The Ancients - El Kurru: Egypt's Nubian Pharaohs

Episode Date: December 31, 2020

In the 8th and 7th centuries BC, Ancient Egypt was ruled by an extraordinary dynasty. This was the 25th Dynasty, also known as the Nubian Dynasty because of their Kushite roots. They maintained their Nubian identity, with one of the most striking examples of this being the site of El-Kurru. Situated in what is today Northern Sudan, this was one of the key cemeteries for the 25th Dynasty. Complete with unique-styled pyramids, beautifully-preserved wall paintings and tumuli, archaeologists have made some remarkable discoveries at this site over the past century. One such archaeologist is Dr Rachael Dann, from the University of Copenhagen. Alongside a dedicated team, Rachael has spent years working at El-Kurru. In this podcast she explains what we know about the site and the archaeology that survives. The second of our episodes on Ancient Egypt.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.

And in today's podcast, we are continuing our theme of ancient Egypt. But in this podcast, we are going to go forward in time from our previous chat on the remarkable Hatshepsut, because we are going to the 8th and 7th centuries BC, when an extraordinary royal family ruled Egypt. And what is so remarkable about this royal family, this dynasty, is that they did not come from Egypt proper. They came from further south. They came from modern-day Sudan. These were the Kushite or the Nubian pharaohs. And in this podcast, we are talking about a key royal cemetery for the 25th dynasty. Situated in modern-day northern Sudan, it is called El Kourou. And it is from this royal cemetery that we have some remarkable

archaeology surviving. Now, joining me to tell us more about El Kourou, I was delighted to be joined by Dr Rachel Dan from the University of Copenhagen. Rachel has been excavating at El Kourou for several years. She has been working alongside a brilliant team, so it was great to get on the show to learn more about El Kourou and the extraordinary archaeology that survives. Here's Rachel. Kourou and the extraordinary archaeology that survives. Here's Rachel. Rachel, thank you so much for joining me today. It's a pleasure.

Now, El Kourou, I mean, this is an extraordinary site, the final resting place for one of the most astonishing, extraordinary dynasties to rule ancient Egypt. Yeah, it certainly is. It's the burial place of what we know as the 25th dynasty, who ruled Egypt between about 750 BC and about 650 AD. I said that wrong. Between 750 BC and 650 BC. That would be a terribly long time otherwise. That would have been very impressive, yes. And despite the fact that these Nubian kings, these Sudanese kings, ruled Egypt and made their administrative centre in Thebes, the old Egyptian heartland, they continued to return home to be buried. And so they maintained, in a sense, a two-centre double kingdom, as it's been called,

in which they kind of go back to their indigenous heartlands for burial and yeah it's an incredible site it's a site with a very long history of burial and some yeah really interesting and quite specific finds we definitely want to get onto those finds very soon but first of all you mentioned how they were returning as it were to their homeland for burial so whereabouts in modern geography, whereabouts is El Karou? So El Karou is located close to the Nile, near to what we call the Fourth Cataract. So the Nile, as it flows up from Central Africa, there are two branches of the Nile, the Blue Nile and the White Nile.

And they come together in the confluence at Khartoum, the capital of modern day Sudan. And then it flows north all the way up through Sudan and then through into Egypt and out at the Mediterranean. And the cataracts are these natural boundaries in the Nile that are sort of places where the river gets slightly narrower and rockier. And it's very difficult to pass these boundary places with ships. So we think of the traditional boundary between Egypt and the Sudan as being at the first cataract, which is around modern-day Aswan. And there are several cataracts along the Nile, and so El Kourou is near the fourth cataract. And these days, it's about a seven or eight hour drive north from Khartoum. So it's

located close to the Nile, as most settlements are in the ancient Nilotic environment, because otherwise you're in the Sahara Desert, and that's a very difficult environment to live in. And it's located just back from the floodplain. So with nilotic archaeology, we find that settlements are not right by the Nile, of course, because that is where the Nile floods. So you could think of the Nile as a corridor oasis, if you like, so that you've got the Nile River flowing, then on either side, there's the greenery, which grows the farmed land that grows after the Nile has flooded every year and laying down rich sandy sediment. And then back again from that is the sandier savannah type environment where we expect to find settlements

and burials. So obviously you don't want to place your settlement on the floodplain, you want it back from that. So we find El KarKhru in an area of quite significant activity, actually, because there are several archaeological sites nearby, not least the two other really key ones for the 25th dynasty, which are Jebel Barkul and Nuri. I still find that really astonishing, just what you're saying there, that during this time that this dynasty ruled Egypt, a key heartland, a central part of their empire was in what is now modern day northern Sudan. Yes, it's a surprise to lots of people that there is this incredibly complex culture in Sudan. And this is not the first manifestation of it that we're seeing with

the 25th dynasty. We can think about the archaeology of the Sudan having a very, very deep history. And complex society existed in Sudan as long as it existed in Egypt as well. And for much of the time, of course, the environmental niche along the Nile is similar in both countries. There are sort of some local differences, but the living conditions are similar. The levels of rainfall are similar. And so, yes, people I think often are surprised because there tends to be a dominant narrative, which is that when we think about complex societies and we think about early complex societies, we think about ancient Greece and ancient Rome and ancient Egypt. Maybe some

people might think of ancient Mesopotamia as well, but people tend to forget about the complex societies of Africa and the relationships that they have with each other. And I think that in lots of ways, the archaeology of the Sudan is kind of the poor sister for the archaeology of ancient Egypt, which is very well known in popular culture and in films and in museums, and has really sort of dominated the narrative. And it's also the case that really, if you study archaeology at university and you choose to study the ancient Near East or Northeast Africa, you will study ancient Egypt. You would either study that as an archaeologist or as an Egyptologist to learn to read hieroglyphs. And it's very, very rare to find specialisms at universities where you would be taught about the archaeology of Sudan or the

archaeology of Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa at all. And this is something that is, you know, it's a deficit, obviously. But if you go to museums around the world, you can find great selections of Sudanese material. The British Museum in London has one of the premier collections, so does the Louvre, so does the Neue Museum in Berlin. All have great Sudanese collections. And of course, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as well. And the Khartoum Museum in Sudan itself too. it's not just El Kourou which seems to be this extraordinary archaeological site in North Sudan that dates this period. You're saying that there were several other sites as well that have left this amazing archaeology that can tell us more about how this dynasty ruled. Yeah, that's right. And the dating of the sites remains under discussion, shall we say. But the site of Jebel Barkul in particular is really key. And we can see at Jebel Barkul the development of what we could

call a complex sacred landscape and Jebel Barkul itself is an enormous rock outcrop which rises from the desert something similar to the way that Uluburun does in Australia so it's a very very distinctive feature in the landscape which is visible from great distance and at certain points is also visible from the Nile. And it's this huge mountain, which has a sort of separate area at the Nile end of it, the eastern end, which to both the Egyptian mind and the Sudanese mind looks rather like a rising cobra. So it looks rather like the cobra that we might be familiar with seeing on the head of pharaohs. If you can imagine Tutankhamen's burial mask, he has the snake on his forehead. For both the Egyptians and the Sudanese, because of this natural feature,

they saw that place as being a dwelling place for the god Amun, who's one of the premier gods of the ancient Egyptian pantheon and who in Sudan is often figured either in this snake form or as having a ram head. And because of this distinctive landscape setting, this investment in this local space, we see the development and the agglomeration of activity in that area because of this sacred landscape. And the site itself at Jebel Barkul has several phases and it's far from being fully excavated. But at that site, we see, for example, the gradual agglomeration of temples,

agglomeration of temples, sanctuaries, settlements, palaces, pyramids, lots and lots of different kinds of monumental architecture that were being invested in in that area. Pyramids and monumental architecture. Remember those key words because I'm sure we're going to be coming back to them very, very quickly indeed. Now, El Kourou especially, I mean, first of all, the archaeological history of the site, how long has this site been excavated for? So the first person to work there at the archaeological site at El Kourou was a man called George Reisner, who is often cited as the kind of founding father of the archaeology of the Sudan. And he was an American professor from Harvard University who came and worked for quite a long period in the Sudan. He actually came with his wife and his daughter for certain seasons as well. And he worked at El Karou during the winter of 1913, no, 1918 to 1919. And he was working at Jebel Barkul and then he moved along the river to work

at Elkiru he sent some workmen in advance to do a sort of reconnaissance mission and then he he arrived and spent six weeks two months doing the clearance of the tombs and certain kinds of excavation and his work's really important because he managed from the artifacts that he found in the different tombs, he was able for the first time to try to reconstruct a chronology of the 25th dynasty. For the first time, he was able to find the names of certain kings and certain queens, and then to put them into a chronological order. And he was helped in doing that, of course, with the evidence that was already available that had already been excavated in Egypt,

where the dynasty from El Kourou also had an administrative centre. And so he really sort of found the basis of the chronology for the 25th dynasty. You know, archaeologists love chronologies. So it was very foundational in that sense. It was also foundational to the study of Sudanese archaeology because really one of the things that he was doing, this is how archaeology has changed, is that he was on a mission for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. And so really he was looking for high quality museum level objects that he could take back to the US to be displayed in the Museum of Fine Arts, which is why that museum has such a fantastic collection because of his work at Elkuru,

at Jebel Barkal and at Nouri and several of the sites as well. But the other way that his work was important is that he was one of the first people that was really laying down foundational ideas about what ancient Sudanese society was like. What did ancient Sudanese society look like? How was it different from Egypt? How was it similar? Did rulership pass from king to queen to son to daughter in the same way or not? And whilst a lot of the ideas that he had were very interesting, very useful, and as I said, the chronology remains really key, he also had quite a viewpoint that we would find today to be the best controversial and at worst racist. So he has, and we see this actually in particular when he's writing about a different site called Kerma, which is much earlier, we really see that he has the idea that the people

that were living in ancient Sudan were pretty limited in their mental capacities and limited in the possibilities of what they could achieve culturally, and that their culture only ever advanced when they came into contact with Egypt. And this kind of Egyptocentric viewpoint, which viewed Egypt as a civilising influence on Sudan, is something that was quite dominant through the archaeological narrative through the 20th century and has been challenged in the last, say, 20 years. So what are some of the iconic elements, monuments, monumental structures from El Kourou that really emphasise this ancient Sudanese, can we say Kushite, identity?

Yeah, well, there are lots of things that are important monumentally at El Kourou. One of the things that we could say is important for the site is that it's the one site in the Sudan where we see the complete phases of the development of Kushite funerary practices or Kushite monumental architecture. So at El Khru, the earliest burials that we have there that date possibly to the 9th century BC, possibly a bit earlier, are tumuli burials.

And tumuli burial is the oldest form of burial in the Sudan. It's a deeply traditional form. And this essentially means that when someone dies, a pit is usually cut into the ground. The body is placed in the pit, perhaps with grave goods. So, you know, maybe pottery, maybe jewellery, maybe food offerings. goods so you know maybe pottery maybe jewelry maybe food offerings and that afterwards the after the burial has taken place it's then covered over with a mound of earth and sometimes in different periods of time this might be sort of decorated with pebbles and at Al-Quru we see this form in the earliest graves which are then marked around the edge with sort of ferrocrete sandstone.

So these sort of slices of slightly reddish brown stone, which stands out on the surface because, of course, it's a sandy, beigey kind of environment. So those are the earliest burials. And then gradually these transform into being tumuli burials with round walls around them. Then they become tumuli burials with rectangular structures around them. And then from there, we move to the pyramid burials proper. So with the pyramid burials proper, by which point we're really talking about the 25th dynasty, we're talking about burials which continue with this they're really playing with the idea i think always of a substructure and a superstructure you know there's always these two elements but

with the pyramid burials you end up with a descendury so a ramp or often a staircase that's cut into the rock that descends at an angle, and then the structure underneath, which would have held the burial itself, is an axial construction with two rooms. So you would go down the staircase, enter into the first room, and then straight behind it would be the second room. And this is how all of the pyramid burials were constructed at El Kourou, except the final burial that was made there, which is very different, and probably much later. And so this was what it would have looked like in the subterranean sense. And then on the surface, there would have been the construction of a pyramid. And this was likely a rubble core with a casing on the outside. So in that sense, different to the Giza pyramids,

which are fully constructed with blocks. And then also there would be a chapel on the surface, a small chapel cut with sandstone decoration and probably offering tables where after the burial had taken place, people would be able to leave offerings or say prayers or pour libations for the dead. So that's interesting, the whole structure of it and the subterranean nature of it as well. It sounds like they're borrowing some Egyptian elements, but as you also say, there are still some unique elements remaining, such as with the material used to create these funerary structures. Yeah, and one of the things that we have to remember is that by this point in the Sudan, by the 8th century BC, burial underneath a pyramid

was long out of fashion in Egypt. This had been out of fashion in Egypt for several hundred years. So it is, in a sense, a revival of an Egyptian form, except the pyramids in Sudan look quite different to the ones in Egypt. The ones in Sudan are smaller. They're also much more pointy. So the angle is narrower, the angle of construction. Yeah, so that's different. And the material that's going into the graves is to some extent different as well. Of course, all of the burials at El Kourou were looted. They were robbed in antiquity and in all likelihood very soon after they had been interred, because there's nothing like sticking a great big pyramid on top of a place to show the robbers where to look for treasure. And in fact, it's the case that the majority of really lovely

objects that came from Elkiru were from the tombs of four queens that are buried slightly away from the main plateau and who didn't have any substructures over their graves. So they were never found, they were never robbed in antiquity and it was Reisner that then was able to excavate them in the 20th century. Let's go on to Queens now because that sounds really interesting in itself. I mean, what do we know from these excavations, from Reisner's, from your excavations there, about the queens of the 25th dynasty, royal women in general? right. We know that in Egypt, there were at times very powerful queens either ruling in their own right or with their husbands or sons. But within Sudanese culture, this seems to be something that's perhaps a little bit different. And the presence of the female royal women, and in particular, perhaps the mother of the king, were particularly key elements for succession. We also see that it,

both in Elkuru and in later periods, that the women are well equipped for an afterlife. You know, they get many objects, which we would imagine that the kings would have had as well. But as I said, their graves are looted. Sooted so we're you know we only have fragments of whatever riches they might have had and at Elkuru we see that there is a spatial differentiation in a gendered sense so that the plateau at Elkuru itself the sort of central area because the areas are slightly defined geographically by wadis that that fill with water in the rainy season. And in the central area is where the king's burials were placed, all in a line. But the female burials, the queen's burials, were placed separately.

And so there are a series of pyramid burials that were buried on the next wadi over from the king's. burials that were buried on the next wadi over from the kings and then there were this series of four queens burials that were also set apart at a distance but that aren't pyramid burials and so there seems to be a gendered spatial separation and the reasons for that we don't really know but what i think is arguable is that certainly that there is a desire for visibility within the landscape so that the kings are respecting each other's tombs and so are the queens respecting each other's tombs when the next tomb starts to be constructed so that they're built in a line so all of them would be visible from a distance. They're not trying to get one in front of the other.

I guess, once again, it must emphasise that dynasty thing that they all belong to the same family. So you don't want to steal someone else's glory because you all belong to the same group, as it were. Exactly. It speaks to something about ancestral memory and about the power of genealogy and of connecting yourself to these other people in your lineage that have gone before you. So it's a legitimating kind of way of legitimating your place in the succession. Just quickly, do we have any idea how many tombs, how many pyramids there were? I mean, how many have been excavated? There are four kings of the 25th dynasty that are buried at Elkiru with pyramid structures,

although none of them are standing today. They've all been looted in antiquity for their good building stones. They've fallen down. And then there were six queen's tombs that would have had pyramids. Two of those, we don't know the names of the queens. And then there's the final very large pyramid, which is known as Pyramid 1, which may well also have been a king. Pyramid 1, the Enigma. What do we know about the big main pyramid at El Karou? So the major pyramid which is still standing at Elkiru is called Kiru 1.

And it's a pyramid that Reisner tried to excavate in 1919. And he succeeded in excavating the Descendury, which is 8 metres deep and 23 metres long. And he entered into the first room of the pyramid and looked up at the ceiling and thought that he could see through a big crack the base of the pyramid and looked up at the ceiling and thought that he could see through a big crack the base of the pyramid, at which point he decided that he better stop because it wasn't structurally sound. And he had good reason to do this because when he was working at Nori, in one of the pyramids that he excavated there, there was actually a collapse which killed several of his workmen. So it was a good thing that he stopped. So knowing this, Jeff and his team started to excavate the pyramid and he brought in the expertise of a Spanish architect called Nacho

Forcadell to help shore up the underneath of the pyramid, which was quite an operation. And this pyramid is slightly different from the others at Elkiru because underneath it it has three chambers instead of two and they're just on a much much bigger scale from the other pyramids and after excavating through layer upon layer of sand and silt that had been washed into the tombs and which took a couple of seasons to do. There was just the sheer quantity of material to be removed was enormous. They got into the third chamber and found a sandstone stealer, sort of like a sandstone slab that had fallen onto its face. And a stealer would usually have an inscription about the dead person on it,

including, of course, their name. And the great mystery of Pyramid One is that we didn't know who was buried there. So after two seasons of digging through all this debris and then finally getting to the final inner chamber of the burial and turning the Steeler over, unfortunately, Jeff found that the Steeler was completely blank. Jeff found that the stele was completely blank. And so we still don't know who was buried in Pyramid 1 or exactly what date it is either, except to say that we think it's probably much later than the other pyramids and this probably dates to the 4th century BC. But yeah, that was a disappointing moment to say the least. Yeah, probably dating to the 4th century BC. I mean, that's around the time that you start getting the last actual pharaohs in Egypt

and the beginning of the Hellenistic and Ptolemies and all that. But I guess it's interesting how you have in a place like El Kourou, which seems to be so important for this dynasty in, let's say, the 8th century, that then you have this unique, iconic tomb in the middle, which dates to perhaps 400 years later exactly and it probably speaks to dynastic problems in the very very late Kushite period where activity had stopped for several hundred years at El Kourou and had moved over to Nouri which is not very far away and then somebody decides a royal personage we think, decides to try to move back to the El Karou heartland, to the original cemetery. And again, this is probably someone who's trying to

align themselves with an older genealogy, with a more ancient lineage at that point. But clearly, it seems that they didn't succeed because probably there was never a burial in that pyramid. But it speaks to these problems that are happening around that period of the 4th century BC before really activity is relocated wholesale to Meroe, which is several hundred kilometres further south, where a new royal cemetery and settlement site and temples start to be constructed. And that is a different epoch, which we call the Meroitic period, which exists until almost just before the conversion to Christianity in Sudan. I mean, that is extraordinary in itself,

because I had a great podcast a few months back about the Kingdom of Kush, the later Kingdom of Kush. And although, as you say, it's further south, centered around that area, it's amazing how things we've talked about earlier in this podcast, like, and especially the Queen Mother idea, it continues into this period with the emergence of the Kandakes, the warrior queens.

It's just remarkable how over hundreds of years, even though there seems to be this shift, geographical shift, certain aspects of this culture that we can see from the remains at El Kourou continue down into the Meroitic period. Absolutely, yeah. And it's key that that is one of the things, this visibility of the female ruler who's sometimes ruling in tandem with her husband. And that's something that really is quite different from Egypt. And we also see this change in the figuration of the female body as well, and the male body. Actually, people don't talk enough about how the male body changes, but it does

when we start to see these much more heavier, stocky figures who really look like they mean business. They really look like they could wield a sword and do some damage with it. And so, yeah, there is something long-term and deeply ingrained in that culture, which presences the royal females in a way that's quite distinctive to Sudanese heritage, I think. Now, before we go, that was brilliant. Last bit at the end. Is there anything else in the next part that you want to include in the podcast that you think is really, really astonishing and you would like to say a quick word about? I'm just going to tell you a quick word about the subterranean mortuary temple at Elkiru.

Okay. Because possibly this mortuary temple might be connected with the later pyramid. And so again, this was something that Reisner had found in 1919, which we knew from his diaries, but he never excavated, which Jeff excavated. And this was originally a quarry site. So it was probably used to produce some of the stone to build the pyramids. And then it was converted, we think, into some kind of temple. So it's sunk into the ground and there are two rectangular forecourts. And the first forecourt has a staircase descending into it. And then the second forecourt has 26 columns in it, which still stand to a height of about two and a half meters.

And it would probably have been roofed as well because we've seen niches in the wall so there would have been beams across it. But then what's quite extraordinary about that is that cut into the rock are several subterranean rooms which may actually have been locked even. And inside these rooms there are also column capitals. And in some ways, again, this looks to have features of an Egyptian temple like the columns outside and areas that are open to the sun and then areas that are closed in. But these rooms that have been hewn from the rock are really distinctively Sudanese and actually something that is paralleled in Nuri with the grave of Taharqa and the constructions there. So it's a very time-consuming, labour-intensive, difficult construction that was made and which again has no inscriptional material to date it properly apart from some graffiti which again probably dates to this fourth century period when things seem to be changing in that area. So it's quite interesting with this later addition

to El Khoury as it were quite interesting with this later addition to Elkura as it were you've got this extraordinary monumental architecture above ground as it were but also once again below ground you have this amazing subterranean part of the complex that likewise still has so many questions left to answer. Yeah that's the thing about archaeology though I think that often you set out to answer questions but in the end you just raise more of them don't you yeah yeah yeah absolutely absolutely i couldn't agree more and the big question i know for yourself you must love them all but are there any particular pyramids particular monumental structures that are particularly appealing for you

um yeah for me the work that i have done at eluru was mostly focused on two tombs, and that's the tombs of King Tanwatamani and his mother, Queen Kalhata. So they are mother and son who were buried at Elkuru, and Tanwatamani is the last king of the 25th dynasty. And their tombs are really important because they both contain painted imagery on the walls. It's possible that some of the other earlier pyramids at El Khoury, the subterranean structures, may have had some wall paintings on them, but they are lost to us completely. But fortunately, both in Calhata's tomb and Tanwat Amani's tomb, the paintings have been preserved. And this is important because this is the first time that we see this kind of material practice in the Sudan. Of course, everyone knows that the ancient Egyptian tombs, not the pyramids, but the tombs in, for example, the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens were decorated with sometimes with relief and also sometimes with paintings and hieroglyphic spells.

But with Tanwetamani and with Calhata, this is the first time that we have evidence for this happening in the Sudan. So it's the first time we see two-dimensional painted art. It's the first time that we're seeing hieroglyphic spells painted onto the walls. And it raises all kinds of questions about religious beliefs, about beliefs in the afterlife, about all kinds of practicalities, about how do people paint a tomb? Where do you get the material from? Where did the artists come from? Who is it that can read hieroglyphs and is able to write the spells on the wall correctly? How many people does it take to decorate a tomb and how long does it take? And so there are all kinds of questions that it brings

up, some of which we can think of as a sort of cosmological, philosophical, religious point of view, but then also from a practical point of view as well how do you make a royal burial in the 25th dynasty and so the tombs are interesting because as i said that the tombs of a mother and a son and there are parallels between the two tombs although there are also differences and the greatest parallels are really in the first chambers as you go into those tombs so you would descend down the staircase and on in the first chambers as you go into those tombs. So you would descend down the staircase and on entering the first room, you're confronted by this polychrome painting. And the tombs can really be understood in a sort of circular fashion. So you would start from the, as you walk down the descent, you'd start on the left-hand wall of the first chamber, then the left-hand wall of the second chamber, then the back western wall,

then the other wall of the second chamber, then the other wall of the first chamber. And we see in both of these cases that the deceased, the queen and the king in their individual tombs are flanked by gods who hold hands with them as they walk down into the tomb, down into their afterlife. And so the queen or the king descends with two of what are known as the four sons of Horus, two gods. They then pass into the second room where the body would have lain. And on the wall, this is depicted as the body in a mummy case, surrounded again by images of gods who are watching over the deceased. Then when we pass around onto the other wall, we see the deceased being brought back to life. And in that pose, we see the mummified body is turned onto its stomach. that pose we see the mummified body is turned onto its stomach and somebody a male possibly the descendant is offering the ank sign the sign of life towards the nose of the mummy and this represents the mummy being reactivated vivified once again and then as you head back into the

first chamber and head towards the staircase again, we see the king or the queen in their respective tombs again, hand in hand with two other gods being led out of the tomb towards the polar stars to commence their afterlife. So this sounds kind of like an ancient Kushai slash ancient Egyptian strip cartoon telling what they believed would happen to their kings and queens. Yeah, in some ways you can think of it like that. It's quite a linear construct and it tells a progressive story step by step. And the paintings themselves are more or less life-size in the first tomb. In the second tomb, they're on a slightly smaller scale. In the second chamber, there's also a lot more Egyptian spells that are

written there. And really, those spells are a combination of material that is dating back thousands of years. So some of the texts that we find on the walls there are texts that date back to the fifth dynasty in Egypt, so to about 2500 BC. So they're already ancient by the time they were put in the tombs at El-Kurru. So again, you can think about how this is thinking back to an earlier time and earlier place. But at the same time, the images themselves and the texts are arranged in an original way. They are not by any means kind of rote copies of a model that was already in existence in Egypt. And the two tombs themselves, although they have similarities, the spells on the wall are not

exactly the same. The way the gods are depicted are not exactly the same. So there seems to have been between mother and son, perhaps some desire to differentiate themselves from each other or to, you know, for Tanwet Amani to do something better than his mother had done or something like that. for Tanwetamani to do something better than his mother had done or something like that. But they're very special spaces that in this subterranean environment, it's interesting to think about how dark it would have been, how you're surrounded by this colourful painting, which would have just been quite incredible at the time. If you can imagine this as almost a new technology that's being showcased with the flickering oil lamps that would have been lighting the way. And then the roofs themselves are also

painted with this bright sort of sky blue colour. There's a colour called Egyptian blue. And the roofs are then covered with depictions of stars. So for eternity, the king or the queen would have been sort of lying in the states, able to look up at the starry sky above them. It sounds absolutely beautiful. I mean, it's one of those things that you describe, and even yourself describing it on the podcast now, can envisage it like being there with just oil lamps, obviously no huge lighting as it were today.

But as you said, it must have felt surreal. It must have felt like this divine place suitable for the burial of someone who the subjects believe now sat among the gods. Exactly. And these things are not done by accident. This is a way to create a sense of the sacred. And I think that's one of the fascinating things about it, because this is the first evidence that we have for this kind of material being put on the walls. We're really seeing the genesis of the start of a religious system, in a sense, as a way of expressing the ineffable. are using sensory aspects in order to make that an interesting, strange, otherworldly kind of experience. And of course, we don't know how many people ever saw the inside of those tombs. Maybe it was only the king or the queen and a few, you know, the priest or the people that had done the

paintings themselves. We wouldn't expect that this is something that obviously that the population in general would be saying but they're techniques that are used to create an atmosphere of the sacred and the special and the divine i'm going to mention the t word just once the tootin carmoon word because i mean all of the i mean just when like it came to london i think a year ago or so at the sachi gallery and the amazing stuff there and you saw these life-size guardian statues and you saw those beautiful coloured walls as well and the like. And once again, I guess, as you've been saying, do you think that on one level, they are trying to harken back to this time of Tutankhamun, to this time in the past of ancient Egypt, when rulers were buried in this sort of manner? It's an interesting question because it would imply that they know what an ancient Egyptian

burial looked like or a new kingdom burial looked like, which is entirely possible because also those tombs were looted very soon after they were constructed. And so it's possible that people were going into those tombs or were seeing the sorts of art, the sorts of objects that were being produced. And of course, we know that the Sudanese kings had this basis for indigenous Egyptian expertise to create Egyptian-style objects or images. However, when it comes to the creation of these objects for the tombs in the Sudan, there's a difference to them. There's a qualitative difference and a sense that there's something creative happening because I think they're not trapped by the canonical tradition of Egyptian art in the same way that an artist who is producing material for a royal tomb would be. People often think that Egyptian art seems like quite a conservative genre because it's very, very recognisable. And that's because it's following certain rules about how you proportion the human body,

how you depict the female body versus the male body, for example. And I think that they're less constrained by that in the Sudan. And so it seems like they seem to take elements that they like and then twist it slightly to their own taste or for their own purposes. Again, to think about this idea of an Egyptological, Egyptocentric gaze, in the past that kind of difference would have been seen as evidence that the Sudanese kings were doing it wrong, that they didn't understand really the proportions of the human body or they didn't really understand that you shouldn't put a spell from the pyramid text with a spell from the coffin text when instead if we think about this from a an indigenous Sudanese creative perspective we can see this as something

that's actually a living process that's being developed and that it isn't just about slavish copying it's about a group of people, a dynasty of people, who were familiar with this other culture and who liked or admired perhaps certain aspects of it, but who also were creating it anew in a different context. Yeah, you wanted to stamp your own mark on it, as it were. It's completely understandable, especially on the human level, when you think of it that way.

Now, just quickly, we've mentioned the pyramids and you mentioned the walls, the beautiful walls and the burials within. Are there any other iconic features from these pyramids and from these burials of queens and queen mothers that are very iconic from Elkiru? Some of the objects have become quite iconic. Objects have become quite iconic. In particular, there's an object from one of the Queen's tombs that doesn't have a pyramid that I mentioned that is an orb made of rock crystal, polished rock crystal, and it's perfectly round. And on the top of this is a golden head of a goddess,

of the goddess Hathor, with her female head and cow horns. And that's become quite a celebrated object from the site, which is one of the star objects of the exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. There's a lot of jewellery from the site. There's a lot of pottery from the site. There are bits and pieces that relate to furniture that would have been placed in the tombs.

I'd like to ask about the horse burials. What is all this surrounding the horse burials at Elkiru? Yes, so the horse burials at Elkiru are really quite fabulous. And yeah, one of the really distinctive aspects of the site, which Reisner excavated. And again, these horse burials are found not in the main bit of the cemetery proper, but at a little distance from it. And they are burials of groups of four horses,

and they're buried in groups, and spatially they lie behind each other. And the incredible thing was that these horses would have been executed, and then they were buried standing up in the grave. So if you can imagine the grave cut itself in cross section, there was a sort of a bit that was sunk into the ground for the horse's front legs and a bit in the back for the back legs. And then there's a middle bit that's raised up to support the horse's stomach. So they were standing up. and Reisner excavated these and he thought that they'd been decapitated because the heads were missing but it's possible that actually when they were robbed the robbers were sort of rootling around the necks of the horses to try and pull off the horse trappings that they were wearing which were were quite ornate. But nevertheless, even though they were robbed, the burials themselves contained inscribed material

so that we know that the horses belonged to Pianchi and to the other kings of the 25th dynasty. And so it's a bit, we could conjecture that perhaps this was the execution of the horses that drove the king's chariots, or his favourite steeds that he took with him into the afterlife. But for whatever reason within their religious thought, it wasn't proper for them to be placed in the tomb with the king. They needed to be outside. And to an extent, the way that they're arranged, you almost get the impression that they're sort of standing watch,

because they're at a distance from the rest of the cemetery. And because they're standing up and because they're in their full regalia, it's a little bit like they're looking out to check what's coming towards the cemetery and in a sense sort of guarding that burial place. So these poor royal horses, it's like their lives were entwined with those of their kings. So when the king died, it looks like they were going to be buried with him. Again, and this is part of a very long Sudanese tradition in burial archaeology, which we see going back several thousand years of the burial of animals alongside humans. And it's something that stretches forward into the 5th century AD, just before the conversion to Christianity in Sudan, the execution of animals to go in the graves with humans.

That's amazing. I mean, horrible, but amazing nonetheless, that whole other aspect of it. And let's go now back to the archaeology of El Karou and more recent times, because we've got the tombs, we've got the royal burial site. Is there any evidence that there was a settlement nearby, a non-secular, well, a non-religious place, a secular place nearby? Well, when Jeff Emberling and I started work at the site in 2013, this was one of the explicit aims of the expedition. And in particular, this was what Jeff was interested in, was an attempt to find a

settlement site that would correspond with the burial site, because one would expect, obviously, that if you have a group of burials, the people must have been living somewhere nearby. And we spent a significant amount of time trying to locate a likely place for this settlement. And unfortunately, we found no evidence of a 25th dynasty settlement. And Jeff knew that one of the things that Reisner was very good at was keeping diaries. And so the whole time that he was at El Kourou, and I suppose there wasn't much else to do after a long day of archaeology, he was writing these diaries about what he'd found and what he was thinking and what his experiences were. And one of the things that he mentioned was a large stone wall that he found near El Karou, near the Nile, but that he didn't excavate. He only did some little sondages. And so I think

Reisner described this wall as probably being 200 meters long. And so Jeff was rightly, I think, thinking that this sounded like a very monumental piece of architecture, something that we would expect on the scale of the 25th dynasty, and that it could be a monumental wall to a settlement area. And so Jeff and his team excavated the wall, which is about two metres deep. It really is a monumental story, it's very deep. It now only survives up to about a metre in height, but it could have been much higher. It has a monumental gateway in the middle of it. But it would appear that that wall and there were some slight, fairly ephemeral remains of a settlement nearby, but those date to the Christian period. So they date to something like the 9th century AD onwards.

So yeah, unfortunately, we were unsuccessful in finding the mystery settlement of the 25th dynasty kings. Still sounds very exciting. You mentioned Jeff there, one of your co-workers on the team, one of the other legends behind this project. And from what you were saying earlier, just before we started recording, it sounds like you've got this amazing team, not just of archaeologists, but also of people from the local area who've been invaluable in helping with the archaeology. Yeah, absolutely. You know, archaeology is a team project always. There are the directors

of the project. So that would be me and Jeff but it requires collaboration with many many people there's the collaboration with your archaeological colleagues and in the case of El Karou this is this is archaeologists that come from many different countries but then we're also working with for example architects geologists chemistsists, museum specialists, conservators, geophysics specialists, people with all kinds of different expertise that we need to bring in when we realise that Geoff and I aren't clever enough to answer the questions that we wanted to answer. And then, of course, the other two key elements of working at an archaeological site. One is the local population who already live there and have lived

there for all their lives. And then there's also the antiquities service who are the professional body who oversee archaeology, cultural heritage management, and who are involved in the protection of monuments in the Sudan. And so you're working in partnership with them maintaining their standards and we always for example on site we always work with one of the inspectors from the antiquities service who lives with us in the house and who is there all the time keeping an eye on what we're doing and then yes of course the settlement itself at Elkuru is quite small. The village is quite small. And it's a village where most people own date palm plantations and are involved in date harvesting. And it's a local family. And the man who is the father in that family is one of the site guards as well. And there is also a man called Mansour in the village

who's the sort of head man in a way. He's the man who helps us to organise workforces, helps us to negotiate with people, helps procure wheelbarrows and all the sort of practical things that we need on site and who generally just helps us out helps us negotiate our way around how to live at el curu and um yeah we've been going there now for well i don't know six six or seven years and it develops into a relationship and to some extent to a dialogue as well, because we want, it's interesting to know, to find out what local people think of why we're there,

what are we doing? And it's interesting also to hear what their ideas are about the archaeological site and what their relationship is to it, which can be quite different to how we might have expected it. And also it's been a source of employment for people in the village because when we've worked there, it's meant that we could hire workers from the village to help work on the archaeological site and to help us with translation, for example, things like that. So we've tried to

build relationships with the people there and to do things like hold meetings with just the ladies in the village or just the men in the village. And we've done talks in local schools with the school children. We've done meetings with local school teachers where we kind of brought them together to talk about our work and what we were doing and why and in that sense we hope that it becomes a bit more of a an equal relationship because they're stakeholders in what is happening at the site and what will happen to it in the long term. And you mentioned long term there what are the long-term goals for yourself, Jeff, and the rest? So the goals for the team are those, I think, which align well with the antiquities service goals and also the goals for UNESCO, because El Curru is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And of course, there are the goals that you have individually as an academic in terms of the things that you want to dig up, the things you want want to survey how you want to record things and ultimately how you

want to publish them because that's important but we one of the things that has been important is to try to prepare the site to be ready for visitors to come and that may be visitors from Khartoum or it may be overseas visitors and to make the site more accessible for tourists in the future. And this is something obviously that could help the local economy. And so in trying to meet that goal, one of the things that we've tried to do in collaboration with people at Elkru is to think about after we've left the site, when our work finishes, what would we leave behind? And we've worked with a Sudanese professor called Professor Abbas, who actually was born in the village of El Kourou. And his team have worked on the site to move rising spoil heaps and to create sort of walkways and paths around the site that make it a bit more intelligible in terms of how you should move through the space. And a goal that we really have is to

hopefully build a visitor's centre at the site. And this would be a visitor's centre that would be located sort of on the margin between the archaeological site and the village, so that really people can have an understanding that this is not between the archaeological site and the village so that really people can have an understanding that this is not a dead archaeological site this is not about something that happened 16 or 1700 years ago this is a site which is in a modern context and in which people live all around it and live with this site and so we would like in the end to construct a visitor's centre, which was partly given over to the story of the archaeology and George Reisner and the methods that we used in excavation and what we found, and that tells the story of the 25th Dynasty Kings.

But we also would like a part of that visitor's centre to be given over to local culture so that it could tell the story of subsistence in the area, local handicrafts like textile weaving and basket making. And one of the great ideas that Jeff had and that he instigated with his team was to conduct a photograph contest in the village. And so he asked people to take photographs on their mobile phones that said something about village life in Elkuru. And we had lots and lots of entries for this competition. And then a team of local people, the headmistress of the local girls' school and Jeff and I and Mansour and a couple of other people were the judges for this competition. for this competition. And then when the winners were announced at a kind of village party, and in the end, these pictures, these photographs, we hope will be placed in the visitor's centre with a narrative written by the people themselves that took the photograph of what this says about

El Karou. And so in that sense, that it gives the local people a way to have a voice. And we would hope also, you know, in an ideal world that local handicrafts could be sold at the visitor centre and that local food could be served, you know, that tourists could, you know, we know that tourists, they like to visit an archaeological site, have a sit down in the shade, get a drink and something to eat and then buy something. have a sit down in the shade, get a drink and something to eat and then buy something. So we sort of see this as a way perhaps of also bringing in some economic value from the archaeological site that would go back into the village itself. Well, Rachel, in the years to come, I look forward to going to El Karou and seeing this amazing visitor centre and seeing this site in the flesh, because what you've described in the last hour, it sounds absolutely

amazing. It's a remarkable site that many of us, including myself, had never even heard of really before today in the research today. So Rachel, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been an absolute pleasure having you.