us what nubia is and the reason for that is that nubia until this point does not have writing uh the unions do not tell us anything about them everything is oral history and we we don't have obviously any of that preserved unless it's written down so until the 18 until the eighth um eight hundreds um the eighths uh we there's no writing at all whatsoever when they do have writing the kushites adopt egyptian um as a language but also egyptian hieroglyphs as their writing system and it won't be until the meroutic period that they actually write their own language uh with a script that is made up of egyptian hieroglyphs but only 23 not the 700 plus that you have in ancient egypt and fortunately for us the meroitic language has not been um deciphered we don't know what the language is so for most of its history nubia has no voice it means archaeologists have to really rely on the material culture that is being excavated and um what other people tell us about nubia but never the nubians except during the nabaton period which we're talking about right now so again centered around that uh mountain it is a fairly large region with multiple archaeological sites and as you can imagine the nubians use exactly the same tactic and decide that after they've started a new dynasty at uh napata that they too will use the god amun who is the god of kingship over nubia and egypt and this gives them the reason to take over egypt now the unions don't actually see themselves as foreigners in this uh in this case um they kind of see themselves more a savior because during this time egypt is fragmented again and there are various um rulers um that have little bits of the country so the nubians are going up to uh put egypt back together together again and um i'll just go briefly through some of the uh major kings here but the one that united all of nubia was king kashta and he named himself king of upper and lower egypt even though he was not in egypt at all um but he established his daughter as god's wife of ammon which is an extremely powerful religious position with political connotation so again the god moon is used here to create ties between the two cultures bianchi was the one who actually went up with his army and united egypt um under one rule this time cushite rule starting de facto the nubian dynasty the 25th dynasty of egypt uh [Music] his claim to fame is that he is now the second king of this dynasty until a few years ago he was the third one the order got swished um but uh savako is better known than shibitko um as having been the one who transcribed this old moldy papyrus um onto a stone because the religious text he thought was very important and needed to be preserved and this text is actually the memphis theology of creation um and so basically how egypt or the world was created according to the city of memphis and the god and if it weren't for shabbato this document would have been lost uh to uh for all eternity because it was on a moldy papyrus and is now on a stone the most famous of all these king kings is king taharka um he's famous because he saved jerusalem from the assyrians and that's how he ended up being mentioned in the bible uh to hark us throughout his entire reign is stuck having to uh make sure the assyrians do not invade sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't work there is lots of trouble brewing in the near east at this point and he is stuck trying to fix things and clearly it does not work memphis gets sacked eventually sacked again um and taharka just um flees back to nubia and that's where he dies before being able to do anything else uh taharka was probably the most prolific of all these uh kings having built at karnak here if you've been there that's the harcas column part of the big kiosk that was erected there he built temples in nubia and as you can tell these temples are not as well preserved the materials unfortunately in nubia the sandstone is extremely friable um it's things do not preserve very very well his successor is the last king of the twenty-fifth dynasty tenured amani um he has the same issues with the assyrians um and eventually the nubians just give up it's like it's not worth the trouble uh and go back home to rule he for another three uh years but the kingdom of kush lasted for another thousand years so during this period the uh koshai kings adopt the pyramid as their uh burial as you can see um here they're much smaller than the ones in egypt much pointier um and that means that it's much easier to construct and there are more pyramids in sugan than there are in egypt the interior of these uh burial chambers located underneath the pyramid are decorated in egyptian style with egyptian religious texts on the walls the only king that is not buried with other the other 25th dynasty rulers is king taharka he is buried here at nuri everybody else is buried here at el kuru um and king taharka's tomb and you can see here an amazing photo of the excavations with the 1070 chapters these are magic um figurines to do your work for you in the afterlife um being sorted out it's absolutely uh phenomenal now i thought peter would probably strangle me if i did not mention the napatan king that is at the vmfa king sankamaniskan the statue came from boston uh who got a share of the fines when reisner was excavating um and that's how the mfa got it um and it was discovered in these pits at jebel barkle where that special mountain is um lo and behold um in 2003 another pit the first one was discovered in the 19 teens in 2003 another pit uh this time was discovered at kerma with sculptures from these different uh these kings saint caminiskin being one of them so taharka tan with amani sankamaniskan and lamani and aspelta these are the the kings that keep being reproduced in these massive fantastic um sculptures um and they're they're napatan uh kings and it was a big surprise in 2008 when at the dig site where i work at dengue which is in the meroetic heartland we're very far away from napata we discovered these same statues um and here's same communist skin as um well so we're still trying to figure out what these statues are there and why they're broken the way they are this is probably a ritual breaking deactivating the statues because they're all broken at the neck at the knees at the ankle and we don't have so much of a pit here but they're all grouped together and they're all associated with levels of fire and uh destruction so in the last section we'll deal with is during the roman empire what is the relationship between egypt and nubia and um unfortunately it did not start on the good foot um a few years after egypt became part of the roman empire uh the nubians rebelled and revolted against the romans because the romans wanted to tax them like heavy taxes and lower newbies that uh we don't want to and the nubians invaded uh the southern part of egypt um the upper nubians kush actually heard about this and came to uh their rescue if you will bringing reinforcements unfortunately the king teratekas died on route uh but his wife took a command of the army and she was the one who negotiated with cayo's petronas there were some skirmishes things didn't go so well but she managed to sit him down at a table and said dude we need to come to an agreement she never never wavered um and she managed to get a very good agreement uh from the romans that basically went back to what the greeks had with that little buffer zone uh between the two leaving the nubians out of out of it not charging any taxes and stuff like that um and so this queen was queen amani reyna's one of the four good forgotten female figures important female figures in um history so as you can imagine the cushites took some souvenirs uh from their time in aswan elephantini and brought those back home and this wonderful head of augustus the first roman emperor was found right here at the small temple at the city of narraway underneath the steps and every single time the priests went in and out they stepped on the head of augustus and it was basically them saying take that roman empire you're never never coming into our country and the romans never did uh manage to um conquer nubia uh eventually they they they gave up pretty quickly um so kush never was part of the greater roman empire it was always at the border but maintained a cordial relationship with rome and the greater mediterranean now most of our sources about this is coming are coming from roman um authors there is this one stila in marowitic that tells us um that is very likely related to this conflict between marawi and rome um because the word array may that we see on the stila is what most people think is the meroitic name for rome it mentions amani reynos on this stila so we really really hope that one day very soon this uh language will be just offered so we know what the nubians thought of this and get their side of this conflict the city of marawi had been occupied for a while before this the capital city moved there um and even later the cemetery moved there as well probably because there was um an attack by one of the egyptian kings um so the city of marawi is uh right here and it includes a big amun temple again very important even though it's an egyptian god it has become one of the most important gods in the nubian pantheon and the marawi is also famous for its wonderful pyramids so we have the necropolis right here with uh that we'll get into in a minute now maraway here's the the temple of amun at meraway with that lovely ram um again we are faced with the same problem um in this part of sudan you do have monsoon rains so that is absolutely destructive to the archaeological uh remains and um a lot of the temples need to be re-buried to avoid um destroy the sites being destroyed from the water from the rains uh marawi is famous uh for its royal bath something you never you don't see in the other two uh kingdoms we talked about at the bottom of this royal bath you have these wonderful statues that are clearly influenced by the greater mediterranean we call this lovely lady the venus of mariway this guy almost looks etruscan um and this is this wonderful um mix of african egyptian and mediterranean all in one that you find in cushite art and that's absolutely uh phenomenal um that they remain very african yet are borrowing other um from other cultures marawi is also known as uh the first iron smelting iron producing um kingdom in africa don't ask me about this i'm just pointing that out because that is important but i know nothing about iron smelting um i know more about pyramids and these are the pyramids at and um these pyramids are actually don't have rooms inside the pyramid itself it's filled with uh rubble and these pyramids because narrow way was said to be a city of fabulous rigid riches um you can imagine what has happened to these pyramids over uh the decades especially in the 18th century for example 19th century when um explorers were going through looking for treasure here's the pyramid of one of the other kendakes amani shahito kendake is a ruling queen you find this in nubia way more than egypt and nubia is also cush is actually from maryland's matrilineal as well and she is famous mostly for her treasure which is absolutely phenomenal um exquisite craftsmanship wonderful uh jewelry and the person who founded giuseppe ford ferdini basically destroyed the pyramid from the top down trying to you know searching for treasure and this is what the queen's pyramid looks like today the burial chamber is underneath the pyramid and um clearly there was no need to destroy it if he had asked a few locals they probably would have figured that out pretty quickly um amanitor is another queen i want to mention we're almost done uh amanitori kind of like taharka was a great builder um and she built the temple of the moon at the temp at dan gale where i work she also restored other temples and built other temples here she is smiting enemies just like that same egyptian motif that you see the nubians adopt that here is the temple of epidemic the local nubian god of war the roman kiosk just to show you the fun architecture that you see when you have this blend of culture uh the roman kiosk that's actually a temple to hathor from naga and this one you cannot get more african than this this is uh it's a large platform there's a temple in there but one of the walls there's this wonderful elephant carved sort of at the end of the wall and it's absolutely quite lovely and very intriguing that's some of the wonders and of the kingdom of cush and on my i would like very quickly to read this um to you um this is a quote from the kingdom of course written by derek wellsby and he says consideration of the cushites alongside such giants of the ancient world as the greeks the romans the egyptians is justified on account of the longevity of the kingdom and of its size if for no other reason at the time at the same time when rome was a small village on the banks of the tiber and the greek city-states held its way over minuscule territories the cushites ruled an empire stretching from the central sudan to the borders of palestine i agree with him and i my question is why is this not in the history books thank you thank you caroline that was phenomenal um we do have quite a few questions i hope you'll you'll consider um the the first is more recent the one that you um at the end of your show regarding regarding the nubian queens uh treasure that beautiful jewelry that you um showed can you give a location as to where that is now is it in a private collection or luckily no it's in two museums um it's in munich and in berlin um when uh ferlini was actually trying to sell his treasure um nobody wanted to touch it when he said that this came from uh you know from sudan nobody could even believe that such fabulous jewelry was produced by an african kingdom nobody wanted to touch it um and um leipzius who was an archaeologist um who worked in sudan um heard about this and he managed to convince the king of prussia to buy this like this is extremely important i think a lot of people were thinking it was like bad egyptian art or like bad egyptian jewelry is not quite right because it's not egyptian that's the thing right and he's like no this is actually this is very important you need to get this collection and so the king of prussia bought half of the collection um big on the recommendation of lep's use who told him what you have down there is is an important african you need to get this um and that's the only reason it didn't end up in a private collection is because this archaeologist was really uh knew what he was talking about he had worked in sudan he knew that this was not an egyptian colony it was a separate culture that needed to be remembered um and thank thank god he did manage to convince the the king and so those can be seen now if you go to germany yeah that is remarkable um i wondered if you wouldn't mind sharing your your powerpoint just one more and maybe going back to that first map of the nile river nile river excuse me so that we can see that relationship between egypt and nubia and while you're doing that we did get a couple of questions towards the beginning of your presentation about the tombs uh the kerma tombs yes um so i'm gonna go to it'll be easier if i go to the slide from my computer perfect yes take your time yep so the very very first one at the beginning yes that would be great yeah that nile river i think that that'll be helpful um so people were having questions about those the the tombs that we were talking about um the kerma tombs but the first is that they looked pretty empty and is that an accurate depiction of what they would have looked like in ancient times when they were sealed or is that after you know years of robbing and looting there is definitely some uh looting and let's see if i can go to um to one like this one i think is after the excavations because they that's one of the ones that had um some treasure in it um but that's that's um one obviously this one does not have any egyptian sculpture but that's typical of a few burial goods um this one i think that's a horse or maybe a dog the horse burials you do have sometimes uh horses in there or other animals um but not a lot the the the nugent tombs are not as garnished and um like egyptian to me if you think of king tut in your head i mean this is stuff galore everything you could ever think of you know including food for the afterlife if you have a jar uh with food in it that is enough it sort of magically can appear for you in the afterlife you don't need the whole grocery store you just need if one that can magically be provided to feed your soul um because you don't need to be fed fed you just need your soul to be nourished i think so that's that's typical yeah right that's fascinating and i appreciate the you know maybe we are more used to that idea of egyptian tombs and this lavish nature and this is a follow-up question to that um the purpose of human sacrifice in the karma burial were those um people to be servants in the afterlife um is that another thing that you could expand on uh yes i think that's that's what it is yeah sort of the service for the person um especially if the person is a king um or a very well-placed um official you would have more than one person um yeah the egyptians that very very early on and decided it was sort of barbaric to force people to dive to be their you know servant in the afterlife that's why they came up with the shabties um the little figurines and everything on the tomb walls that is represented everything you put in the tomb will be available magically for you and here you don't have any um representation of that you actually just have physical objects for in ancient egypt all those drawings um may ensure that you have that as well not just what's in your tomb yeah well so the locations of these these tombs and burial sites in the present day are are they in the middle of the desert are they are there towns around them could you give us a little bit of maybe what they look like in the present day yes um i've been to karma only in the town i didn't go into the cemetery the cemetery is like i think a couple miles away um but as you can see here this is near enough the nile so on one side you will have the nile usually the cemeteries are further in the desert to ensure um the if they're flooding for example and you want that land there to be for the agriculture and if you look back and let me move back to that map this one i mean the nile is not very wide um and especially in nubia there's very specific areas that are more arable than others um like the region around kerma that's a little bit greener this area is a little bit greener the rest is very very dry but you have to remember that in ancient times it wasn't quite as dry it is as it is today this was more of a savannah type environment how interesting yeah yeah there is a desertification starts uh in egypt around the end of the middle kingdom um there's a great famine because of that um where things like climate change impacted the the old kingdom where you have people who normally thrived on the borders on the edge of the desert now have to move into the nile valley um because there's no more water things are drying up so that happened at the end of the old kingdom fascinating so even the the landscape that we think of today is very different from the the time that we're discussing so that's yes thank you yes um maybe just two more questions and then we can wrap up um i remember i've just been a delight to listen to you and peter talk but you were talking about how you know there are so many circles in this presentation and how that is very unegyptian so i was wondering uh someone actually asked if they studied constellations um and if that had any connection to the minoans or other cultures that kind of cross-cultural connection is there any connection there then i don't know um circles um seem to be very organic um i think there's a nice flow and i think it's also easier if you're building in mud brick um with mud services with um twigs um and branches not to have angles um and it's it's something that you still see in some parts of africa today in other parts of the world obviously um it's it's just i think it's just a little bit more um organic because of the materials you're um using um at that point i don't know if there's much connections uh with kush to the greater mediterranean that comes much later with the the marowites and basically through the roman empire have um contacts that extend all the way through india karma doesn't have that their contacts is further south into africa um the thing is with kerma it is such a shame that there is no written documents i mean we could learn so much because a lot of it is very very we would mysterious to know more information um about that um sometimes the archaeological question the archaeological remains bring more questions than answers um well and i have a feeling many of our audience members now are asking the same questions that maybe plague you when you're on your digs um questions that maybe we won't have answers to but thank you so much for your time tonight and your expertise this was a wonderful talk and a wonderful way to kick off our sunken cities lecture series i'm so grateful to you and your time and your willingness to present virtually thank you so much absolutely thank you so much for inviting me to participate of course well hopefully you'll get to richmond to see the exhibition and i invite all of you with us tonight to please visit vmfa if and when you feel safe to do so please do look at our website to see all of the safety precautions we have in place and to reserve your tickets for the exhibition it is wonderful and if you can join us for a future lecture our next talk is on remembering osiris with dr robert rittner from the art institute of chicago so um please go to the website and register for that event thank you caroline and i'll see everyone next month you

Channel: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

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Id: FYYG7WdMvus

Length: 57min 36sec (3456 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020