you welcome everyone I'm told that the mic works no matter where one stands up here so I don't need to move it forward my name is Suzanne Blier and it's a real honor to come in at the end of this wonderful trilogy of lectures by Chris Aaron and introduce them to you this evening before I begin I want to make two important announcements of things you have to do requirements before the end of the week or a little bit later one is the really remarkable nubian exhibit at the MFA Boston which has one of the great collections and Rita freed is here right now it is really amazing and it transforms what we think about Nubia and Africa and Egypt and the whole complex of early arts in this extraordinary region and secondly much smaller and perhaps far less important there's a exhibition of early Christianity and art in Africa with a lot of works from Nubia and a few from Ethiopia which is in the third floor of the Harvard Art Museum it's one of the teaching galleries and we put it together with works from the Harvard collection and I think it transforms the way we think about how Africans in the early period shaped Christianity as well [Applause] and skip just so you know I did mention her but I didn't have her stand I wanted to leave that to you so professor Christopher Earhart eret graduated with a PhD from Northwestern University which as you know is one of the premier institutions for the studying of all things African from Hershkovitz to others it's been a really Center for thinking both broadly and narrowly about core issues related to the continent in both an historical and broadly socio-political framework and then he's taught for a long time at UCLA where he's now a distinguished research professor emeritus and UCLA as many of you know is also a rich and important Centre for the teaching of things related to Africa I'm thinking of people like Merritt posnansky and Anthony after and many others and here to like northwestern focusing on the rich cross-disciplinary ways in which things about Africa are being addressed almost anyone who studied issues related to the continent knows important things about professor arid through his many writings among these his widely disseminated and read civilizations of Africa a history to 1800 which was recently revised which came out from the University Press of Virginia with a lot of images and other kinds of cross-disciplinary engagements which point to the important history of this continent as well as there's African Classical Age which came out earlier in 1998 and argues for really a reframing of the early period in African history from around a thousand before present to around 400 of the current era in addition to that he's published broadly on things related to linguistics reconstructing proto afro-asiatic vowels tones consonants and vocabulary which came out in 1995 from the University of California Press and his earlier historical reconstruction of Southern Pacific phonology and vocabulary published by rhymer in 1980 I think one of the most extraordinary things about linguists as a discipline is it's one of those fields much like my own discipline of history of the art at a certain period of time in which one small detail can be the focus of incredibly rich and divergent opinions and in some ways you can see the ways that camps form around the reading of one or another key issue and how it is framed both in a narrow sense and a broader sense and I think throughout this all week regardless of one or another linguistic camp so to speak in the reading of African history I think what they all have done and professor eret in particular is to get us to pay an incredibly close attention to the richness of this history and how much of the historical record in here I'm using that metaphorically can be discerned from things that are happening both in the present and in the historical period and I think of all of the subjects and this has been an incredibly rich series of lectures to my mind one of the most profoundly important and profoundly controversial in an incredibly important way is the subject of ancient Egypt and it's very Africanist so let me let's give a warm welcome to Professor Aaron and the title here of his talk the Africana T of ancient Egypt [Applause] thank you all I want as I've been doing to again thank the Hutchins Center the study event the center of African Center for African Studies and all the variety of people from professor gates and Abby wolf on through all the great people that I've been working with that are on their team it's a it's been a great experience and this is an honor to me and a great time I've certainly been having I hope I can make it at least of some interest to you as well so let's see if I still have my right there so we can change scenes so my beginning comment here ancient Africa ancient Egypt was in Africa we can't really doubt that can we it's in the continent but more important ancient Egypt was of Africa and that of course is not the way the past two centuries of Western scholarship have generally presented its history it's long past time I would say for all of us to discard a whole set of old notions about Egypt notions rooted in really the self-serving racialist presumptions of 19th century Europeans notions that only too often people even today simply assume they've never thought to examine those ideas they're back in the background informing our minds even we're not aware they are and on the historical and the scholarly level that reexamination is underway the most recent maybe she generation maybe should say generations the last 30 years or so of scholars and scholarship on Nubia and Egypt are bringing together a whole new body and maybe I should say a whole new bodies of evidence revealing the African rootedness of pre-dynastic and early dynastic Egyptian culture by the way this is just going here for a second some of you may have seen or heard about a recent genetics article that makes the ancient Egyptians out to be leaven teens let me be very clear these findings come from one locale and a large stretch of possible locales in northern Egypt and they find state well after the foundational periods of ancient Egypt it's somewhat as if I was thinking of this particular image rather than investigating DNA from a 17th century Cemetery in Plymouth we instead choose to investigate DNA from later 19th century Cemetery in South Boston and then we conclude having done that that the United States was founded by people of Irish descent and that Americans were predominantly IR or predominantly Irish well that is necessarily how the writers of the article meant it to be interpreted but that's certainly why I've had people interpreting it to me even someone with a Coptic seemed to be a Coptic last name from the sounds of things berating me for being such a terrible human being all these years of my whole career for ever having thought of Egypt as being African so anyway though there is a deeper problem here genetics may be able to tell us about you know the different elements and our individual genetic physical ancestors ancestries that we may have partaken come from in our individual cells but genes do not at all determine language it's our own historical cultural life experiences personal experiences that determine what languages speak not our genes and we need only look around at each other here in the room to know the truth of that and it is these experiences also that shape our culture choices and our choice of cultural self-identification again not our genes it's our historical and cultural experiences though the stories that I would have tell today explore the developments that laid the cultural and language foundations of ancient Egypt developments beginning before sometimes long before 3100 BCE now the foundational areas of Egypt also of ancient Egypt also uncomforted encompass not northern Egypt but a whole range of lands extending far across northeastern Africa and there are actually two ancient Egyptian foundational stories that I'd like to tell and so that gives me an opportunity to change our slide well one of these we might call the deep time story the story of cultural and historical developments from the 7th the 6th millennium on down to around 3100 BCE and the setting of this story was what was then a wide swath of steppe grassland not some narrow strip of habitable land just along the river extending for more than a thousand kilometres extending north-south from beyond the confluence of the blue and white nile in the south to the - as far north as the archeological sites at Elbe dari in middle Egypt it was this vast stretch of lands that constituted the foundational cultural regions and the cultural heartland of pre-dynastic Egypt but there is also a second story what one might call the way deep time story with its beginnings before 15000 BCE and the setting for the way deep time story takes us even farther south in northeastern Africa so to give things their proper historical order let's do first things first let's begin with that earlier way deep story in doing so we'll consider the kinds historical evidence that I'm particularly known for applying comparative linguistic and cultural evidence along with archaeology to excavate this history we must set out first of all the language relationships of ancient Egyptian now in ancient Egyptian belonged to the afro-asiatic language family small digression here there is an older name for the afro-asiatic family a horrendously bad name the alternative name commits o Semitic you recognize the name ham of course here in Homero to still use that name today is to perpetuate the horrific invention by racists of a myth a myth used to justify enslaving Africans that and his the slavers own myth it's not truly biblical that ham was the ancestor of all Africans so they kept the Africans they wanted into their myth that God had passed Noah's curse onto ham suppose descendants by giving them dark skins and even more horrifying to me still in our own day I've been discovering there are only too many American fundamentalist Christians who still hold to this myth it's really shocking and sad to see so avoid this name as if it were the plague or indeed the seven plagues of ancient Egypt so back to our topic three initiating questions this really acquires from us first how in when did the language directly ancestral H and Egyptian come to be spoken along the Egyptian Nile and answering that question requires two other questions the answer where does the ancient Egyptian fit in the family tree of relationships within the afro-asiatic language family and where were the languages is the family most probably spoken at different points along the lines of descent in the family tree which we haven't quite yet shown you so first we need to view the family tree of afro-asiatic what are we going to do is treat a little series of slides here tracking the lines of this of ancient Egyptian back to the original proto a fro easy attic language so there that gets you to ancient Egyptian and back through these successive earlier stages back to proto afro-asiatic the mother language of the whole family now these findings by the way are very similar to ones that have been previously published but they the version that is here is coming from the ongoing work of a team of scholars that I brought together we've combined some newer mathematical approaches ones that are actually used in the genetics field we'll along with traditional methods of working out language and language family genealogies what language is a closely related to each other and which are farther and so on a first presentation of our findings is currently in the process of publication and well you know the evidence is like so much of it anyway but I Billy probably be happy to talk with people about what goes into it and we'll have to wait if you are more months for the material starts to be out and I get all the materials up online for people to see but as I say I'd be a little happy to talk with people about this a little bit afterwards now in your handout you will see that there is a bibliography and so on a bibliography you can find some articles that refer to to the history and actually to a variety of different topics that are related to what we're talking about so our second question where would the daughter languages of the family have been spoken at successive eras in the language family history well to answer this question we apply some long-established standard tools for inferring historic historical geography from comparative ethnography and linguistics so on the bibliography I did cite myself but I cited the classic work from 1916 by Edward Sapir that brought all of these different methods together but there's been a long history of scholars using the is in fruitful and very useful and ways that normally have worked out to give a answer that that works in the long term so two primary methods supply in proposing the ancient locations of people the first is the principle of fewest moves often called least moves but I'm a little uncomfortable because moves should have fewest not least but anyway sorry being a grammatical whatever I am here to state this principle in plain terms the most probable history of a spread of a language family is the history that most parsimoniously we're getting to all commas razor here accounts for the later locations of the languages of the family the most probable history is in other words the history that requires the fewest and the most direct and straightforward movements of people into new lands people who speak languages of the family and a second principle which is related we might call the center of diversity principle what anthropologists long ago discovered is that the areas where a particular complex of cultural practices shows the greatest diversity in the particular race the individual practices are carried out or expressed is the region where the complex is usually the oldest and the guiding idea behind this of course is that the longer a set of cultural ideas or practices have been existed in an area the more time it has had for people to develop in different cultures will differ some cultures are there at that area did it all develop their own new varieties and new features of those ideas well in similar fashion we can use this principle by it for language families if there is a region where the earliest branching of a language family were the earliest branchings of that family cluster close to each other that will be most likely the region where the languages of the family have longest been spoken so how do these principles apply to ancient well the geography of the successive branchings of the afro-asiatic tree puts it beyond doubt in my mind beyond reasonable doubt as the term I would use that one that the family originated somewhere in the Horn of Africa in and around that region and to that speakers of the languages of the family then spread in a step-by-step succession of advances outward from the horn so back to the family tree and here I've underlined a few key groups so they you can see one notice note be able to identify them when we get to them the tracking of this history begins with the first two divergences of the family initially the proto afro-asiatic language diverged into two daughter languages each daughter language was ancestral to one of the two primary branches of the family you can see we have two primary branches way up at the top of the tree one was proto Almaty I hope that arrow popped up so you can see it proto harmonic and that's ancestor to the OMA tech branch of the family and then there's a second proto-language proto era 3ik ancestral to the rest of the family we've given the name Era 3 that is to say red sea knowing our ancient history everyone here of course this is the to this secondary the second primary branch for geographical regions that will start to become apparent as we map the next several stages in this history now at the second stage of early afro-asiatic history the era three branch then itself diverged into two the proto arithmetic language diverged into two daughter languages that branch in other words began to develop into two secondary branches of its known one of these branches was the sort of go back again there because I popped it up to quit the crocheting branch okay now this branch continued over the long course of its history to be spoken in regions in and around the Horn of Africa so we'll let's so we'll go on to that in a minute now the evidence is clear in-state fault straight forward the first two periods of divergence in the family took place somewhere broadly in or around I'm wondering what happened to two there we go let's take it back to here what we'll do what we'll do is we'll look at it this way the here we had let's look first at where the Omata branch is located on the mouth then here's where the crocheting family at its widest expansion it's not as widely expanded anymore but a thousand a thousand BC but it's all around the Horn of Africa okay so that's our two things the first two branches took place in and around the Horn of Africa now still later we need postulate just to further single well for we need the third stage of the history we need to postulate just a single additional advance northward the spread if we take her back selves back to the tree then no proto north Aerith right so I baked its arrow pop in there proto north Aerith right okay let's taking ourselves long word it requires only a single expansion northward out of the northern part of the Horn of Africa to spread the North arrow three branch northward and still later in time we only have to postulate to further single expansions outward from the Egyptian corner of Africa to account for the remaining divisions of the family with the speakers of the language distantly ancestral to the much later Semitic languages crossing Sinai from Egypt to the Levant and with the speakers of the ancestral language of the Chaddock and Alma's if opposition is what Berbers prefer to call themselves these days Chatto a music branch spreading somewhat later west from the nile across the sahara now just how long ago does this succession of developments begin so finally our third step archeology excavates the material artifacts of earlier cultures and the dating methods of archeology allow one to then date the artifacts to particular periods in the past at the same time we can also excavate language for the linguistic artifacts of the past how well by reconstructing the culture of vocabularies and sometimes I may use the word lexicon because I get a little more technical sounding now on them but okay vocabulary lexicon the culture vocabularies of languages spoken in earlier ages the words used in those languages reveal to us the variety of things that the people who spoke the languages possessed what they did what they knew what they believed and so forth if a past word heads society had words for a particular thing or a particular activity then at the very least they knew of that activity or thing if we can reconstruct whole Suites of words relating to a particular area of culture then we know that that collection of things or behaviors or ideas were a lively part of their culture and if the cultural suites include items that could include words for notable features of material culture material culture features that are liable to be or likely to be preserved in the archaeological record we can do something else we can search the archaeological record for the times and places where those assemblages of materia cultural items occur so what do the word histories of it afro-asiatic reveal I'm giving a little hint ahead there and I've also put data in your handouts well the most important for archeological correlation they're words that we can reconstruct back to earlier and earlier periods reveal that the proto afro-asiatic people were already harvesters of wild grains so unread we've written fact that oh yes there's a subsistence vocabulary you look in your handout I've given you particular sets of words that we can track back to each successively well actually successively more recent stage in history that's the way I made up the list so and this economic focus then continued right down through the early nodes the early periods in the afro-asiatic tree no I proposed elsewhere that the adoption of grain harvesting was very probably a response to the climate changes around the period of the last glacial maximum this period peaked around the 20th millennium BCE and widely across Africa at that time claimants became drier significantly drier and the results in the horn would have been the shrinking death of forested areas and the expansion of grassland areas with edible wild grains especially in the northern ethiopia islands and the northern edges of those highlands so if we are to seek out archaeological correlations for this new kind of subsistence economy now the salient question is what would the diagnostic archaeological markers be well there is one particular kind of item that is determinative of this economy and it's an item that survives well in the archaeology much better than the grains itself and that item is a small sickle shaped stone blade with a particular surface feature a kind of Sheen caused by specifically by the repeated cutting off over time of many years of grain is there such a marker in the tool in the tool record of the northeastern African archaeology yes there is now for most period most of the period of several years around the glacial maximum our archaeological knowledge of the farther northern ethiopian highlands is really minimal because so few sites have been studied but there is one notable exception la coda which is down to the very bottom of the slide lava Oda is low decay 'td at the northeastern margin of islands near the modern-day city of da da da WA and the findings of Lana Oda fit right in with the predictions of the ancient afro-asiatic word histories and the occupation that laga Oda dates back to around 16,000 BCE calibrated date already in its earliest levels we can find those key diagnostic items the small blades bearing the sheen the tell-tale Sheen shall we call of harvesting now because we lack archaeological sites from the region for the crucial foundational period immediately preceding we don't know yet how much earlier this adaptation let's let's put that back for a moment okay the adaptation may have begun my own expectation as I indicated is that we might we probably may find that wild grain harvesting goes back to the high point of the glacial maximum maybe before 18,000 BC but more directly germane for our study the earliest finds at lago de belonged to the era immediately preceding the first appearance of the new kind of tool and economy in egypt so in egypt this new economic orientation and its determinative tool arrived a thousand years late around 15,000 BCE and these features came as part of the arrival along the Egyptian aisle of a new culture the Afyon culture and also there's a variety of it a little farther south of Aswan which I'm not mentioning in case someone thought I didn't know about that one but okay anyway well so what might account for the timing of this economic and archaeological change over this cultural and economic change or well in that very period between 16,000 and 15,000 BCE the first amelioration of the extreme die climate of the glacial maximum began in areas on along both sides of the Red Sea in the form of somewhat increased rainfall actual enough rainfall on the African side and on the Arabian side during that millennium to support an expansion of grasslands step and for our purposes grasslands step right to the chain of hills and middling mountains that connect the northern Horn of Africa and Upper Egypt the Red Sea Hills as there tend to be called so in effect the climatic amelioration opened an environmental pathway in the 16th millennium for the potential spread of the wild green harvesting economy as far north as Egypt now moving on from that who might have been the people then that could have taken advantage and moved that economy northward to Egypt well the linguistic maps of the successive earlier periods of afro-asiatic divergence that we briefly looked at they offer one strong possibility so let's go back to those maps and we'll put ourselves at this particular stage of history and that is the divergence of the proto northeast there are three speakers out of the earlier era three community the geographically most parsimonious spread line would be along the Red Sea Hills now this is not a story of population replacement when we look at the archeology in the archaeology some of the older tool making technique of previous the previous existing Egyptian Nile people of before 15,000 BC got adopted into the overall affion toolkit the way deep time story history that I'm proposing here is that it's in part a story of the rival of new people from farther south in Africa bringing a new subsistence economy and cultural ideas north to the Egyptian Nile regions but it's a story - of the melding of the immigrants and the existing populations into a new society with a new language and probably the adoption of new cultural ideas and practices that came along with the new with the immigrants now one caveat archaeologically this proposed history fits the current evidence currently available evidence but there is one notable gap we have no archaeology for the crucial millennium in the crucial intervening lands along the red sea hills but the history I oppose at least does raise the testable proposition for a future archaeological investigation it tells us what we what I am expecting we should find the evidence of the spread of a wild grain economy in the 16th millennium BCE through the Red Sea Hills now then just to go back briefly before we head take ourselves back into Egypt the - back to the two subsequent here as a divergence as we've seen yes did I decide not to put yeah I did there we go there's the movement of taking very very early language this much much later going to evolve into proto Semitic and we also have the later still later expansion westward the Sahara my I think we're going to demonstrate eventually that the Chaddock the shadow almas the movement was connected with the rise of the Holocene wet face so it probably goes to the 9th or 9th maybe 10th or later 10th millennium BC anyway now among the afro-asiatic speakers of state in the lands on both sides of the Egyptian Nile no changes did take place in the archaeological materials over the long period from 15,000 BCE down to much later times but here's the key point the archaeology within Egypt indicates that overall a broad cultural continuity extended from the Afyon period down into much later times with new developments yes but with no evidence sharp clear evidence of notable cultural or archaeological breaks Vilna veteran I'd love to try to pronounce names that or I can use my linguistic background 25 years ago argued very cogently putting all these materials together that this cultural continuity continuity in fact extended right across the transition into the later eras from wild grain harvesting to the adoption of domestic crops domesticated crops and to the adoption of domesticated grains spreading in from the Levant and also the spread of African crops from farther south northward into Egypt and this view continues to be sustained in more recent findings that we'll be looking at today the existing populations of Upper Egypt meaning from middle Egypt southward in our what we're talking about here and also farther north in the volume they did add new crops eventually and the new ways of producing those crops by cultivating them but they did so without the evidence of notable demographic intrusions into their lands now time for us then we can move on to the less deep time story so we're back to a title page aren't we here now the story of ancient Egypt Nubia and Sudan in the period around 6000 to 3000 BCE now to tell this story I want to introduce a particular anthropological concept the concept of a culture area anthropologist as they built their discipline in the 19th century encountered and more than one part of the world in which people of different historical origins had for century been involved in extensive cross-cultural interactions with each other and because of those long histories of cultural interchange the societies of those regions despite having maybe disparate earlier origins despite speaking different languages of different families often came to share many features of culture with each other their lands formed a culture area an interactive region of long-term cultural and interchange and even cultural convergence now I have long called in argued in print that Upper Egypt and the eastern Sudan belt formed just such a zone of extensive cross-cultural influences from the late 7th millennium BCE on into later millennia and past I've taken to calling this long north-south extending region the middle Nile culture area gets a little further up into the northern nile area but a lot of it's down in the middle now culture area I was presuming of my audience but upper means farther upstream so they're forced to the south and lower and so when we say lower Nubia that's going to come up to lower Nubia is nearer to the upper egypt part and upper Nubia is farther south because the rivers upriver is south thank you that's very useful so so what this is sort of the thing that I see now quite independently of anything I might have written this view has now become common understanding among the cohort or cohorts of archaeologists who have attributed so greatly over the past three decades to widening and deepening on deepening our knowledge of those regions and those times so in a recent article in the major journal antiquity David wengrow and his co-authors bring these findings together their title is a telling one cultural convergence in the neolithic of the nile valley a prehistoric perspective on egypt's place in africa so maybe i didn t give this talk we can read their article in any case they described notice the style cultural convergence - that's quite a strong statement about how intensive and fully integrated this intercultural interaction is what they described taking place is the emergence from around 6000 BCE onward across that whole expanse from a few hundred kilometers south of the blue and white nile confluence to as far north as Elbe dari in middle Egypt of a comment by the way there's a map in there and you can maybe start to find some of these places that I'm talking about in middle Egypt of a common they kind of cover themselves and say a common economic culture and they call it a primary pastoral economy but they then go on to show that the cultural commonalities across these regions went far deeper than that and the economy by the way was not completely pastoral this is partly the the bias of what you get to discover in the archaeology but even little of the archaeological evidence and certainly the linguistic evidence indicate the cultivating and harvesting of grains and certainly on the Sudan side of things of other crops as well crops we've talked about yesterday like melons and so on no from self so let's put that down I should have let you see it up there and not just told you shouldn't I okay onward now from south of the blue now white white and blue Nile confluence to the Rhone just a bit north of the latitude of Aswan it appears from the differences we can detect that the participants in this history of cultural interaction would have spoken languages of the what's called the eastern Sudan ik or the eastern Sahel e'en branch of the niger the nilo-saharan language family a different language family with its origins in the area of what modern-day Sudan and South Sudan from a little north of Aswan to Elba dari in middle Egypt they would have spoken it apears dialects of the language that was to evolved into ancient Egyptian no before we go on any further there's something else very important for us to understand I've kind of mentioned it previously but we all need to understand the geographical setting for this historical period forget the idea of ancient Egypt as a gift of the Nile in the formative age from even before 6000 BCE down to around the 3300 BCE the river was not just just the river was just another locale of settlement within a far vaster region of human habitation in that 3,000 year period an environment and a bit from before then as well an environment of continuous steppe grassland predominated across middle and southern Egypt as well as far south into the Sudan some communities most certainly did live close to the Nile and the locations of any early large villages probably would have tended to be along the river but the great majority of the inhabitants of the middle Nile culture area would not have lived along the river they would have carried out their lives instead and their pasture all economies in the wide expanse of lands extending for some hundreds of kilometres extending both sides east and west of the river now here's the map that and it's in in your handout I hope we gave you the proper version anyway this is a map with a little with no additional date notations by me that it was given by when Grove at all that depict the extent of this area you can see the dashed lines the south and the North that indicate the regions that they're the areas that they are pulling into this big culture area a region of cultural convergence and as the archeology of these lands reveals these people shared much more than a common economy they also appeared they also participated to use when Grove atolls expression they participated in a long term history of cultural convergence as we said with a common set of cultural ideas and ritual practices taking hold from south of the confluence to the founding regions of ancient Egypt along the Nile and here's that this slide becomes relevant as well as in the surrounding steppe grasslands from south of the confluence to El bhadori again to quote when Grove and his co-authors treatments of the dead became remarkably uniform Barrios followed unquote a common ritual template and they did so with the people the local population spoken IO Saharan language or in an ancestral form of the ancient Egyptian language here is more than I will take us through individually but I've if it's supposed to be in your handout I hope it's there here is a slide where you can see what those features were so for your easier reference I hope that the listing is there so okay there's a second key historical point to make here more often than not it appears that new features of culture new notable features tended to have their origins in the more southerly areas among people who would have spoken not early ancient Egyptian but languages of the nilo-saharan Fong family now if you look back at your list of grave Goods mace heads for example appear first in burials in the Sudan in the 6th millennium it's by the 4th millennium that they finally become common in upper and middle Egypt and for your fun here's a couple of may sets of rather famous ones late 4th millennium Kings who were involved in the lead up developments to the consolidation of Old Kingdom Egypt the one on the left is can be connected with the king known as scorpion the one on the right is for an armored who is either in some people's view the founding king or the king just before the founding king of the Old Kingdom so a couple of nice little cases here now similarly prominent ceramic Styles evolved out of styles that ish eiated farther south to use the term of the eminent French archaeologist Beatriz Medan grain the ceramics all across the region in the fifth and fourth millennia were foreshadowed in later six millennium ceramics and early fifth in the Nile confluence region of the Sudan so in witness of that here are a few striking ceramic images it's always fun now these are on these are really dark black burnished pots but because it's an old photograph from 50 or 70 years ago anyway and black and white and I took it straight out of the book instead of having a first-hand copy you don't see the real blackness but here we can take ourselves way north from sha sha nob way down in Sudan which you can see on your mouth way up to the other end to elba dari in the later 5th millennia and you can see also the development that starts taking place by this period of red as well as black burnished wear so you get this combination of things and here our 4th millennium pots lower Nubia that means sort of northern Nubia south of Egypt Nile Saharan speaking areas and here's also from lower Nubia I want to point out on this one in particular the rippling which as far as we can see actually begins south of Egypt and then spreads as a decorative motif northward so here's with rippling and qostoul and honored with some early things and even taking us on to karamja in the third millennium we're back in we're in Upper Nubia I mean a lower upper Nubia here so I'll get mixed up - Wow there we go and those really are still making Blackburn East we're but again it's a photograph that takes away the beauty of that burnished meant now that's not the only evidence we also have links achill evidence linguistic evidence and not surprisingly at least one of these bits of lexical evidence evokes something about the shared ceramic technology be nice to know exactly what jar what kind of jar this is referring to but the reference is more to ones the ones of the shapes that I showed you because it's jar it's not a cooking pot board and then other word histories reveal southern influences not just in primary pressed oral economy which you can see in some words they're like the cattle pen turn by the way the funny way that things are written we don't have the vowels properly from the earliest Egyptian and so what you're getting is the consonants the three is my attempt to represent how the Aleph the glottal stop representation anyway which regularly at the end of words I've been able to show in my reconstructions very often regularly comes from an earlier are and then use you can see the are in the nada Sarah and version that it came from so at the same time there were crops spreading north not just south from the the Levant into Egypt but from them from the southward from little van but northward from the Sudan and so you see there Waterman the watermelon term but there are other other ones must melons and bottle of gourds and such moving northward casserole the castor oil plant also but not ones that we I can't trust track the word on on the castor oil plant anyway so another arresting body of archaeological evidence exists relating to the ancient sharing of ritual and belief across this culture area in the 5th millennium BCE naba you can find that if you look for on the map it's between kind of off to the west south of the first cataract 200 kilometres 250 kilometers southwest of asjuan this was a major ritual center with astronomically oriented megalithic arrays so here are three slides with some of the remnant finds that we they're all over the place there but anyway this is one particular set of slides here is one where you see on the left the archaeologists reconstruction of how they were when they were still upright and I give you a third one just to give you an idea of how demanding the transporting and setting up of the individual micro lifts must have been for the people who lived in that era era think Stonehenge you know ah yep we are three thousand years earlier than Stonehenge okay and and the other sort of materials around about indicate that this is more of the nilo-saharan speaking areas where this ritual center was now the initial astronaut you astray archeo astronomic there i can talk after all studies of nopt o megaliths my friend Fred Wendorf and particularly the scholar was involved in doing the interpretation Jamie Kemal Vil argued that there were three primary megalithic there's a possibility now of one or two more others two of the arrays lined up with the heliacal rising point of Sirius and a second the heliacal rising point of the belt of Orion and maybe particularly if malval Ken McKim Melville was right the middle star of the belt but anyway and the third and longest array pointed toward the Big Dipper toward the north sky if parts of the sky where the stars never set now more recent studies suggest that knob to more recent archaeological studies served probably for centuries as a ritual center not just in the 5th millennium which these particular alignments date to but that it served for centuries the ritual center with possibly the founding times as early as the late 7th millennium BCE now there are two big stories if we look that I'd see here if we look wider at the sort of settlement areas around and near this ritual center first the building of these arrays The Associated ritual burials the grave goods indicate some kind of level of political concentration sufficient already by the 5th millennium BCE for mobilizing a large labor force and keeping it at work over an extended period so in in all likelihood not to lay in the lands of a state of some kind of small state or centralized early big chiefdom centuries before in such causing consolidation at least in most parts of of Egypt and there's a second influence the very existence of a megalithic arrays tell us there must have existed some kind of formal priesthood you need people who formally cultivate the necessary astronomical expertise and carry out the ritual responsive responsibilities related to that expertise now second part of that story if the initial studies of knobs are correct several notable features of the megalithic it's presage the cosmology of Old Kingdom Egypt most notably in ancient Edith Egypt the Halal rising of Sirius was connected as a key event for calibrating the calendar the two other knob to Playa alignments connect up with ideas about life and death in ancient Egypt the belt of Orion came to be associated particularly with Osiris after life death resurrection fertility of the land a lot of things actually with Osiris who became quite unnoted God the third napped Ori the longest one pointed to the northern parts of the sky where the stars are always above the horizon to the part of the sky where in ancient Egyptian thought the stars never die so now in the middle and the second half of the fourth millennium Idul and the second half of the third and fourth millennium there's evidence of continuing residential and political growth of scale upper egypt and in parts of Nubia as well inhabited by novel Saharan peoples in fact the leading Kingdom here's a couple of towns south of Egypt of that era the leading kingdom from a roughly 3,600 down to maybe 3300 BCE may well have been had its center in the Nile Saharan speaking lands immediately south of Upper Egypt it's sort of Center its royal burial locations where @qu stool which you see up there and the next to the last line and it's on your maps I tried to write a little bigger and put a red line under it the archaeologist Bruce Williams first brought put a spotlight on the this polity and he's worked for decades ago and what I'm discovering and it also was interesting going to a conference so I went to just a couple months ago at at the University of California at Santa Barbara recent work confirms many of Williams ideas and this work is beginning to reveal that if anything the Casull state may have been even more influential then Williams first proposed and here's my comment that will lead to from cultural remains and sites far off in what is today the western desert as well as extend the eastern the Nile we're not sure how much further into the eastern desert it now appears that the coastal state held cultural if not outright political hegemony over a wide expanse of territories and peoples along the Nile and far out notice the two in the West far out away from the river into what would then have been western grassland step rather than western desert ah but then around 3350 BCE given give or take a decade or two or or three a transformative climatic collapse changed everything the Eastern Sahara rapidly shifted over the final drying out to the arid kind of climate it has today changing from step grassland supportive of pastoral pursuits to bare desert in most areas and now least not so much because there's some rain coming from the Red Sea into the Red Sea hills but certainly close to the river on both sides and all the way out westward so an immediate demographic consequence appears to have been that the P past resulted in the emerging desert resettled among the communities along the Nile itself with this climate collapse the Nile finally became what be only too often and wrongly assumed it to always have been this narrow corridor of reliably habitable land with a reliable water supply located in the midst of a vast extremely dry desert the knob de poblet knob de playa site was abandoned the coastal Kingdom with the loss of its outlying population and sharply declined in wealth and power between 3300 and 3100 BCE this is something that Williams discerned in the record already 30 30 or more years ago and now we can look at him with a claim that evidence say oh yeah now we can see why but in Upper Egypt the movement of people to the river I would argue at least helped to set off an opposite trend with vastly more arable land in long continuous stretches in lower Nubia at least the patches of arable land are separated by rocky patches of river and their narrow and small but Egypt long stretch right off northward up the Nile down the Nile sorry there we go I almost did upper and lower all over again anyway so with vastly more arable land and with a continuous run of such land different rulers in Upper Egypt could come to rule over territories with much greater populations then could be sustained any longer south of Aswan at least until you've got up to operate upper to upper Nubia and among other things they would not be able to field larger armies because they had more people to drawn now along with this great and abrupt demographic shift and I suspect that it was very possibly set in motion indeed by these social and political disruptions of the demographic change a succession of new developments of lasting historical significance took shape in the last three centuries BCE the emergence of one or more large polities I got myself too far ahead did not watch out for me here one or more large polities initially in the regions of the naga culture in upper egypt the invention of writing and finally I'll Rob by around 3100 BCE and the 31st century BC the conquest and establishment of the old kingdom unifying all the Nile regions from Aswan to the Delta and also one of the things that happened here during that period in the 31st century there was a major raid southward that under AHA hor-aha which apparently was meant to depopulate what the people that were there because apparently they considered the coastal region to be an area of potential danger and so we see a real it's a real cutting down of the population they seem to have driven people out and deliberately made sure that that land wasn't going to be a threat in the future now even then the Old Kingdom continued to have cultural things that showed the wider connection to the middle Nile cultural world and one kind of indication of course were the celestial ideas and imageries in addition it appears that a notable ritual practice with its origins farther south played a role in early royal observances of the Old Kingdom during the first dynasty of Old Kingdom Egypt royal tombs at Abydos it now appears contained not just the graves of the rulers themselves but also the greys of a large number a Jason Jason Braves a large number of high status individuals buried next to the king apparently to accompany and look after him in the afterlife as many as 300 people in the case of the second king even 135 subsidiary graves in the case of the fifth ruler so some things to be learned there and maybe tried to be better understood now this ritual treatment of the King's death was similarly practiced early in Nubia and it was a ritual feature present still in the high age of the karamja kingdom of Upper Nubia in the second millennium BC and more than that this is a ritual practice that historians have encountered in the history of a number of later nilo-saharan speaking or nilo-saharan influenced kingdoms in the Sudan Belt of Africa from pre-christian Nubia to his far west and as late as the Peyer of the Ghana in the around the 8th or 9th maybe as late as the 10th century ce e ad so now Egypt in this light is best understood not as the source of the practice but as a portion of the middle aisle culture area that may for a time have had this custom but not as deeply rooted maybe in local culture I dropped back out of use by the way of course we don't know that people were executed to go into the afterlife they may each as they died in their turn been buried so we're we're not you know we're not prejudging just how this happened know what a bad yeah I know you're right but we'll give people an opt out if they like it okay to sum up the second story of the Africana T of Egypt is a story of how the institutions and ideas that we see in the ritual for instance of the Old Kingdom Egypt took shape during the 6th the 4th millennium BCE within this wider multi-ethnic sphere of cultural interaction and cultural convergence the middle Nile culture area at least as I call it and it's a story of how quite a number maybe many of the notable cultural features in Egypt had their origins among nilo-saharan neighbors of theirs to south now want to close today with two proposals for critical rethinking by historians and I hope by all of us first it's well past time I think for a critical reexamination of the use by historians and by all of us of the word civilization ok the building of monuments the producing of elaborate art does not mean that the people of such societies were somehow smarter somehow more able than the rest of us what monument building actually testifies to is the growth of wealth and power and the constant growing concentration of that wealth and power in the hands of the few it's the centralized close control of institutions and of the indie ideologies of power that enabled Kings to draft the necessary labour forces it's your ritual responsibility it's not because you have to enslave people to build the the pyramids this is this is your cultural responsibility to the people who have the ritual power and position it is the concentration of wealth and ideological power that gave both royalty and priesthoods the means to support professional artists and to commission their artistic works and we know that from medieval Europe or other places just as well and you know now we can and I think we should indeed appreciate the human accomplishments of these worlds but I'd rather call these societies by terms more materially and objectively descriptive of their features they were early centralized stratified unequal societies they were urban societies in the sense that they possessed at least some towns and cities actually the word civilization once used to really originally mean you had towns but that's not the way we use it anymore but along with valuing they're accomplished accomplished months we ought to be as direct and unblinking in our historical evaluations of their failings as we are of those of the unequal and oppressive societies of recent history and there's a further related point there are more ways for us us to exist and I think this is really important for historians everywhere then just in larger stratified societies it's long past time that smaller scale societies receive proper historical attention it's harder often they give them the attention but they deserve it and all the more so when you consider that in the African case and actually not just in Africa but in other parts of the world too it was people living in small-scale societies who produce some of the most notable early technological advances and I talked about ones in a previous day those in Africa where that happened and it happened in small-scale societies Egypt is a place where the inventions of smaller scale societies that knowledge crossed and it could be fruitfully made use of but isn't necessarily necessarily the region where they started it's maybe where they end up and they caused fruitful interaction so my second closing thought we do no service to the project of giving Africa it's just historical do if we continue to plant our feet in one region of the continent and look outward one of the problems in world history is people plant their feet somewhere in Eurasia and they look outward at the rest of the world when they try to write their world history books all we've done is plant our feet a little farther southward not in the Levant or the Mesopotamia or southern Europe but in Egypt to make Egypt the source for the rest of Africa of some abstract quality or may mythical quality of civilization is still to treat the rest of Africa as peripheral to world history to continue to treat the accomplishment of the rest of Africa's peoples as derivative Africans everywhere on the continent well the further you get away from the middle of the world the more you are but anyway so if you live up in the Arctic and Siberia you know you're kind of getting toward the edge but Africans nearly everywhere in the continent were not off the edge of history instead they were innovative contributors in integral ways and participants in each of the major transitions of long Holocene age that was my sort of topic for last time and they did not need some special people in one part of the continent to bring these developments to them Africans in West and Central Africa were historical and technological innovators innovators in their own right possessing for example ceramic technology long before Egypt and even longer maybe before the Middle East and it now appears earlier having iron technology as well so it's long past to give all of Africa its proper due in the history of Kent Kent mankind and I hope we've able to somehow move that venture forward it's a difficult one to do we live in a cultural world that we didn't make but we're in it so there we are anyway thank you all just working yeah thank you Chris it's been a marvelous lecture series as a fantastic lecture today and I know there be a lot of questions a lot of comment before we ask everyone to join us to celebrate Chris as a lecture with food and drink at the back of the room but it's obvious that what you're doing and other scholars I remember the first shocking time I saw this argument Emanuel was reading his graduate student a cough unto Diop and he said all these historians start in Mesopotamia or wherever and then go I can't say down the now cuz it's the wrong way but go from the north of the Nile toward the equator when civilization starts at the equator and goes north at that in various ways it's not all the way down the equator but that is what all of your evidence is showing that there is a south to north movement rather than things floating down the nah or up the Nile you know from Europe in some mysterious mysterious way why do you think it's been that way I mean the simple answer is your ending which is that we're all photo centric right that's wherever our feet are standing when we're writing that's how we see the world but why wouldn't that occur to people that ideas and culture would flow the way the Nile flow rather than the reverse way well one kind of simple answer is the ethnocentrism I mean all these people wanting you they discover in Europe ancient Egypt and say oh must be people like us well know and so I think we start out with those sorts of viewpoints but we also have the horrific history in between of people needing to cut parts of Africa out of their perception of things otherwise they're going to have to accept the guilt and the horror of what they're doing so you know I I think those things people don't even necessarily consciously word those things however if you look at the this Confederate States documents of secession yeah they they do they are very clear and their nastiness I think really that's more of it but it's also because of each start from eras now as far as Africa goes Europeans and Middle Easterners and East Asian people are used to trying to find written records of things so we have to retool ourselves to understand how much we can get from the other kind of records so that very fact oh we can read and write they can't or something well they didn't choose to but they chose to be an oral Society and have elaborate representations and presentations and continuing of things but so we start out with a deficit because we're starting with the presumption of what is going to give us historical evidence we start out with a deficit understanding for how we can do it for the other areas of the world now you can see however if you can get really big buildings then at least the Europeans got really excited so therefore hey the Incas didn't read didn't write but they built big buildings and they conquered people so we're also seeing a perception of the world like that if you're powerful and you have wars and defeat people somehow that makes you better and stronger too which is I hope we're going through the phase of history I'll never live long to see the result when we'll finally get rid of that sort of idea - but anyway I'm going off on too many things yeah thank you I'm over here thank you so much for this my hearing is coming from there everybody's right there goes to this latter point in the issue of civilization and creativity invention etc and I would say simply from the vantage point of the history of art in much of Africa there's as much creativity and production of art and new ideas within the non-royal non-hierarchical groups as there are within the others and indeed in Congo Benin elsewhere there's often a real push to force each person who comes on the throne to move the capital to create a new palace etc not only bringing together labor but also forcing internally a means of really challenging the status quo and so they're kind of interesting things there so that would be my common internship as we're rethinking civilization and I'm not sure if you're able to put up your wonderful chart of the languages that you had early on it's a question related to that and some work that I've been doing in the area of northern Cameroon near Chad and that area and as you pointed out in your chart the house of language family and the is closely linked with the Coptic language family and a wide variety of ways and Lee indeed they use a Coptic calendar but more recently I've found some really interesting DNA evidence why DNA in particular that links a area in this region which is a mountain area now dominated by Boko Haram because it has such great view shed on the whole trading network and spoke with a DNA expert one that skip users who argues that most likely this is from after 2500 BCE and not earlier and and I've been one of those who's been arguing pretty strongly for an important east-west route from the Nile westward or from the niger been away eastward as a probably in the medieval period controlled by cops and others and I'm just wondering within this context of language I think that there's enough evidence material evidence on the ground to suggest this and it's a well-watered route as well because it was once the Yellow Nile and full of waters but the kind of linguistic one evidence one would use to let's say argue that you could this could not have been coming later but necessarily had to been coming earlier for that Co relationship between the Coptic and the house of language families yeah well the the language relationships are in the order of ten thousand years but the the I know this genetic material which is interesting and we are having discussions trying to see how to fit it into the rest of the genetics now the the Chaddock group moved into an area with largely nilo-saharan people and it shows up in their genetics with only a certain amount of their genetic background from the more ancient coming from the edge of the from the nile direction now as to african movements there were what i talked about last time was about for those who weren't available here one of the big themes was that there was an west african commercial revolution beginning as long ago as 1800 BCE and this becomes a very extensive network of interactions the movement of goods manufacturers with interesting new kinds of town formations taking place and so on what we don't have as a is knowledge of a nice area we'd really love to have right on through an eddy and across to northern parts of modern-day sudan there are the evidence people are now interpreting things like harus trips as actually going well out to the West and so we have the possibility of this area being also an early area of long-distance trade connections where people could have moved along these connections and then got involved in trade in the West African trade commercial network and moved up into the hills perhaps to carry on connections and married locally and and have something to do with us so there are possibilities that way coming behind you thank you very much and I haven't been disappointed when I ask you a few questions a fresh son versus a Frisian I noticed in your first edition you said a fraction well second edition is that a Frisian so I thought well I'll just make it short for people it was stupid of me because it really makes more sense to be a phrasing that's a short way of saying afro-asiatic and it's basically it's the north east african language family with this one little offshoot semitic that gets all the historical attention and whatever so it's kind of too bad that it's even called afro-asiatic but that's also a name that's well in it so I've often also used afro-asiatic but I'm I probably am going to go back to that except for for students it's better to have a shorter term so a phrasing is what I've gone to so I will go back to you know this upper/lower thing it really you know I have to concentrate okay yes maybe I mean it's just we should just be talking about North and South that's it you know North and South and probably in brackets puts you know whatever we want to put there yeah I thought to that you know afro-asian afro-asiatic I agree with Topanga that that name should change and I think we should still try our best to get a better terminology instead of of that the language mapped away I see you disconnect between the map and the idea of a for a she attic as such starting the area south of the confluence but I may be wrong from the middle that's neither Saharan family yeah but anyway I'm sorry I need your advice thank you that to me now do you agree with their thesis though that you know Sarah rather I think is the name of the place would have parts dated to about 12,000 South Europe in the Sudan but anyway that mind as you were talking and then I record also that we have some parts dated about 9,000 400 BC in the Malian region this is what I talked about previously yeah right oh I see yeah so anyway that so that came to my mind now I take it of course that society and couse tool would be synonymous so sort of you know referring to the same thing oh sorry to learn what oh I see yeah tossed ideas coos - absolutely okay but it was yeah yeah the land of the bow people and the bowmen yeah thank you so much for the comments on Bruce Williams I think this guy is a pioneer you know excellent pioneer and he has been not to recognize as as much thank you so much for recognizing yeah I was going to say by the way we do have some genetics which fits with a movement from so in your bibliography I put as a notable article by show market kata which shows how the genetic there's this one set of especially white chromosome genetics that maps out with the language spread though we've talked about it gets all the way to the Middle East and it gets clear across to the Alma's and so on well uh feein is the name they give to a particular Fe NM ''a Don are two cultures that turn up at the same time are seen virtually varieties of the same bringing in the wild grain collection at 15,000 BCE that's the name they give to this new culture the archeology archaeological yeah it's an archaeological name okay okay the question was was there was there a king Menna or not and and if so what's the evidence Narmer the same person yeah that's that's that's what we have does NASA's is a debate on that yeah there are one argument could be that hor-aha is or just AHA was the actual sort of founding king that really put the kingdom together that he's the the real name at the time of the name whatever the nickname menís came from that this would have been this would have been the person who was that person other people feel that maybe Narmer is the one that should be fit into the category of menace but okay and hor-aha is the one of the documents the monuments showing that he went down and cleaned up so to speak in a nasty way did a sort of a like our president and the Kurds did this to toss SETI so anyway so he may have been the person to put the whole show together and they did see that region as a core region of danger where armies could come and the the Bruce Williams has came up with pictorial documents from coastal which show the foot of who needs to be the king of coastal standing on upper egypt claiming that they had conquered parts of no upper egypt so yeah there is a relationship there that's significant as well to know about we may have Nile sarin conquest of Egypt before the 25th did our dynasty's them skip likes to do that too so I the I I've been reflecting on early photography I know we've talked about know the influences of a European scholarship and refer to him I take things that but I'm also going back looking at even the Greco Egyptian and the early beginnings of cartography picked up by Arab photographers and how they represented space and there's a sense in which the feather you went down in in Africa there's you nothing was happening and so there's a sense in which even the very beginnings of the representation oh the special representation of space yeah almost kind of ignored much of Africa the northern part was part of the Mediterranean world it was part of this well and as well I've been reflecting on that I mean when you were trying to figure out whether it is upper egypt or lower you and we need to turn it around but but there's a same which it doesn't matter how the river flowed according to these le cartographers nothing much was happening as you went further sound mm-hmm and it's just something I've been reflecting hmm but you know this is a human thing I'm seeing in modern American politics there's a whole bunch of Americans who really don't know diddly and they're saying well it's not really happening cuz I don't know about it so you know this is what people do you say well it couldn't be worthwhile I don't know about it and then that keeps your Eagle in contact and contact and not falling apart on you and so it's you know surely if it was something happening there we'd know about it so I you know I think that's just what human beings do and the further they got away from the early people who made maps on written sort of maps and I discovered of course working in the field way off in the country in Tanzania people could just could draw a map so people can all do this they tell me well though you forget to get to this guy's house look here is it made draw map on the sand or they over the earth there so people we have this natural capacity so anyway that's kind of another side topic rather than anything else but kind of the north west the the west the northeast the center everything that the South East kind of won one time or another traveled to people not lived in that little village called Killam at Indy about four hours from Dodoma with the go-go people yeah when I was the 19th I was curious yes hands : people I hesitate to displace ignorance and this company since African history especially way back is not my field but I am curious about the name Africa I know it's what the Romans called a place called Tunisia yeah yes it's from a tribal name in northern yeah structurally what you can tell looking at it it has the absolute the vowel and consonant sequences type of structure of an amaz if a Berber name is perfect begins with a vowel I'll or II and then has three consonants oh it's perfect so it has to be some Berber regional name and I would think in that area it would have been more an aerial or regional name rather than an ethnic group name why would the right chosen it I mean why did it become the name for the entire country yeah yeah tail wagging the dog yeah yeah interesting question because what happens is people start drawing Maps in the Roman period then their sense of what might be Africa gets this widening but how we then through the medieval Europeans or something decided to take the whole of the continent yeah I don't know I'm sorry there's my ignorance so maybe someone else knows couple places here and one thing by the way is I think is very important is we always should admit our own ignorance of things we really get ourselves in holes if we don't and we learned so much more if we say you know I don't know about that thank you for I openin fascinating lecture I am intrigued absolutely by your language family tree I was looking here for Mara Witek and hey Mara wedeck needs to be an Eastern Soudan ik language of the nilo-saharan family there are several things that do that that that seems to be when people have dug into it that's what they feel is true I would also I also can bring another kind of evidence there are lone words words borrowed into Nubian Nile languages that come from some other nilo-saharan language I can show they're borrowings because they don't have the right town sound correspondence but they're not all Saharan and the people who would have been there should have been Mara lytic speaking so I'm presuming that's an indirect indicator as well that they were Eastern Soudan ik Eastern Sahelian branch of model Saharan so fascinating I also know language specialist by any means but I've also heard that their cognate sand as far west as Chad I'm sorry there are language families that relate to Mara whiticus far less west is Chad how do you feel about that yeah yeah you know because the Nidal serán family goes as far as as so nigh on the bend of the niger that's that's where the family goes now one thing you'll discover is that there there are not very many people really seriously or historical linguists anymore because once no Chomsky came along it was you'd show you're a more intellectual and really smart if you did obscure grammatical things so you don't necessarily get enough people getting in the field so what happens with the African cases you've got some people that really they're still doing a bunch of other studies that on the side they may do some language relationship and they they don't see the big picture a lot of times and a second thing to notice if you have a language in a family that's the only language of its branch it's all by itself in its branch well the more languages you have in a branch still spoken the more chances you'll find oh here's the ancient word these two don't have it but that one does and well here's another one and that that it's not in the other two you have only one it becomes harder to find the evidence so there's a bunch of people that want to make song I and do something else all its own because it's the only language of its branch and it's several thousand years time depth from any nearer relationship probably since probably 7,000 years that makes it hard so you will find arguments about whether it really works or not I'm saying this so because I want you all to accept what I did rather than what anyone else says but but I did do in for nilo-saharan - I did deep intense family language to language working out the sound correspondences and doing a bunch of things and there aren't many people interested or really directly concerned to grapple with these issues so things are kind of sitting in stasis but I go ahead and use them anyway hello piggyback off of my professor and say thank you for mentioning Bruce Williams this is a man who wrote eight monographs on the excavations in Nubia and there are such detailed such great such you know however all the texts that I've read a lot of them they won't even mention him they won't even say his name I would like to know how you feel about when he talked about the coast or an incense burner from toss a tea and he actually explained that it definitely still is a form of writing not the crystal incense burner so can we say that writing literally came from Nubia you know the incense burner and it seems to be something that no one wants to like Markowitz and taxi me a troop I mean we need another century or two before we're actually seeing for sure we've got writing in Egypt okay and this would give us that but I think also the the pictorial documents we're beginning this this is a creation initial form of writing itself thanks why so so if you have the collapse of the climate you have the chance for these things - now their ideas to stimulate the change that we then that people do admit to north of the the first cataract so he also talks about the fact the Nubians and the Egyptians were basically like they had a familial relationship and it's almost like cousins in the North and the South you know you know they they were more familiar it wasn't they weren't more enemies they were more like fighting cousins almost you know they did but I have a cousin who might want to kill me I mean so I mean it happens however there was there was less distinction between the two civilizations which I think that they were this is what I tried this is what when growing people are saying this was cultural convergence right there on one world yeah okay so yeah so you do agree that we need to bring Bruce Williams out more in his research yeah but by the way he was at the meeting and people still invite him and I've got to see him again I hadn't seen him for quite a few years well there's a book look which I didn't bring here Egypt before the pyramids visit anyway there's a recent book that's connected with a museum exhibit but he's got an article in there there's a whole bunch of fun articles in there that pull all these things together where you can see a lot of what you're saying so yeah because I went to the Boston Museum real quick and I asked a woman at the Boston Museum actually literally asked about his work and said his name and the woman had no idea yeah he was well you know yeah you know what we're dealing we're dealing with the issues that I'm raising about this idea of civilization and whatever and all the racist ideas of our Egyptians fit in the world compared to people south of Egypt it's just oh my god so you know I come [Applause] no I think they're so hard on him because he's actually saying exactly what mr. Eric is saying in my opinion and is that no there's a south to north migration of people and that the culture basically started there and not in Egypt and he's definitely letting people know that Egypt is in Africa and also of Africa so I liked when you said that it was over cuz I read that in the book and wanted to throw the book across the room it made no sense to say Egypt is in Africa but it's not of Africa so it didn't make any sense ing said that I was like yes that's what that's what my first several sentences today we're about exactly that this is ridiculous we're dealing with centuries of the need of people north to have a particular view of the world and and you have and look it's become it's so important for many certain older Egyptologists they have this idea in their head and they can't imagine the world could be different you see what's his name there's someone else I know well and shows my age on losing names anyway I wrote this me oh no no I'm not Fred but anyway whatever they deal as he came out right away with an article after Bruce Williams came out saying oh well there may have been some chiefdoms down there or something but there's not really Kingdom's no you had no basis he had no basis for saying that he didn't confront the evidence that Bruce gave him well so anyway you know thanks to Chris hare Charles Bonet Rita freed and other brilliant scholars we know the truth here and that's the way it let's give it up for Christopher arataura brilliant series of Legends please join us for food and drink at the back of the room before he spirit him
