Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Kingdom of Kush and the Pyramids of Nubia
58 Plays13 days ago
In this episode of Pieces of History, I’m joined by Geoff Emberling to explore the history of ancient Nubia and the Kingdom of Kush - a civilisation too often overlooked in traditional accounts of the ancient world.
We begin with Geoff’s own path into archaeology and his work in Nubia, before stepping back to place the region geographically and culturally within the wider Nile Valley. From there, we examine how Egypt-centred narratives have shaped popular understandings of the past, and what they miss about Nubia’s political power, cultural confidence, and global connections.
For those encountering Kush for the first time, we discuss who the Kushites were, what their kingdom looked like at its height, and what Nubia’s pyramids reveal about Kushite identity, religion, and authority. We also explore the long and complex relationship between Kush and Egypt — from trade and rivalry to the Kushite conquest of Egypt during the 25th Dynasty.
Drawing on recent archaeology and fieldwork, Geoff reflects on how new evidence is reshaping our understanding of Nubia, and why placing it at the centre rather than the margins fundamentally changes how we view ancient history.
Email: piecesofhistorypod@outlook.com
Facebook: Pieces of History podcast
Instagram: @pieceofhistorypod
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Pieces of History and Ancient Nubia
00:00:13
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Pieces of History. I'm Colin McGrath and in each episode explore both the well-known and the overlooked stories that have shaped our world.
Exploration of the Kingdom of Kush
00:00:23
Speaker
Today we turn our attention to ancient Nubia and the Kingdom of Kush, a civilization that flourished along the Nine but has long been overshadowed by its Egyptian neighbour.
00:00:33
Speaker
Through the work of archaeologist Jeff Emberling, we explore Nubia on its own terms, its geography, culture, power and deep connections across Africa and the ancient world.
00:00:44
Speaker
Together we'll examine who the Kushites were, what their pyramids revealed about their belief and authority, and how do you understand Nubia's complex relationship with Egypt without reducing it to a footnote.
00:00:56
Speaker
Along the way, Jeff reflects on his fieldwork and how archaeology is reshaping long-held assumptions about the ancient past. I hope you enjoy.
Jeff Emberling's Journey into Nubian Studies
00:01:06
Speaker
Geoff, thanks very much for joining me. I really appreciate it. So to start off, could you tell listeners a little bit about your background?
00:01:13
Speaker
What first drew you to archaeology itself and the study of ancient Nubia in particular? Yeah, sure. I think like all archeologists or many archeologists, I got started young or at least the caught the bug young.
00:01:27
Speaker
when i was When I was in high school, I saw Treasures of Tutankhamen exhibit that was touring the United States. And looking back, that was the moment when I you know when i got fascinated both with the the idea of connecting with another culture that was so distant and in time and so distant in space,
00:01:47
Speaker
um and And then to to to being an archaeologist and getting to physically traveled places to to to study them.
Geographical and Cultural Significance of Nubia
00:01:56
Speaker
I mean, i had ah I had a, there were a series of steps that led me to Nubia.
00:02:01
Speaker
when i When I did my PhD, I ended up working on Mesopotamia, which is an excavated at a site in Syria. um And i I took a job as museum director at the University of Chicago, where they have a big collection of Nubian material that came out of the Aswan Dam salvage projects of the 1960s.
00:02:19
Speaker
And so I was responsible for supervising ah installation of ah of a museum gallery. And because my training in in the United States, often archaeologists are trained as anthropologists.
00:02:32
Speaker
So it's all about culture, but it's also built around the idea of comparison between cultures as a way of understanding what is particularly distinctive about the ways that that some cultures are organized.
00:02:44
Speaker
So in the course of working on that Nubian exhibit, I got very interested in the the possibilities for comparative study of Nubia by comparison with particularly Mesopotamia, but also Egypt and other ancient cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean the Middle East.
00:03:02
Speaker
I always like to place myself geographically on where the piece of history is set itself. So for those people that familiar with the region, how would you describe Nubia and why is it such an important part of the the Nile Valley story itself?
Understanding the Term 'Nubia' and Kushite Empire
00:03:17
Speaker
Well, sure. So ah the in narrow terms, Nubia is the term that we use to describe the the Nile Valley, mostly, um running from Khartoum in Sudan, which is where the Blue and White Niles come together to form the main Nile, and running up through a series of cataracts areas of islands and waterfalls and rapids and things like that that sort of interrupt travel in the in the valley up to Aswan in the southern part of Egypt. So that stretch from Khartoum to Aswan is what archaeologists anyway mean when we when we talk about Nubia.
00:03:56
Speaker
um if If I could just take a moment to talk about the term, because this is definitely the broadest term that that people use, but it is totally not appropriate to the ancient cultures that that we use. The term Nubia itself, meaning the land of the Nuba people, wasn't used until the Crusades.
00:04:19
Speaker
So thousands of years after the the the culture that I've been studying.
Multiculturalism and Political Dominance of Kush
00:04:24
Speaker
And that culture is called Kush. That was the ancient name that they used for themselves.
00:04:30
Speaker
But it was it was, in my view, an empire, which which is to say that it's not really an ethnic designation. um you know Empires are often, are always multicultural.
00:04:42
Speaker
um And so Kush was the dominant political power in this in this region of the Nile Valley. ah The reason that Kush Nubia became became the term, sort of the dominant term is that there are modern people who speak Nubian languages who live in at least the northern part of that stretch of the of the river. And so there's a natural connection between these areas of Nubian speaking people. And the there are immediate predecessors who were Christian medieval kingdoms, who were the ones that the crusaders were interested in. And then the ancient cultures of Kush and others.
Diverse Cultures and Geography of Nubia
00:05:21
Speaker
My final point about about this is that, actually, have two final points about this. One of them is that oh under the umbrella of Nubia,
00:05:33
Speaker
there's an incredible diversity of cultures. So in addition to this politically dominant Kush, there are nomadic groups, semi-nomadic groups, and we we see them in ancient texts and and in different places at different times. So we don't have ah a full picture of who all those people were, but you have to think of this as ah as a complex social environment. um And the other thing is that,
00:05:57
Speaker
the The Nile as it flows northward flows first through a savanna region, ah which in ancient times would have supported elephants and giraffes and those kind of African fauna lions and that kind of thing. And then it flows into what's now the Sahara Desert.
00:06:13
Speaker
And so so the a big stretch of of Nubia is effectively desert outside the the Nile Valley itself. the The Nubian Nile is not as wide or fertile as the Nile in Egypt, partly because of these cataracts and other ah geological phenomena.
00:06:34
Speaker
And that means that the population of of of Nubia, of Kush, was never as large as the population in
Kush-Egypt Relations: Trade, Conflict, and Gold
00:06:43
Speaker
Egypt. And also the population had a ah significant component of mobility. There were mobile groups that were an essential part of the overall economic, political a situation in Libya.
00:06:57
Speaker
For somebody encountering Kush for the first time, like I did several months ago, um who were they? And how do you characterize their kingdom at its height in terms of power, wealth and influence?
00:07:09
Speaker
Yes. So first of all, Kush as a as a political entity is first named in 2000 BCE or so. So that's for people who know Egyptian history, that's the Middle Kingdom of Egypt.
00:07:25
Speaker
And it but it would continue down into the early centuries a d as So so as ah as an entity, it's known for over 2,000 years.
00:07:38
Speaker
It was Egypt's southern neighbor. they They were trade partners. There was movement of people back and forth. And of course, there were conflicts throughout this relationship that were driven partly by the fact that Nubia, broadly speaking, has a lot of gold.
00:07:59
Speaker
And so the Egyptians were were quite interested in not having to trade for that, but being able to exploit it directly. And so that that drove a lot of the Egyptian interest in in Nubia, just in economic terms.
Kush's Global Trade and Historical Significance
00:08:13
Speaker
you you You asked me to characterize Kush at the height of its power, wealth, and influence. And one thing I always our field is built in a way that this is the way we talk about these ancient kingdoms. But especially now, i i and and others are sensitized to wanting to glorify, you know, despotism and all the cruelty that that that that entails. And, you know, so it's always interesting to me, for example, that um the the story of enslavement
00:08:45
Speaker
and and enslaved people as key to the the economic prosperity of ancient empires is very often it's sort of a story that's not told.
00:08:56
Speaker
But I would say that Kush was an empire and That was as territorially extensive as Egypt at its height, that was in trade contact with all the cultures of the ancient ancient world from Persia even to to Mesopotamia, Assyria, and also Greece and Rome.
00:09:19
Speaker
So it was a part of that larger world of ancient cultures. It was militarily powerful enough to have fought with and against most of those groups at different times.
00:09:31
Speaker
But really the fundamental point is that it belongs in any history of the ancient world.
Depictions of Kushite Rulers and Historical Biases
00:09:40
Speaker
I don't want to harp back to the Egyptians at all because but we know that the main rulers and the pharaohs, Cleopatra and so on, Ramesses and so on and so forth.
00:09:49
Speaker
Do we still have, not literature would you say, but do we have artifacts that date back to who some of these, what would they call pharaohs, would they call kings or who what who were they? I'm sorry, it's just a complete blank slate for me.
00:10:04
Speaker
Okay, yeah, let let me just address that pharaoh question because there there's a big a much bigger issue embedded in that, which is that ah historically we've we've tended to see Nubia and Qash through the eyes of Egypt.
00:10:19
Speaker
And that is both through the eyes of Egyptian texts, you know so which were not neutral you know in the ways that they were describing these people, but also through the discipline of Egyptology.
00:10:32
Speaker
And so the early the early explorers, archaeologists who worked ah in Kush were all trained as Egyptologists. And I often think that the the ancient texts, like Egyptian texts, really still have this capacity to cast a spell on scholars. you know Oh, yes, of course, Kush was vile. That was one you know a translation one of the terms that the Egyptians used to describe Kush, vile Kush.
00:11:01
Speaker
even though the overt racism of scholarship, you know, 100, 150 years ago is no longer expressed, still that idea that push is important only because it is only insofar as it relates to Egypt, that idea is still very much with us, I'm afraid to say. it The neutral term for the Kings of Kush, kings and queens of Kush is just ruler.
00:11:26
Speaker
That's the the term that they used, kore, and it could apply to a king, it could apply to a queen if she was ruling independently, which happened with some regularity. And, um So some, I mean, some of the the best known ones are Piamke, who just before 700 BC conquered Egypt and and then established a Kushite dynasty that would rule over both Kush and Egypt.
00:11:55
Speaker
Taharqo was a later king in that dynasty who's well known partly because he's mentioned in the Bible. he fought ah He led the Egyptian and Kushite armies to fight the Assyrians first in the area and around Jerusalem. And then and ultimately they were not successful and the Assyrians sacked and burned the the Egyptian capitals. But anyway, because of those interactions, he's his he's well known.
00:12:23
Speaker
um So I assume you're asking about some of the
Colonial Influence on Nubian Archaeology
00:12:28
Speaker
particularly famous ones. I'll mention just one other, if I can, who was a ruling queen who successfully fought the Roman armies after the Romans conquered Egypt.
00:12:41
Speaker
um And the the Roman in the the classical historical tradition, she's called Kandake, which actually is the is the title is her title, which means queen or queen mother.
00:12:56
Speaker
And her name probably was Amani Renas. So Queen Amani Renas was another powerful and and a figure who significantly impacted neighboring cultures.
00:13:10
Speaker
Jeff, normally i ask this question at the end of interviews, as in how much more research do we have to do in relation to this area? But I'm going to ask it now. i How much research do we still have to do in relation to this area?
00:13:23
Speaker
My other question is academically, how far back does academic research go into this area? Like when was it, I suppose from a Western point of view, when was it first started to be looked into? Was like 100 ago, 150 years ago? one hundred and fifty years ago har ah harlo what's what's our for that?
00:13:39
Speaker
European research in in Nubia was you know intimately connected with colonial dynamics and whatever. And it it began in the 19th century. The earliest people who came there were actually part of a conquering army that came down from Egypt in 1818, 1819.
00:13:58
Speaker
And they they made the first you know published drawings of some of these ancient monumental sites and temples and inscriptions and things like that. And so there were a series of of more formal expeditions.
00:14:14
Speaker
um The first excavations really began right around 1900. And really the and and really the One of the really important early figures was an American archaeologist named George Reisner, who was based at Giza.
00:14:32
Speaker
And then during the winter, he would come down to to Sudan. And he systematically excavated every single royal burial of king or queen that he could find.
00:14:45
Speaker
and you know so And we still rely on on the work that he did and this kind of thing for for chronology of of rulers. He was one of those racist early scholars who who saw everything in Kush as being a poor reflection of what was in Egypt.
00:15:04
Speaker
And he didn't think that the Kushites could have developed anything by themselves.
George Reisner's Work and Controversies
00:15:08
Speaker
So it all had to be, in his in his view, the result of of Egyptians or others coming down to teach the the the local people what they were you know what they should do his because of his interest in first of all in the in the royal chronology but second of all in getting objects that he could bring back to museums um his focus was was on monumental buildings on on tombs and temples primarily a little bit of palace kind of stuff
00:15:43
Speaker
um and And in that he was he was like all of those other early archeologists in the 1910s and 1920s and 1930s who were aiming to bring things back from Sudan to their home museums. And so Reisner was connected with the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which means that the Museum of Arts in Boston has the largest collection of Nubian antiquities anywhere in the world, including in Sudan.
00:16:09
Speaker
And I will just say that almost none of it is on display. And it's an international scandal that that that they're holding this material and not putting it on
New Insights from Jebel Barkal Excavations
00:16:22
Speaker
display.
00:16:22
Speaker
Okay, I'm getting back to your other question of how much more work do we have to do? so So these early excavators really focused on that elite culture to the exclusion of so much else about about this culture. So i'm just to give you one example, I've been directing a project at a at one of the capitals of ancient Kush, which is called Jebel Barkal in Northern Sudan.
00:16:49
Speaker
for the last, i don't know, eight years or so. And it's it's been tricky because there's a war going on in Sudan, as you may have heard. So our more recent work has been working with our Sudanese colleagues who are there on the ground. But anyway, we're all still somehow finding ways to to keep our our work going.
00:17:08
Speaker
But when we started working there, nobody had any idea that this site was actually a city. They thought of it as more of a temple center, because that's where where the excavation had had been done.
00:17:21
Speaker
And we're able to put together a picture of ah of a large, thriving, complex city
00:17:30
Speaker
were able to do really basic, basic, basic studies for archaeology in other parts of the world, but just hadn't been done for Jebel Barkal itself, which is what were they eating?
00:17:43
Speaker
You know, those kinds
Challenges in Sudanese Archaeological Research
00:17:44
Speaker
of studies, which you you know from, I'm sure, having talked to other archaeologists, everybody does. But we did literally the first flotation for our recovery of of ancient botanical remains, for example. And we did the first analysis of fauna remains from the site.
00:17:59
Speaker
as a latecomer to archaeology in Kush, I'm really trying to take that comparative idea seriously. And what that means is that we we need to develop so much basic information about how Kush functioned as ah as an empire um before we can really really put it on ah on a level playing field with with its contemporaries and in the ancient world.
00:18:27
Speaker
Personally,
Kushite Pyramids and Cultural Influences
00:18:28
Speaker
i would say that we have so much work to do in archaeology in Sudan, and i'm I'm hoping that the political situation will make it possible for us to go back.
00:18:39
Speaker
Absolutely. Jeff, it it sounds really exciting as well. And like you said, hopefully if things... you'll calm down over the next number of years, you'll be able to get back into the field and you get all great work done as well. Slightly moving the conversation on again then, um and you did slightly touch on some of the structures there. So people may not necessarily know um the pyramids of Kush as well.
00:19:00
Speaker
What would you say captured your imagination for the first time? And what were the pyramids actually for? Was for their politics, religion or identity or a combination of all three?
00:19:11
Speaker
um this is This is another very interesting question that that in a way it goes to this question of the how how Egypt and Kush were interrelated, and they definitely were interrelated. Pyramids in Kush were burial markers.
00:19:28
Speaker
They were put above the burial chambers, which were were dug into the rock underground. um They, the Kushites began, first maybe be experienced pyramids when the Egyptians had colonized Kush during the Egyptian New Kingdom.
Cultural Interweaving: Kushite Worship of Egyptian Gods
00:19:45
Speaker
So Egyptian officials in Kush built their own pyramids. So they're small. they're They're private pyramids. They're not the big pyramids of Giza or, you know, any any of those sort of Old Kingdom royal or Middle Kingdom royal pyramids. They're small.
00:20:03
Speaker
And so when the when the Egyptian empire collapsed and local rulers began to develop more power in Kush, they started building pyramids.
00:20:16
Speaker
First, they were just mud brick pyramids. And then with this King Piyanki and his conquest of Egypt, I think they must they brought back architects, stonemasons, scribes, and they built stone built pyramids that had, you know,
00:20:39
Speaker
very Egyptian looking inscriptions and wall paintings inside them. Only a couple of them are are really preserved. But the appearance of pyramids in in Nubia is really, it's a i think it's a reflection of, or an acknowledgement of the cultural prestige of Egypt.
00:20:59
Speaker
They were doing this at ah a time when the Egyptians had long stopped making pyramids. You know, and they and and they continue doing it for wild pyramids again for for you know another another thousand years or more.
00:21:11
Speaker
And the Sudanese are always are always ah want to point out that there are more pyramids in Sudan than there are in Egypt, which is true. It's also true they're smaller. But anyway, they're they're it's a tradition that that the Kushites carried on for a long time after they had borrowed it from the Egyptians.
00:21:32
Speaker
So you can tell a very similar story, for example, of the Kushite worship of Egyptian gods. So the god Amun, was the chief god during the new kingdom.
00:21:45
Speaker
Temples were built around the Egyptian cult in in Nubia. And then after the the Egyptians left, the Nubians, Kushites, made Amun one of their main gods. And the biggest temples in in Nubia are are to this Egyptian god Amun. And in fact, they they continued making Amun the main god of their of their religion long after the Egyptians had stopped active construction of temples and so on on to them.
00:22:19
Speaker
So the question in an older generation of scholarship, people would have used a term like Egyptianization. The Kushites were Egyptianized.
00:22:30
Speaker
But if you look more carefully, you can see that they are very they are making choices. They're active agents. They're deciding to do this. And in fact, since they maintain this a lot longer than they were relevant in Egypt, it's really these have become Kushite.
00:22:47
Speaker
You know,
Recent Discoveries and African Connections
00:22:48
Speaker
how how long do you have to worship a God because before it becomes your own God? Right. It's not that, you know, after a thousand years, they're still thinking of this as an Egyptian God. No, it's their God.
00:22:58
Speaker
So anyway, pyramids, gods, all speak to the the interwoven nature of the of these cultures. um So we kind of go into your own research now as well.
00:23:11
Speaker
From your fear work that you've done on the ground and again, more recent archaeology, which just said what you did mention, there there is conflict in Sudan at the minute. What discoveries or kinds of evidence have most reshaped how we understand Nubian society and its wider African connections? You have lightly touched on it before, but if you want to go into into a bit more detail, that'd be great.
00:23:33
Speaker
So our work at Jebel Barkal has been focused on the idea that this was a city and we have successfully documented that using a lot of different archeological techniques, including magnetometry and ground penetrating radar that allow us to see under the under the surface and to show really a very, very dense urban framework.
00:23:57
Speaker
um But also through, you know, recently, let let me just take one moment to talk about funding because it's been a chaotic, especially for archaeologists based in the United States.
00:24:08
Speaker
I had $200,000 worth of federal government funding canceled by the Trump administration in in early 2025.
Funding Challenges for Sudanese Archaeology
00:24:19
Speaker
That's a lot of money for an archaeologist. A lot of money to have. And so we We're extremely fortunate to get a ah very generous gift from a man named Steve Klinski, who is supporting five archaeological projects at the University of Michigan, where I'm based.
00:24:37
Speaker
and And that's what's allowed us to continue working in this otherwise like otherwise funding has has has disappeared for us. So we're very grateful for that. And also recognize that um however generous a private gift is, it's a difficult way to sustain. you know, you you just don't know what the what the donor's interest is going to be over the longer term.
00:25:02
Speaker
So that being said, with that work.
Kushite Society's Dependence on Cattle and Pastoralism
00:25:05
Speaker
We've continued a magnetometry survey and we're building out a picture of this very large city that that again, in in comparative terms, puts it closer to being on on a par with the size of cities in Egypt.
00:25:21
Speaker
We've been able to do some advanced analytical work. Let me tell you a little bit about what they ate. It turns out amazingly to me that the faunal assemblage in the city is is about 80 to 90 percent cattle. at that So this is this raises a bunch of questions for us.
00:25:41
Speaker
At that time, the Nile Valley is is quite narrow they and and irrigation technologies were not widely deployed there. So they could not have raised that many cattle ah right there at the city.
00:25:54
Speaker
we all so So I've had this question, where were the cattle being raised? We also just did at that the University of York an analysis of residues in ceramic vessels.
00:26:07
Speaker
Also has been very rarely done in Sudan. And I'm not an expert in in these kind of things, but one of the results was that there are remains of cattle who have been eating C4 plants. These are plants that grow in arid environments. So that kind of supported my idea. And we're we're working on a hypothesis, which we'll have to test with further isotope studies and so on, that in fact, these cattle were raised away from the Nile Valley to the south in the Savannah zone that I talked about earlier.
00:26:42
Speaker
Probably, i mean, there this is that there are cattle pastoralists in Sudan today who who move their cattle east-west. And so we're imagining something like that. and then look cattle drives to the Nile, slaughter of, you know, butchery of cattle on the banks of the Nile, and then distribution of the of the of the meat through the city.
00:27:05
Speaker
That by itself is a great, I mean, it remains to be proven, but I think all the evidence is is falling into place. That's a great indication of the extent to which Kush was a society that fundamentally depended on mobile populations.
Urban Complexity and Cultural Richness in Kushite Cities
00:27:22
Speaker
So it's mains one of its main cities depended on the the meat that was being grown in the savannah. I will also say it had always been surprising to me that here's this big city located right on the Nile, and we're we there's there's no fish bones.
00:27:39
Speaker
Like, what's going on with that? and And, you know, there was a, there's Piyanki in his inscription describing the conquest of Egypt at one point makes a kind of a disparaging comment about unclean fish eaters.
00:27:55
Speaker
So, you know, maybe there's some kind of a class thing or you know, or you know the fish was not elite food, something like that. Anyway, so one of these jars that we did residue analysis also had clear evidence that the jar had contained fish.
00:28:13
Speaker
So like, what I don't know where the fish bones went, but the Sudanese even today do make a kind of fermented fish dish that that could be what this practice relates to. This starts to bring all kinds of color and texture to the life of these cities and also begins to highlight some ways in which Kush and and Nubian cultures in general are are are distinctive and worth this kind of comparative study that i've been talking about.
00:28:44
Speaker
Absolutely. Jeff, that is fantastic. And if I'm honest, I think you could talk about this particular subject area for a lot longer than what you've just done. But I think that's yeah that could be another podcast episode.
00:28:54
Speaker
So my final question, now Jeff, if that's OK, finally stepping back from this.
Future of Nubian Archaeology and Encouraging Scholars
00:29:00
Speaker
Do we have a better understanding now in 2026 of Kush than we did, you know, five, 10, 15 years ago? Where do you see the field going in the next five or 10 years?
00:29:12
Speaker
I'm sorry, it's a three pronged question. And if anybody else had an interest in if if if they're listening to this and maybe they're studying history in school or they're a young archaeologist training themselves, how would you encourage people to get into this particular region?
00:29:27
Speaker
So it's a great question. Thank you for asking that. And it's really difficult right now because of the war. And so normally the way that somebody would would get into this field is to go on an archaeological project and spend time
Building Sudanese Archaeology and International Collaboration
00:29:42
Speaker
in the country. And I have to say that all of us working in Sudan fall in love with the people um it's a difficult it's it can be a difficult country to work in it's sort of you know it it's not the wealthiest country in the world to to to say the least and uh but the people you know i always i often tell my friends there that i've learned so much about being a good friend from working with you you know so so but that for the moment that part of
00:30:13
Speaker
that part of the experience of becoming a ah scholar is it's not really available. there's another There's another sort of more systemic issue in this, which is that for a variety of reasons, including, i would argue, structural systemic racism, archaeology of Sudan is not it's not a priority in the field. I mean, if you think about, there are entire departments of you know Near Eastern studies or Egyptology or classical archeology, whatever. There's whole departments devoted to those specific areas. And there's there are very few positions in the world
00:30:53
Speaker
that are Nubian archaeologists. So it's ah it's a challenge for students. And the the students that I've worked with at Michigan who who have come with me to Sudan and and and ah done work, this has always been a second field for them.
00:31:08
Speaker
And I wish it weren't the case. and And maybe I can just close with with an idea about this, which which may not help all of your listeners. if If anyone has further questions, they should not hesitate to send me an email. I'm happy to to talk talk through what opportunities there might be. but Part of the way that we're working, and there's a number of projects in Sudan that are working this way now, is where we are trying to be fully collaborative with our Sudanese colleagues and also deeply engage with the Sudanese communities that we're working with.
00:31:41
Speaker
I really think that the future of archaeology in Sudan is really going to be building up Sudanese archaeologists and Sudanese archaeology. And so, you know,
00:31:55
Speaker
I don't know what the you know what the ideal balance ultimately would be if you were designing it between having international scholars and Sydney scholars. But I know that it should be a conversation. And I know that it should be a conversation of equals for each contributing distinctive perspectives and and and so on.
00:32:14
Speaker
and And this is if because we designed our project this way, we've been able to keep working during this war when you know most other projects have not had those developed relationships with professional colleagues in Sagan.
Conclusion: Kush's Significance in World History
00:32:32
Speaker
That was Jeff Emberling, whose archaeological work is helping to restore Nubia and the Kingdom of Kush to the rightful place in world history. The story of Kush reminds us how easily entire civilizations can be pushed to the margins, not because they lacked power or influence, but because later narratives chose where to focus our attention.
00:32:52
Speaker
By placing Nubia back at the centre of the Nile Valley story, we gain a fuller and more connected picture of the ancient world. Make sure to subscribe and rate Pieces of History tray on iTunes and Spotify and follow the podcast on Instagram and Facebook at Pieces of History.
00:33:08
Speaker
Thanks for listening.