Black African Origins of Ancient Egypt | The Debate is Over

[Music] [Music] we don't have Egyptians of European sent in Egypt we have a population which is basically a mixture of ancient Egyptian blacks who intermarried with Arabs right after the Arab Conquest the ancient Egyptian population was brown and black before the Arab Conquest but but before the Arab Conquest came the Greeks it was ancient the ancient Egyptian population was in Egypt for thousands of years the the ancient Egan population was brown and black and the Greeks came in 300 BC and they started to intermar with the local population and then the Romans came and ruled from 70 BC until they were con conquered by the Arabs and kicked out by the Arabs in the 7th century and these people intermarried with the Egyptian cops and and and they made the the pigmentation of the of the Egyptians the cops much lighter because of this intermarriage with Europeans the Egyptian are black the real Egyptians are black because the real real Egyptian they are real Africans so those people in lower egpt you see in Cairo Alexandria and fahin area they were mixed between the Turkish mamluks French English Romans so those people who come to uh attack Egypt in that time they couldn't come to AB e to the sou which we still have the same color our dark color or black color so they couldn't mix with us the Nubians and Egyptians they were not white they are black Africans I I like to follow the evidence and to me I didn't care about which race of humans it was at the time but you did point out that Egyptian guide books that were popular uh had some very racist descriptions about uh the the attitude of Egyptians toward different racial groups yes you'll see uh even in in uh current guide books probably a kind of a hierarchical description of of the of the views of the races yes so many Egyptians today who probably think of themselves primarily as Mediterranean people uh even though they're on the African continent uh look down at the idea that they're very powerful ancient culture might have emerged out of black Africa yeah and it's it's clearly obviously a modern uh ethnic view or ethnic mindset that that leads to that kind of thinking not any evidence from ancient history I don't [Music] think history was written by the Victor and the Victorious will often attempt to wipe out every trace of their enemy existence there are hundreds if not thousands of lost civilizations that have succumbed to collapse Invasion or amalgamation and a plethora of lost languages miseducation and indoctrination has long been a tool of conquerors to influence the hearts and minds of a population under our current system of capitalism this strategy was instrumental in the western world's rise to Glory a new tactic was employed for the first time in recorded history which was chadow slavery slavery has existed since the beginning of time and indentured servitude has been employed widely but this new iteration of slavery was extremely cruel and barbaric by comparison during the 15th and 16th centuries European royalty was vastly outnumbered by commoners and slaves in order to maintain power they created a cast system to keep people divided it is in this space where European Elites conceptualize the Contemporary concepts of class and race during the colonial period mid 1600s there was no such thing as white people I know some people who are now called White find that shocking we didn't call ourselves white we weren't all members of one big happy family are you kidding have you studied the history of Europe the history of Europe was about killing each other that's what we did in Europe we just killed each other before we figured out there were other people to kill we just killed each other right I mean that was the history of Europe the English hated the Irish right Northern Italians didn't even think that southern Italians were Italians the Germans hated everybody and everybody hated their ass right back right there was no team called White no race called white but all of a sudden in the middle of the 1600s there was why why was it suddenly necessary to create this thing called the white race well because rich people can count that's why and so rich folks looked around the ones that owned all the land you know in the colonies the colonial Elite looked around around and they realized something that they were heavily outnumbered by African enslaved Folks by European indentured servants who were just one level above a slave or other Europeans who weren't technically indentured servants but they were still peasants didn't have any money didn't have any land and they could do the math they added it up and they were like damn we got to figure out a way to split these folks apart from one another or they're going to rise up and take our stuff right because after a while these black folks who were enslaved Africans and these quote unquote white folks who were poor Europeans are going to figure out they're all getting played by these rich people right so ultimately the rich figure out they got to come up with some way to get somebody in that group on their team the easiest thing is to get the poor Europeans in order for this new form of Slavery to operate smoothly they had to completely dehumanize Africans so they were seen as nothing more than animals they had to convince the world that they were Savages and had no culture or civilization they did this by creating the myth of the Dark Continent to justify Colonial ISM and legitimize the enslavement of Africans they created the term subsaharan to suggest black Africans were only present below the Sahara but if you look closely at the historical record you will see that they are in fact indigenous to the entire continent and prevalent within the Mediterranean as well when referring to Black Africans the term Sab Saharan is also slightly inappropriate for the period which is why I'm not using it as black people wen't only present south of the Sahara Desert and there is a lot of evidence for that in the Classical period instead the Mediterranean is seen as an unifying sea used and exploited by Greeks and Phoenicians just to mention a few to colonize but also to trade the Mediterranean Sea is a connection to Africa not a barrier now because of this the creeton world had a documented presence of black people which we find in the mooic civilization and the same can be said also about the missanian world of Mainland Greece we see black individuals in minan representations of the Bronze Age and because of the extreme diversity of representations musicians Warriors Traders Etc we can understand that they had entered fully into the minoan social Fabric and as we said we have a very similar situation with the missanian world starting from the 14th century BC and by the 9th century this would be common place modern concepts of race and ethnicity can be tricky because the Ancients did not consider skin color the source of identity the term black as it is regarded today denotes race and was created to so division in the old world your tribal ties or nation state was the dominant factor of how one viewed himself and others skin color was but a superficial [Music] trivia Darwin essentially suggested that in order to say that a species was subdivided into sub species which would be the equivalent of races it that the populations involved would have to be almost incipient species okay so a high degree of substructuring I can tell you that you cannot use the idea of any difference or being able to tell a difference either at the molecular level or physical level uh as indicative of or or requiring the use of the term race so I say there are populations but no races and and I'm not the first person to say [Music] that all of these people are connected to each other and dividing them in a way that implies a a level of discreetness that the term race implies as inappropriate where there people with darker skin lighter skin curlier hair less curly hair yes they're there were there's no evidence that they had a theory of human variation that would be commensurate or similar to Notions of race as they were developed in [Music] Europe when narur came from the south he conquered the Delta Region uniting lower and upper kimet upper kimt would serve as the political spiritual and power center of the nation lower kimet in these times were inhospitable and the Delta was but a wet Marshland but in the seasonally dry channels of the second cataract early African Farmers learned to manage parts of the river's annual flood this knowledge would be transferred into Kim's wide flood plane giving rise to the early nikada civilization in Upper kimt they used the thousands of years of accumulated knowledge to accurately predict the flood season and transfer the wet marshlands of the Delta into the world's most fertile Farmland they would also use this knowledge to build the Great Pyramids their Mastery of sacred geometry allowed them to align the Great Pyramids nearly perfectly along the cardinal points north east south and west within 115th of a degree of True North although each was their own Nation with its own identity Tam Mary Teter and tetti were connected culturally commercially and spiritually the cultural exchange between these three now valley civilizations was fluid the emergence of kimt was an evolution of African science philosophy and agriculture which seated the very foundations of civilization so the Greeks traveled to Egypt and said that the Egyptians were faultless people they said that they were the greatest people on Earth the most beautiful people on Earth they went to Egypt Greek mathematicians went to Egypt to study mathematics Pythagoras spent 23 years studying math in Egypt the Pythagorean theorem a a 2 + b s = c² was used in kimet to build the Pyramid at least 2,000 years before Pythagoras was born hypocrates uh the Greek father of medicine acknowledges motep as the father of medicine motep was the designer of the step pyramid as Sakara uh The Columns that are referred to as Greek columns you can find them at Sakara so the elements of Greek design Roman design Greek philosophy all had their Beginnings in ancient kimet or Egypt um around 1919 breasted wot wrote an incredible book um uh that documented his travels in Egypt and described the ancient Egyptians is dark skinned people with woly hair who were not unlike the uh the Nubians who live in Egypt now well this book was called ancient times and it was a favorite book of uh John D Rockefeller he read it to his children all the time and then Rockefeller decided to fund breasted gave him $1. 5 million to establish the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago but he also had caveats with that uh with that contribution in that in the second edition of ancient times which was published around 1935 breasted removed all references to the ancient Egyptians as being dark skinned people and he added a new chapter where he said that they were members of the great white race most of what we know about about Egypt is viewed through uh Greek and Roman eyes Egypt is a Greek word Sphinx is a Greek word pyramid is a Greek word so until we can begin to interpret this indigenous African culture and civilization through an African lens then we will always uh view them uh from a disadvantage but there's Ryner George Ryner who excavated in Sudan and so many others who saw the historical truth saw saw that black people who have been marginalized in this country and around the world who have been enslaved because uh Pope eugenius IV said the black people had no souls so people did not look upon us as people who created anything of value so I can understand how racist would say oh no well these buildings could not have been built by black people they don't have intelligence these black people could not have written uh these great scripts so they were operating under a false system of white superiorities so when they were confronted with the historical reality they uh suffered what's referred to in psychology as an identity Quake cognitive dissonance you know they couldn't connect the do so they fabricated historical lies and and so the work that that we're currently engaged in right now is to tell the truth we are literally digging up the truth and the truth speaks for itself reyner's writings about the kushites are a window into his warped racial beliefs its very race appears to be a product of its poverty and its isolation a negroid Egyptian mixture fused together on a desert River Bank too far away and too poor to attract a stronger and better race even as he was awed by the pyramids he excavated he refused to believe they could have been built by the ancestors of the black Africans he saw all around him his prejudices even seem to have clouded his eyesight in 1916 when he discovered beautiful black granite statues of the great kushite Kings he argued they were not real likenesses instead he proposed that the Kings and the Builders of all the kushite monuments had actually been light-skinned foreigners [Music] the discipline of egyptology has its Origins with the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon bonapart in the late 18th century Napoleon's Army would defeat the Ottoman Empire at a time when European colonis was nearing its Zena the Ottoman Empire also known as the Turkish Empire Rose to prominence in the 12th century with the help of the mamlock the mamlock which translates to one who is owned were an Eastern European population of slave soldiers who overthrew their rulers and came into [Music] power in 1798 Napoleon led the French army into Egypt swiftly conquering Alexandria and Cairo the battle of the pyramids marked the beginning of the end seven centuries of adaman and mamlock rule in [Music] Egypt when Napoleon invaded Egypt he brought along an army of Scholars whose studies during French occupation became the foundation of egyptology this field of study was employed to promote the idea of European imperialism genan Leon Jerome's painting bonapart before the Spinx captures Napoleon's Instinct that the glory of ancient Egypt could be harness to exalt French colonial power many of the early archaeologists came to the study of ancient Egypt and ancient Nubia from the perspective of Semitic languages or the study of the Hebrew Bible and it was very important to them to bring Egypt specifically into the sphere of of biblical studies and so they had to carve Egypt away from Africa to bring it into that sphere and the way that they did that was they used race so these early archaeologists effectively made ancient Egypt white in the sense that they made it part of a dominant Western culture and ancient Nubia was separated from that it was black and this was how they took Egypt Out of Africa and put it into this this Semitic sphere this biblical sphere and so it's imperative that we go back and continually reassess the the things that we take as facts Western academia's anti-african sentiment has contaminated the fields of egyptology and anthropology from their very Inception these institutions have been rooted in racism in 1912 German archaeologist lewood Bart discovered the famous bust of Queen etiti in a region of Egypt called Tel L armara it would later be unveiled to the general public in 1923 at the Egyptian Museum of Berlin in Germany and became the standard of beauty and a cultural symbol for Berlin and Egypt alike however the sculpture has been the subject of heated debates and many scholars have gone on record to question its authenticity after 20 years of research Henry sterin a Swiss historian made the shocking Revelation that the bust of Nefertiti is actually a fraud and in the documentary The Mysteries of the Nefertiti bus he lays out the compelling evidence what first made the academic suspicious was the exceptional state of conservation of nepa's bust when it was discovered the object was in congruous it bore no resemblance to any other 3,300 year old busts from Egypt to historian Al steran the bust of nefatiti is simply too well preserved or as he puts it too new to be true numerous archaeologists American an Italians French have expressed their doubts about whether the bust is genuine but none of them have made their doubts official so we've decided to Stage our own inquiry Bart is very precise in his Notes From The Dig he states he found large quantities of pigments adding they were all still quite usable but if this was an experimental copy how is it borot never spoke of it to his team nor in his meticulous notes according to the historian on the 5th of December 1912 the archaeologist was in Cairo he learns that one of Germany's princely families is passing through and wants to visit his archaeological digs caught unprepared borot rushes back to tell Al Amman he arrives on the 6th of December 1912 which was meant to be a day off for his workers he immediately sets them back to [Music] work later he proudly shows their highnesses the fruits of his labor in an excess of zeal one of the Dig Foreman an Egyptian called seni disappears briefly during the visit then returns with a bust of nefatiti the Royals are delighted with such a masterpiece and a photograph immortalizes the moment leaving borchart apparently no time to explain it was a copy and not the real thing Al Stan claims the photo as What trapped the [Music] archaeologist you couldn't just tell the Royal visitors who are infusing over the object listen you're mistaken it's uh it's ridiculous it would make a mockery of the Royals it was simply not possible to tell the truth or the Royals might have been covered in ridic and that would have been Le majeste or treason which at the time was very serious indeed and could have ruined bot's career and life for good I have no doubt in my mind that this is a fake a copy a phony uh during the second Reich um the Germans were coming about with a philosophy to justify further expansion colonialism and imperialism and in an attempt to do that they claim to be the discoverers of many sets of different artifacts one of them being this head um but in fact uh what it was was something created um at the time uh or just afterwards to justify their ideas of colonialism and imperialism but this was far from an isolated incident in 2018 paleo artist Elizabeth D unveiled a facial reconstruction based on the fraudulent Nefertiti bust which first further europeanized her features in in 2005 Drzahi Haas Secretary General of Egypt Supreme Council of Antiquities announced the results of a digital reconstruction of the face of Queen etiti son King Tuton however the relief on the back of his Royal Throne of him and his wife Queen Ani cinamon shows a dark brown BR skin tone and features that resemble populations found in modern day Sudan and the Horn of Africa with discrepancy so glaringly obvious one has to wonder what other Liberties have been taken behind closed doors a concerted effort has also been made in Hollywood to whitewash ancient kimet television and film have promoted the idea of a European Egypt for decades but but when we look at the temple walls we see a melanated population with a variety of skin tones and hairstyles such as afro waves braids and locks indeed the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and translation of the ancient heroglyph originally known as meture made Western Scholars rethink their narrative the newly transcribed inscriptions revealed an advanced culture that had attained an exceptionally High level of development they quaint the term subsaharan Africa as a way to separate the genius of Egypt from the rest of the continent ladies and gentlemen welcome back to the study of antiquity and the Middle Ages as always I am your host Nick barkell and today we are joined once again by DrRebecca Futo Kennedy who's going to take us through a thought-provoking episode on the term subsaharan and the whitewashing of ancient North Africa this idea this like sort of continually trying to find this idea of you know separating out North Africa from subsaharan as if the Sahara was the impermeable boundary that nobody could get through is really a continually um problematic Point uh type of argument um particularly since we have early texts that tell us that right herodicus tells us that he says the Ethiopians and the garamantes are indigenous to North Africa and that of course the Phoenicians and the Greeks are not um but he makes it very clear that people he call Ethiopians are indigenous to North Africa and northwest Africa in particular um right um but they are not subsaharan so I I just think I just I I constantly what is the obsession that people have with this idea of subsaharan that whenever they ask any question what they're trying to do is prove that subsaharan Africans aren't part of the ancient Mediterranean World which we know is false um not only do we know of course that um people that we would call quote unquote subsaharan Africans um ruled Egypt before the Persians got there um among others but that they have this continual culture that runs up and down the Nile um and we know from our ancient sources that um they believed very firmly and they interacted with what in the area they called Libya [Music] right shik anop was a senales historian and Anthropologist he was a firm believer that the ancient Egyptians were in in fact black according to his research the skulls of ancient Egyptians had physical features resembling the peoples of the Opel region East Africans and Nubians all visibly black populations but his theories aren't shared by all experts on the matter we spoke to Drzahi hawas an awardwinning world-renowned archaeologist his life's work has been dedicated to the discovery research of ancient Egyptian Antiquities not surprisingly his office is full of books on the topic some of which depict dark skinned ancient Egyptians but he says there's an explanation no they were dark skinned but they were not black but they are not negro because look at the the the lips of the the Negroes like that and the nose like this is not really in the Egyptian uh origin at all it's different completely different and this why we have you cannot connect the Egyptian civilization with the African at all it's different or from sytin Mesopotamia it's different completely during an interview on BBC News Africa Drzahi Haas illustrates egyptology reluctance to acknowledge black African presence in ancient Egypt when asked about the ethnicity of the ancient Egyptians he describes them as being uniquely Egyptian you cannot make any test there's some studies to see that the uh shape of the skull could be looks like African but but still it will you will never put a final decision about the origin of the ancient Egyptian at all because you need really to make a a very comprehensive study by DNA and and this will take long time so how African the ancient Egyptians were Still Remains a matter of debate for some even if UNESCO scholar now say the matter is settled and that the pharaohs and their people must be placed firmly within the black African context check out our apparel line and become part of of the know thyself family we have fresh t-shirts hoodies and caps to stay fly and represent the culture all proceeds go towards the funding of future episodes log in with us www. no institute.

com support the channel by tapping that like subscribe and notify button to be alerted to new content the civilization of kimt was not homogeneous the Delta was a transcontinental Highway connecting three continents kimet was a Multicultural Society with many different populations of indigenous Africans transporting their cultures and traditions into the N Valley as well as populations of non-africans migrating back to Africa and settling in the Delta regions and along the coastlines of North Africa the Mediterranean coast of Egypt where the mighty River Nile ends its long journey through Africa and mixes with the waters behind me when you come here to Alexandria it's easy to see why Egypt became such a Melting Pot you can get here through the Nile Valley and also across the Mediterranean Sea from Europe and the Levant what what we call the Middle East today this facilitated trade but it also led to an exchange of ideas and cultures Egypt's strategic position clearly made it attractive and hence vulnerable to attack throughout the centuries the evidence of Outsiders coming to Egypt from Europe Asia and Arabia and mixing with the locals is apparent in the physical appearance to some of the population today but when you reach further back into time to the monuments of the ancient Egyptian civilization a th000 kilometers from the Mediterranean Sea you're reminded of ancient Egypt status as that of a great African [Music] civilization [Music] [Music] the history of pre-dynastic Egypt and the movement of African tribes drawn to the Nile dates back to the end of the last ice age around the same time the ice sheets begin to melt the lose tropical jungle that covered Northern Africa begin to dry up we uh went there to visit a uh a beautifully painted prehistoric cave that uh was discovered in that region uh just discovered in 2007 it has on the ceiling very beautiful prehistoric rock art depicting the people who live there and their raising of cattle and very ious domestic scenes and that sort of thing we're talking about black Africans yes over thousands of years it became the Sahara Desert there were migrations East and many tribes settled on the banks of the Nile along with tribes from the south the White Nile begins in Tanzania it flows northward until it reaches Sudan where it converges with the Blue Nile the Blue Nile begins near Lake Tana in Ethiopia like the N these ancient African tribes have been migrating from the south following the flow of the river northward since the Neolithic period the nap toli of find was announced uh by CNN as the Stonehenge of the Sara and uh it's a fascinating site it does have megalist and uh however the the calendar Circle that uh got a lot of attention uh was composed of is composed of H smaller stones that come up to about your knee but they are in they that forms a very interesting calendar Circle which has as astronomical meaning uh and that calendar circle is in a complex of uh megalithic large Stone uh structures and alignments as well mhm do we know anything at all about the people who created these structures uh yes there uh uh we know they were black African uh people their remains are studied anthropologically and they were the people inhabiting the region of of the time ancient Nubia and ancient Egypt sheer Roots common cultural roots in Northeast Africa in the Sahara and along the na Valley the ancient Egyptians and the ancient anubians can both be described especially in the earlier periods as being descendants of Northeast African indigenous populations as one writer said all of these people are Africans and I Define Africans as uh people whose biological histories have emerged and and their identities have emerged in Africa and where any mixing that took place took place on African soil the Egyptians did not come from any place else other than the Nile Valley uh their identities uh and any other ancestry that they may have have were all forged together in that space in those ancient times Egyptians called themselves remet and kerit which means the people of the black land inscriptions refer to their Origins being the Land of Punt which is present day Somalia in Northern Kenya they point to these Southeastern regions as being their ancestrial Homeland [Music] [Music] tetti was the earliest great now valley civilization and stretched from Nubia to Upper kimet yeah that area became hyper area extreme desert uh uh uh around 3400 BC mhm but before that it the climate was different yes yes it was more moderate there were seasonal rains and uh and at the site that I studied the ancient site that I studied napapa even that would fill up seasonally as a seasonal lake bed call it a pla uh the cattle cult and uh the uh the uh Sirius and uh cattle iconography was very important to them uh as well as uh in uh ancient Egypt which came later so there are many elements clearly of the culture that was operating at nabaya in the earlier time that moved to the Nile Valley and uh became the uh ancient Egyptian dynastic civilization [Music] the napta Playa stone circle is the world's oldest astronomical site located in modern-day Sudan nabda Playa emerged in the Newan desert as a regional ceremonial Center during the middle Neolithic period archaeological Studies have identified hundreds of the hears cultural debris and numerous mummified cattle which rep represented wealth and power amongst the people of the time the cattle iconography was very important to them uh as well as uh in uh ancient Egypt which came later and uh one of the important correlations is the which you as an astrophysicist studying archeoastronomy uh pay attention to his similar alignments found in the Giza Plateau or the Great Pyramid s so in ancient Egypt uh the helal rising of Sirius heralded the uh timing of the uh the floods the now flooded every year at about the same time just after the helal rising of Sirius ancient Africans studied the procession of the Equinox from as early as 9,000 BC to around 3,400 BC at the sight of the napap pla this is were geometry and the concept of Pi was developed as well as the world's earliest evidence of pastoral life archaeological evidence reveals these populations were black Africans who were indigenous to the entire continent of Africa not just below the Sahara at about 3,500 BC the monsoon Reigns pattern moved further south so napapa region became extreme desert and had to be abandoned and uh that's when the same the culture the ancient Egyptian uh dynastic C culture that shows many of the same elements pops up in the Nile Valley so you're suggesting maybe these people migrated North yes extreme weather conditions forced both populations of the green Sahara in the napta Playa to migrate to the na Valley and with them they brought the traditions of cattle worship mummification geometry and the study of the Stars when the napap Playa region dried up due to the rapid climate change these populations migrated following the flow of the N River bringing with them their knowledge and high science yes so there's this there's this very clear link uh from the astronomy at napapa at around the time 4,000 BC we know from the anthropological evidence that the people uh just predating the uh dynastic civilization in the in the naapa region were were black uh black African people there there were monuments uh uh temples in uh uh Old Kingdom Egypt that that were rebuilt to track the rising of Sirius as it moved with their alignment of the temples was rebuilt to track Rising serious as it moved through precession motion and we found the same thing at naapa these megalithic Stone alignments they tracked the rising of Sirius and other stars uh uh as they moved through procession these Africans from the south would move into what would later become upper kimet and established the early fonic dynasties I I like to follow the evidence and to me I didn't care about which race of humans it was at the time the 5600 year old tajat mummy known as the black mummy of the green Sahara is the earliest evidence of advanced mummification in the world and was discovered in 195 58 by Professor fabrio Mori it predates the earliest kdic mummy by nearly a thousand years and was found in modern-day Libya this 2 and 1/2-year-old boy's organs were removed as evidence by incisions in his stomach and thorax and an organic preservative was inserted to stop his body from decomposing he was emomed and wrapped in cwh high an ostrich eggshell necklace was placed around his neck and the boy was given a royal burial because of this very sophisticated form of evisceration what we have is essentially the earliest form of complete mumification yet found in Africa and it's interesting that everybody always goes to Egypt as the home of mumification and yet in fact from the dates of the black mummy there's certainly nothing like that going on in Egypt at that time anthropological evidence has revealed the populations of the the green Sahara during the early to mid hallene era were black Africans due to the extreme climate change and the desertification of the Sahara these populations were forced to migrate and with them they transported the science of mummification and the tradition of cattle worship to the Nile Valley these Traditions had deep African roots and would continue in the N [Music] Valley we found the bones and charcoal of kettle so um this was the really the very first hard evidence archaeological evidence of some kind of ritual connected to the CLE C I find it very interesting that these animal headed human figures exist outside of Egypt um at such an incredibly early date and then later in fonic culture you find exactly the same uh motifs repeated in the very sophisticated Egyptian art form the Nile Valley was populated by various tribes and populations from the source of the Nile the green Sahara napta Playa in the Horn of Africa early fonic culture was seated in the South between the regions of kusto and the City of neb it was this Fusion of early African Ingenuity which planted the seed of civilization and birth the nation of kimet [Music] just here Tripoli we have here Cairo and and the Nile and just in the center we have the akakus mountains and we have uh Algeria uh Libya Egypt and Sudan and Chad and ner and and Mali so this area is bigger than Europe so it means that all this very very large extent was inhabited during ancient times uh by the same ancient African Saharan culture I find it quite extraordinary that this Central Saharan civilization uh shows all the features we generally associate with later Egyptian fonic culture and mumification is a prime example there are definite links between the two cultures traditional egyptologists have relegated the black presence in Egypt to the 25th Dynasty which they refer to as the kushite period it's a period of time uh in the 8th Century BC when indigenous Africans from Kush came into kimet which had fallen on hard times it was invaded by libyans and Assyrians and and others they came in into Kim to restore the land of their ancestors those were their specific words to restore the land of their ancestors and for approximately 100 years uh five uh African rulers kushite rulers came into kimet drove out the foreigners and then rebuilt ktic culture and civilization the libyans who' fought for the Egyptians as mercenary generals gradually infiltrated Egypt's power structure and eventually took power as the 22nd Dynasty Egypt's Libyan rulers understood that looking and acting Egyptian would help to keep the country under their control yet in some ways these images are simply window dressing lip service to ancient Egyptian traditions in order to claim a greater prize for the libyans had organized nothing less than the state sponsored plundering of Egypt's Royal tomb s they were so transfixed by the wealth by the gold by The Bling of ancient Egypt they wanted it for themselves and over their several centuries rule while they appeared to look like pharaohs and to rule as pharaohs Egypt never feels to have been a cohesive United Kingdom they weren't Egyptians at heart and that's really what mattered Egypt needed a regime that could reconnect with its most powerful asset it's history and by 747 BC that's what happened when the kushite rulers of nuia made a direct spiritual connection with Egypt's glorious [Music] past the religious and cultural ties of kimet and Nubia Run Deep so in 747 BC when the libyans occupied kimet Nubians from the kingdom of kush marched North to restore Law and Order kimt was weak from being invaded repeatedly by the nomads but when the kushites arrived it wasn't to ravage or destroy they saw this as an opportunity to seize power and restore kimet to its former glory the kushites spent a considerable amount of time rebuilding the great monuments and temples this differs greatly from the libyans and other Asiatic Invaders who came to to pillage and plunder the kushite Pharaohs built columned temples with pylon gateways and added to the great Ammon Temple complex of carac they also took the old Kingdom's religious text and transferred them into stone for better preservation an example of this is the Shabaka Stone named after the Nubian King who had it inscribed on the stone Shabaka added I found the writings of the Ancients damaged and I restored it better than it was they were fervent Believers in Egypt's traditional gods in some ways making them more Egyptian than the Egyptians beliefs that centered on this great Sandstone Mountain Jebel barkle for centuries it had been regarded as the myth mythical mound of [Music] creation the mound from which Egypt's great Creator God amoon was [Music] born here is the Holy Mountain this is where the god lived in his primeval form DrTim Kendall has spent almost 30 years working at the site being at the the southern limit of the Empire it was where where the Nile began where fertility began and so it had to be the place where creation began so this was the they imagined this is the birthplace of the god Amon as the kushite Kings gained increasing military power they also claimed Egypt for themselves so when King pile L A kushite invasion of Egypt in 747 BC he didn't plunder or destroy but restored and rebuilt and founded Egypt's 25th Dynasty the irony is that he's conquering Egypt to put everything right I suppose so it's all such a cycle of of rebirth regrowth Redevelopment and the kushite kings are really kind of tapping into that ancient power source and just sort of giving it back to the Egyptians starting time all over again and doing it right so they had that same sense of history and continuity as the Egyptians they are the natural successes of the 18th Dynasty Kings and as such the kushites left a legacy of renewal and Resurrection I am here today to make a plea for history to say that history is not something about the past no history from the African point of view is something which allows you to have self-respect it helps you to have a a a reclaimed identity it helps you to assert yourself on the social political and cultural agenda today so it's a very very important thing and in my view it's been overlooked um wrongly it's very fashionable to talk about education education is important it's the you know most empowering thing you can give a young child in Africa and it's true but what kind of education quality education is the thing that's very important and history is an integral part of that um and not just for people living in Africa but also the established African diaspora be it in the Caribbean be it in Brazil be it in the United States whether it's also the more recently arrived diaspora Africans living in the west all part and parcel of the same history it's a shared history it doesn't matter where you live in the world you are of African descent be you you know in Brazil where by the way a lot of people don't realize that around a 100 million Brazilians that's about more than 50% of the population either have African Heritage or mixed African Heritage you know they are the second largest African population after Nigeria or the African-American diaspora the most powerful and influential diaspora of Africans in the world our history is about identity it's about self-respect it's about claiming our own narrative so is that Oneness of the disperate community it's bringing everybody together under you know one Banner only when Lions have historians will the hunters cease to be heroes [Music] log in with us www. nys institute.