The Ancients - The Kingdom of Kush

Episode Date: January 26, 2025

Beyond the ancient Nile’s fertile banks lay a civilisation that rivalled Egypt in power and prestige—the Kingdom of Kush. This ancient empire, centred in modern Sudan, once ruled Egypt, defied Rome, and it's formidable warrior queens left a lasting mark on African history.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes visits the British Museum to explore the story of the Kushites with Dr. Loretta Kilroe, curator of a new exhibition on Ancient Sudan. From royal pyramids to one-eyed battlefield leaders and even Kushite porridge, uncover the hidden legacy of this extraordinary civilization.Loretta's exhibition, Ancient Sudan: Enduring Heritage is touring the UK this year. It opens in Portsmouth on 1st February and in Stirling on 9th August.Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight.The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.The Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here:https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes and if you would like the ancient 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. The sun rises over the Nile Valley. Stretched out ahead is an avenue of conical-shaped pyramids, each with steeply slanting sides.

They mark the entrance to a sprawling ancient city, overlooking the fertile Nile in the eastern Sahara. But these pyramids, seemingly emerging from the desert sands, well, they're not in Egypt. They're in Sudan, in the ancient kingdom of Kush. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. In today's episode, we are exploring another of those ancient civilisations all too often overshadowed by more famous names like Egypt, Greece and Rome.

We're shining a light on the Kingdom of Kush, its people known as the Kushites. Centred in present-day Sudan, the Kingdom of Kush has an extraordinary story. From ruling ancient Egypt to defying the powerful Roman Emperor Augustus, its people have left an indelible mark on Sudanese and African history that endures to this day. To learn more about this kingdom, I headed to the British Museum to interview Dr Loretta Kilrow, Curator for Sudan and Nubia at the museum. Loretta has recently curated a brand new exhibition about ancient Sudan, full of stunning Kushite artefacts. The exhibition will be touring the

UK in 2025 and is called Ancient Sudan, Enduring Heritage. We have a brand new documentary showcasing its artifacts out now on the History Hit YouTube channel. So please do check that out after listening to today's episode. This chat has everything from ancient Kushite porridge to their striking pyramids. Loretta was fantastic and I hope you enjoy it.

Loretta, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast. Thank you for having me, Tristan. We've done this, well, we've done it for TV already, for YouTube, talking about ancient Sudan and those extraordinary artifacts. Great to have you on the podcast as well to talk about the Kingdom of Kush. And it's the story of an, I guess you could say, sometimes overlooked kingdom, but it had strong connections with Rome, Greece and Egypt. It's got an amazing story. Absolutely. And the more you look into the Kingdom of Kush and ancient Sudan more broadly, the more fascinating it is. And I think a lot of people end up getting really drawn into these amazing stories.

And what time period are we talking about with the Kingdom of Kush? So we're looking at about 790 BC to about the 4th century AD. But obviously throughout that there are a lot of changes in political rule, rises and falls, extensions of empire. This isn't a static kingdom that we're looking at. 790 BC, that's quite a specific date in the 8th century. Do we know why you put the beginnings around the beginning of the 8th century BC? CK So a lot of archaeologists have studied the rise of Kush. There's been a great interest in the early cemeteries. In particular, we

have a cemetery known as El Kuru. This is in central Sudan, so around between the third and the fourth cataract of the Nile, the River Nile. We found a couple of hundred years ago, a large cemetery that had what looked like the remains of pyramids, massive superstructures, smaller accompanying burials that were perhaps for consorts. and this really intrigued early archaeologists who at that time didn't know much about ancient Sudan. We know based on Egyptian and biblical actually textual sources of the 25th dynasty who

are particularly famous for invading Egypt. So the 25th dynasty are Sudanese kings who suddenly turn up in Egyptian and later biblical sources as ruling Egypt. And this is when we start to get dates in, once we start to get these rulers with inscriptions written in hieroglyphics and in the biblical stories. But that's interesting. So that 25th dynasty dynasty is that some of the earliest evidence we have for the Kingdom of Kush. Do we have any idea what came before in that area of what is now Sudan? Emma Yes. So when we look at Al-Khuru, we can see evolutions in burial chambers, funerary superstructures, the Kushites themselves, once they start writing, they start using Egyptian

hieroglyphs at first and so we do start to get history in their own words for the first time. They talk about early ancestors, particularly a king called Alara. We're not sure if Alara is real, is perhaps semi-mythical, but they all seem to date their reign and their rule back to him. We think that the early ancestors of the 25th dynasty are rulers, chiefs in this part of the Nile Valley. They ruled a small part of the Nile Valley after the Egyptians withdrew from colonial control of Sudan at the end of the Egyptian new kingdom. Right, so Egyptian new kingdom, so before the first millennium BC, and that's the time of famous names like Ramesses II and Tutankhamun, when Egypt is very much at its zenith. At

that time, before the Kingdom of Kush, Sudan was very much part of that great empire further north, I guess down the River Nile. Absolutely. So for the first time, Sudan is absorbed into Egypt proper. So obviously, Egypt has had a fractious relationship with ancient Sudan for thousands of years. We know there have been a lot of wars, a lot of skirmishes, different kingdoms taking control of different parts of land. There's a huge amount of trade as well. There's obviously a lot of friendly relations, people moving, bringing with them goods and ideas. And moving would it generally be in that time? Should we not be thinking road? Should we be thinking river travel? to bear in mind that the Nile in Sudan is not as smooth as the Nile is in Egypt. There are six cataracts, which are very large areas of rocky rapids in the river that make sailing a bit more difficult than in Egypt. And people would have to take their boats out and drag

them through the desert, thus making them vulnerable to attack from different polities or nomads perhaps. Also actually quite a lot of roads that people would have travelled on. I didn't really. Yeah, we've started to do a lot more archaeological investigation into some of these and we're finding some absolutely incredible things. People would probably use donkeys and also human power to carry goods between Egypt and Sudan. So it sounds like right away and indeed before

the time of the Kingdom of Kush, there is this strong connection between Egypt and Kush and ancient Sudan. And is this a connection, a link that we will see almost continually through the whole story of the Kingdom of Kush? Emma Absolutely. I mean, one of the most famous earlier relations that we see is in the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. The Egyptians built large fortresses on the Nile to control- Middle Kingdom, how far back are we going with that? Yes, very far. The Egyptians at this period are trying to control access from the Kingdom of Kerma.

So at 4,000 years, do we think? So this is around 2,500 to 1,500 BC. Right, okay, yeah. The Kingdom of Kerma. The Egyptians build these huge fortresses to control Kerma, to control access to the river, to control trade, because they're a little bit frightened of Kerma, who are extremely powerful. And in the second intermediate period after Egypt pops into smaller independent polities, Kerma raid Egypt. We have Egyptian statues being dragged back to Kerma and buried in local burials. So this is all something that you have to take into context when we look

at later periods like the Kingdom of Kush. So once we get to the New Kingdom, the Egyptians have decided, no, the fortresses aren't enough anymore. We have to control Sudan proper. So they come in, they colonise Sudan, they destroy Kerma and they build colonial towns and they settle Egyptians in these. And for the first time Sudan is part of Egypt. And this is really important when we're looking at Kush because people look at Kushite culture, Kushite iconography, Kushite objects and superstructures and temples, and they think, oh, they're Egyptian, they're copying the Egyptians. But they're not. The Egyptians were in Sudan for 500 years. And by this point, the culture that has developed

in Sudan is something completely new that uses both indigenous and Egyptian iconography to make what eventually becomes the Kushite culture. And we'll explore more and more of that. And I also love what you mentioned there also about them cutting off statues and bringing them back because I think we'll explore a famous example of that later on. But if we then go to that 25th dynasty that you highlighted right at the start, this is almost feel like role reversal in a way that, you know, once conquered Sudan, then the Egyptians go back after the new kingdom and then this dynasty rise up from Kush and take over Egypt. So instead

of Egypt being the heart of the dynasty's power at that time, in actual fact at that time it was Sudan, it was Kush. So what we start to see when we look at Kushite textual sources, once they start writing things down, is that the Kushites very clearly think that they are naturally the rulers of Egypt. They are taking control over something that is rightfully theirs. This is partly linked to when you look at religious centres in Egypt and Sudan. So the very famous religious centre in Egypt is Karnak, a very large complex of temples added to by every king in every reign.

A Luxor today, Amun. Yes, exactly. Although we obviously get a lot of reference to different gods on these temples. Beautiful, tall, Apostle Halls, smaller sanctuaries, often still with paint on the walls. But when the Egyptians went into Sudan, they found this large mountain, more of like a mountainous plateau called Jabal Barkal, and they gave it the same name as Karnak. And they actually thought it was the precursor to Karnak, the Egyptians themselves. So when you're looking at this kind of environment, you can see very easily how the Kushites thought they were taking back their rightful heritage by going

into Egypt and also restoring a lot of the temples and monuments. So they're prolific builders in Sudan. So do we know much? You mentioned all those monuments. So do we have quite a lot of archaeological evidence alongside you say there's mentions in the Bible, which is really interesting. Do we have much evidence to create a really detailed story about the 25th dynasty? Yes, and it's more than what we do get in later periods, of course. So it's often a period that archaeologists focus on, even though it's generally a way of also focusing on Egypt. Unfortunately, there's a lack of people studying this in Sudan as much as there is in Egypt.

We have a huge amount of buildings in Sudan and Egypt with the same names of rulers. They often restore temples as well from the New Kingdom. They show themselves in very Egyptian and Egyptianized styles. So things that we'd be familiar with from Egyptian temple reliefs, people shown on a side profile, specific Egyptian crowns, such as with the uraeus on, they snake,

shown obviously very thin, very tall. They start using hieroglyphs to write inscriptions, which is when we start to get their voices. And then as I said before, we have some reference to some of these later kings in the Bible and also in Assyrian text as well because the 25th dynasty come up against the Assyrian Empire as well. So is that the biblical context, it's fighting the Assyrians who are more right. Interesting. And so going on from that, I must also, if we keep on the 25th dynasty a little longer, because should we talk about pyramids? Because there is a very interesting, a very cool fact about pyramids in Sudan.

And I'm guessing a few of them date to this period. What is this obsession, shall I say, between the 25th dynasty and periods and the great magnitude and number of pyramids in Sudan? So yes, you're right. There are actually more pyramids in Sudan than there are in Egypt. What a fact.

So there are 118 pyramids in Egypt at last count. There are currently estimated to be 200 in Sudan, but it seems likely there's a lot more. I've been to sites that are currently unexcavated or in the process of being excavated and you can see the remains of superstructures on the top of the graves that were clearly small pyramids. So there were a lot more than we think there were. And do we think they all date to the time of the Kushites of the Kingdom of Kush? Is that when that fascination with pyramids

really takes hold? So we start to get pyramids to some extent in the New Kingdom. So rather than thinking of the very grand pyramids that you see like at the pyramids of Giza, which are obviously much, much older, they date to the Egyptian Old Kingdom. By the New Kingdom pyramids are quite small, they're tall and narrow and they're generally linked to a small tomb chapel at the front so that you could go in and you could give offerings to your ancestors and pray for your ancestors. This is what we see in Sudan. We know that in some cases this is Egyptians moving south

and constructing their traditional burial practices from home. So at the site of Tombos, for example, in Sudan, we know an official known as Siamoun was sent to run the city of Tombos. He brought his mother with him, suggesting that the city is quite safe and also really interesting elements of familiar love and how important it is to bring your family with you into Sudan at this point, which is again new. This is a new, new kingdom thing a new new kingdom phenomenon. In the Middle Kingdom it wasn't safe so people didn't do that. Siamon builds what we think is a small pyramid superstructure and he also constructs his tomb chapel in a very Theban way so we can tell he's from

thieves and he's bringing his traditions with him. But once we get to the Cushate period, this is when you see some of the more famous pyramids probably. This is when you see the royal pyramids. So at sites such as Merui, which was the capital of the later period of Kush, as you enter Merui today, you enter the pyramid fields as they're known. There are all these quite dark, tall pyramids that just seem to rise up out of the sand as you cross the hill. Yes, you type in Merriery today and that first image you get is that pyramid field and they're quite thin but tall pyramids, quite conical.

Exactly, and this is something that is clearly inspired by the New Kingdom pyramids, which we did see then as well. They are unfortunately generally broken so that the tops have often been smashed off. For example, there is a pyramid belonging to a ruling queen, Amane Shiketo, whose pyramid top was smashed off by an explorer and his feline looking for treasure. That's why most of them have been damaged by treasure hunters. Unfortunately, Ferlini found huge amounts of beautiful gold and precious stone jewellery. So then he thought that he should keep going because he'd been rewarded. And I've also got in my notes that site of El Curru. It's another royal burial site of

the 25th dynasty, if I remember correctly. Yes. So El Curru, there's nothing remaining of the superstructures, but we can attempt to replicate and understand how the superstructures once looked based on the foundations, based on remains of stone that are scattered around the site. It can be difficult, but what we think happens at El- Coru is early superstructures are what we call mastabas. So these are more, if you want to think of more like a little table made of stone, so a flat rectangle and then after a couple of generations we think they move back to pyramids. But again, it can be very difficult to be sure. What we

do know is that by the 25th dynasty, when it's in its full swing, we're seeing pyramids. And then everybody does it throughout the Kushite period. So they occur at Jabalbakhl, they occur at Meroe, they occur at Nuri, which is where the famous 25th dynasty king Tahaka was buried. So he's particularly famous for fighting the Assyrians and losing, unfortunately. And at Karnak, there's that famous pillar, the Teharka kiosk isn't there that you can go and see. I mean I could talk about pyramids all day and they're linked to Meroe. I mean one other thing is so interesting isn't it. So we're talking first millennium BC but the

pyramids you think of with the Egyptians are more than a thousand years earlier. They've moved on to Valley of the Kings and so on. So it's really interesting how that pyramid revival, it actually occurs in Kush. But moving on, we'll keep going thematically because chronologically there's quite a lot we could talk about. But thematically, keeping on that link to Egypt, when talking about religion in the Kingdom of Kush, the gods that they worshipped, do a lot of them have a close link to Egypt once again? Yeah, so particularly in the early periods of Kush, we're seeing huge focus on gods such as Amun, the ram-headed god who seems to appear in Sudan in the New Kingdom again. So we're

still seeing all this inspiration left over from the New Kingdom. And Amun was the focus of a lot of the temples that were constructed by the Egyptians at Jabal Barkal which the 25th dynasty and later Kushite kings restore. There's a large interest in Isis, the goddess Isis, who is important in temples but also seems to be important to more ordinary people and a lot of ordinary people are not welcome in temples, it's more of a space of priests and royalty. So ordinary people are not welcome in temples. It's more of a space for priests and royalty. So ordinary people are leaving these small offerings such as an ear made of phions, which is like a bright blue or green false stone. Or sometimes things in clay. Sometimes you'll see

a small woman made in clay. Sometimes you'll see pieces of female genitalia or you'll see clay, sometimes you'll see pieces of female genitalia or you'll see beads sometimes or small heads. We also see Hathor who's venerated in this way and this seems to be perhaps some kind of link with indigenous women looking for somebody to pray to when they need help more informally. And Isis and Hathor, they largely associated with healing childbirth, magic, all that stuff. Exactly, and that's why we think we get things like the ear, the female genitalia, it's people asking for help with injuries or with perhaps struggling to have a child, fertility problems, often perhaps praying for their own children as well and we've had these very very small semi-temples that we see in settlements that have hundreds and thousands of these tiny little

pieces. They're cheap, they're disposable, but they're clearly very, very important. And they give us a glimpse into a part of Kush that is outside this elite wealth and this elite power. And it's a little bit different. So yes, we are seeing a lot of these Egyptian and Egyptianized deities, particularly the early period, but they're not just Egyptian at this point. They have become absorbed and hybridized in local Kush pantheons. That hybridization between Egyptian and Kushite, which is so interesting. I will draw you back into that elite area for a bit longer, I'm afraid, because one of the objects we looked at recently was that figurehead

of Isis, wasn't it? Now would you mind explaining what this object is because it is so extraordinary and it tells a great story about Isis but also I guess larger religious practices associated with Isis in Kush. So the figurehead of Isis, quite small actually, about the size of a pineapple. You can see this beautiful bronze face, missing eyes and missing a headdress suggesting that it would have originally had more elements to it that have since been lost. Without those eyes it looks like it's basically staring into your soul. Exactly, she does. She's got a beautiful pectoral collar and a really finely

detailed wig. The eyes probably would have been a semi-precious or precious stone and then there's obviously a hole in the top of her head as well that would, I would assume have held a wooden and perhaps golden headdress. This may have been removed every time it came back to the temple and then perhaps reused, lost, perhaps it was melted down or the stones were reused for something else. So this quite small figure head would have been added to the front and the back. So there would have been a pair originally of a ceremonial bark. So a small boat, a small boat, okay, that would have had inside a small, think of it like a small room within which a statue

of a deity could be carried from temple to temple. So temples are particularly sanctified spaces. As I said before, these are not like modern churches. They're not for everyday people to go into and pray and connect with deities. Temples are restricted to priests, to members of royalty. Ordinary people would really have only seen deities when they were travelling on processions. It's a procession. Exactly. So when a deity had to move to a different temple, perhaps because the time of year changed and there was a special festival or they needed to replicate the movement of the flood of the Nile or something like that. The day she would be placed within this sanctified mini sanctified space.

In the boat and carried by priests to the next spot sometimes the bark would be put on an actual boat as well so you've got a boat within a boat like Russian dolls. put on an actual boat as well. So you've got a boat within a boat like Russian dolls. But it's really interesting, you have to type it in as well sometimes, you know, the sacred bark to get your mind over this image. Sometimes you say it is, but usually not in the water. It's in fact being carried and it's like this portable house of the god from temple to temple and that artefact of Isis in her regular portrayal as this beautiful woman, you know, that beautiful bronze bust would have been decorating that sacred object and it must have been such a sight, as you say, for the everyday Kushite to see that processing through the street from temple to temple.

Exactly. If you think about the strength of the sun in Sudan, these rays bouncing off this polished bronze, it would have shone out, it would have been really striking for a lot of people. Toby So moving on from that, we've talked about that hybridisation between Kushite and Egyptian deities in Kushite religion. Are there any strictly Kushite deities that we know of? Emma Yes. Particularly in later periods of Kush, we start to see some of these Kushite deities rise to more of a prominence, particularly Epidamac, who is a lion headed god of war and fertility.

There's always- War and fertility, wow. It's very interesting in a lot of religions around the world, war and death and fertility and life almost pair. It's fascinating actually. So Apedamak becomes very popular in what we call the Meroitics of the later period of the Kushite kingdom. And Apedamak occurs on temples across, particularly further south in Sudan. So we're seeing these around the Meroite area. These are known as lion temples and we're still getting inscriptions at this point, which is brilliant. So once we get to the Kushto period, we finally are starting to

get inscriptions. We can see the ancient Sudanese through that, hear them through their own words, which is amazing. Apedimach is very, very popular. We also have other deities. Isis does continue to be very, very popular right up until the Christian period, which is very, very interesting. So they're all enduring side by side. And that lets me go on to a bit of a tangent because you mentioned language there. So do we know much about the Meroitic or the Kushite language? The Kushite language is very indigenous, but the actual alphabet originally comes from Egyptian hieroglyphs, so it's using Egyptian

hieroglyphs to write a local language. So it's using that script for their local language. Exactly. Later, shortly after, it also is written in cursive. So if you think of cursive more like shorthand, it looks almost a little bit like Arabic, less joined together. We actually do see cursive, Mer Merruitic written in inscriptions in later periods. So there's an amazing steeler actually in the British Museum that is just fully in cursive Merruitic. And I think a lot of people walk past it because unlike hieroglyphs which look like pictures, it can be quite hard to see and it can be quite hard

to engage with. But these tell the Kushite story in their own words and they're absolutely fascinating. They absolutely fascinating. Yeah and hopefully we can explore one or two before we finish but it's almost like another comparison to maybe this is oversimplifying it all tell me if i'm completely wrong but is it kind of like english and french today not that two different languages as a gypsy and marowitig. Meroitic, but they're using the same script as in that they're using the same letters? So yes, to some extent, yes, they are using the same letters, but we actually think Meroitic comes from a completely different route from Egyptian. Understood. And now I will start by saying I'm not a linguist, so I would not trust my detailed linguistic analysis of this, but we are starting to understand Meroitic a lot better than we used to. It's semi-translated.

There's unfortunately no Rosetta stone of Meroitic, so we're still missing a lot of vocabulary. A lot of particularly non-royal inscriptions are quite formulaic, so they don't have a huge amount of information, but we are starting to understand spells, we have names. they're all very very different from Egyptian names obviously, but it's nice to see it kind of confirmed. We're starting to see the importance of different elements in religion, so they're thinking of water, there's a lot of emphasis on water, there's some particularly interesting steely that talk about the importance of horses

because Kush seems to be famous for breeding horses and they are actually really popular around the entire Mediterranean. I didn't realise that horses, I would think of ancient Persia or somewhere like that or the steppe. I didn't realise Kush was also very well known for its horses. Absolutely. They seem to be in demand massively. As far as Assyria, you've got the Assyrians trying to get Kushite horses. Well, there you go. I didn't know that at all. But your mention there about magic, that leads me nicely onto the next part of this talk, which will be thematically, death and

burial. Now, I know in ancient Egypt, there's quite a heavy focus on death and burial from the surviving archaeology. Is that a similar case with the Kushites? Do we know a lot about their burial customs and how they treated death? So you're right, it's almost similar with Egypt in that because a lot of burial remains have been found by archaeologists, they're preserved and protected, we often think the Egyptians are obsessed with death. And you get that in Kush as well to a certain extent. We have a lot of pyramids, we have a lot of temples, we have a lot of graves that have been excavated. But we have to remember this is such a bias

of archaeology. These are the things that survive and they're the things that archaeologists were interested in excavating. Nobody for hundreds of years wanted to excavate a poor settlement. Now we do, but it's obviously a little bit more difficult to excavate places at the moment. But they're the things that tell you the diet that people were having, the way ordinary people saw the world, the way that certain vessels meant things to people, certain pots meant things to people instead of just being a jar. We just tend to ignore them and we look at the inscriptions of gods and the pictures of kings and queens and the grand pyramids. But there's a whole undercurrent

of Kush that we sometimes struggle to appreciate. Paul Fearnley Okay then, let's appreciate it now. How did the everyday Kushites, how did they view the world? Well I think, and I will say I'm coming at this from a very biased point of view because I'm a pot specialist, but I think that pottery can really give you an insight into how ordinary people were viewing the world because it's unconscious. People are not making pots to conscious. People are not making pots to promote some kind of a political agenda or make themselves look better to certain gods or promote their ancestry. If they've stole the throne from somebody they don't then pretend that they haven't as people tend to on temple reliefs.

Pots will show how people are eating and drinking and that's such a huge part of culture Well, they will show by the lipid residue by in analysis of the inside of the pot Yes to some extent but also the shape of the pots. So particularly in In Sudan there is very much a trend to eating more porridge like foods Whereas in Egypt there is like in the further north in the Near East, there is a focus on eating breads. It's a very different cooking trend. It's a very different eating trend. And the fact that these things get passed down from parent to child,

often from mother to daughter, gives us an insight into ordinary people and the things that concerned them. We also have pottery decoration, particularly handmade pottery I think is very very interesting into telling us about indigenous ways of understanding the world around them. We call it a symbolic worldview. We don't really understand some of it but they mean something and that's what my research is on at the moment, trying to understand Kushite worldviews based on this indigenous pottery. And handmade pottery, so that's not industrialised in these great workshops, that's done by someone

in the household who is creating the pot for you to use. So yeah, to some extent, and we do actually tend to think of handmade pottery as very domestic and made by women, and then you often get archaeologists thinking, well, it's domestic and made by women, it's cheap and it doesn't mean anything, which is obviously a massive bias. We're actually thinking a lot of these women are highly skilled and some of these handmade pots get imported huge lengths of the Nile and Sudan. So there's clearly a market for them, they're clearly wanted. Well, let's keep on pottery a bit longer and we'll focus on an example or two in a second. But

what have they also revealed about the diet? You hinted at that porridge substance earlier, but if I'm presuming the River Nile is incredibly important to the ancient Kushites and farming along the Nile surely, is it largely those kind of cereal crops and is it water as well? What do we know about the food and drink of an everyday cushite? So what we know about the food of an everyday cushite is slightly different from what we know about the food of an elite cushite. Unsurprising.

So if we look at wealthy burials, royal burials, we'll often find particularly things like wine I'm afraid. We'll find imports from Egypt and the Near East and the Mediterranean. And wine imported from Greece, do we think the Mediterranean area? Yes, sometimes from Egypt. There seems to be an attempt to grow grapes in Sudan occasionally as well, but the weather's not ideal for it. So it doesn't seem to have taken off massively. So we're still getting grain coming in from Egypt sometimes, we're getting oil, special oils, perhaps flavoured oils coming in from further north. And this is what you see,

particularly when we start to get to later periods and there's a strong relationship with Rome, we're starting to get Roman fashions coming in. And this is what always happens, this is what always happens in diet, people adopt fashions, people adopt high trends. It's like how nowadays when there's a real trend for people eating sushi. So often people will have a couple of pairs of chopsticks in their home and like a sushi mat, even if they have no Japanese ancestry. Whereas when we look at what ordinary people are eating, there's a lot of sorghum and millet in the south. It's a different kind of grain. Okay. Instead of, so wheat is very popular and common in Egypt and the Near East, but sorghum and millet

grow much better in the different climate in Sudan. And we're seeing flatbreads being made, flatbreads and porridges being made out of sorghum and millet. And we still see that in Sudan today. So you can get kisra, which is made of this sorghum flower that is almost like a springy bread, like injera in Ethiopia, that people are more familiar with. And also like with drinking wise, I mean, would there be milk? Would there be pastoral animals like cows and sheep

and goats and I guess also beer? Would there be beer too? Yeah, so there's always beer. There's millet, millet beer is very popular. But beer is popular, I mean, in the ancient world everywhere, partly as well because water is not always safe to drink and partly because beer is quite easy to make. If you're growing sorghum or millet or wheat, you can make beer. You often make beer out of old bread and it's very, very nutritious. Very true indeed. Well, one last thing on the pottery because you hinted at also the decorations

and we have looked at one particular really striking pot. So kind of to introduce that, what types of decorations were usually shown on Kushite pottery? Like we've talked about the wheel-made and the handmade pottery, you're getting two completely different symbolic repertoires on these. So the crocodile pot that we have in the exhibition is part of the wheel-made. This is what we looked at, the crocodile pot. Exactly. So this is quite a bulbous jar with a small neck and slightly flared rim. And around the top, there is a painted register showing two quite large crocodiles

looking quite happy in red and black. No teeth shown, which I would guess is done on purpose to neutralize them, but a little turned up snout, these really big eyes. And then just so you don't forget how dangerous they are, these very, very large claws. It's quite interesting in this part that the top is the only bit that's decorated.

Usually wheel made pots are decorated around the body, so I would suggest that this is probably meant to be put in a pot stand, maybe even half buried in the ground so that you could see the top. But the fact that it's decorated means it's meant to be seen. This is not a kitchen object, you are supposed to see this and it will add to an individual's reputation. So it shows how wealthy somebody is and how much power they have. And depicting animals or things that they would have seen, just plants and stuff, was that quite a common motif in the industrialised level on those wheel-made pots? Yes, so we think the wheel-made pots are made in centralized workshops, fully controlled by the state,

because we see some of the same motifs across Sudan. We get a lot of animals, we get crocodiles, giraffes, we get a lot of plants, we get wine, vines and grapes in particular, that's very popular. Sometimes we get people, and they're shown quite different from the standard we're perhaps used grapes in particular, that's very popular. Sometimes we get people and they're showing quite different from the standard we're perhaps used to in Egypt and that's again a really nice example of how Kush is doing their own thing.

They're showing people in the way that they want to. The wheel made material also often shows a lot of symbols that we're familiar with from ancient Egypt. We get Ankh signs, the sign for life. We get Ankh signs, the sign for life. We get the Saar signs, the sign for endurance. Sometimes these are stamped as well. They're so thin. I mean, they would have been very, very difficult to make. And they're made on the wheel, which is the first wheel-made industry we ever see in Sedan. So interesting.

The handmade material is completely different. And we think this instead shows a very different worldview and is more like indigenous symbolism. Just spoken like a true pottery expert right there. And alongside pottery, what could they put in the burials to remember their fallen one? So you'd put objects from daily life. You'd obviously put like textiles, you'd put jewelry, you'd put clothing, people were generally placed on a bed, a wooden bed, and then outside the burial itself you would often have what we call an offering table. So this was placed outside the tomb chapel, so this is more open to your relatives who would come and make

offerings to you to try and make sure that you receive nourishment in the afterlife. So we have one of these offering tables in the exhibition. This is a square piece of sandstone, grey, inscribed on the top about a metre in diameter. You can see on the top it's really beautifully inscribed inside the centre of the offering table is this beautiful cartouche basin depressed into the stone itself. And a cartouche, that's basically the shape of a, that was like a royal hieroglyphic name of a king would be in a cartouche. So it's an oval shape. Exactly, which is why it's very interesting that it's on this offering table, which is

not a royal offering table. This belonged to a member of the elite at the site of Pharas, which is now a rich necropolis flooded under Lake Nasser, Lake Nubia in lower Nubia, northern Sudan. The offering table also shows the deities Nephthys and Anubis. Toby So it's Egyptian gods once again. Emma Exactly. But we're again seeing this hybridisation. Anubis and Nephthys look similar to what we're perhaps familiar with from ancient Egypt. Anubis has his jackal head. Nephthys has a very well-known headdress, which is like a series of interlocking squares,

but they look distinctly Kushite. Anubis has quite a fringe dress, Nephthys is holding a curved staff. Above them we have bread cones. So bread, as I mentioned before, bread is not as common in Sudan as it is in Egypt but once we start to get this influx of Egyptian traditions, this hybridisation shows that bread becomes important in elite contexts. So you would pour your libation into the basin, it would overflow over the inscription of the deities and the bread, nourishing the deceased, and it would go out into this little channel around the outside, and outside the channel,

almost like a border around the offering table itself, you can see an inscription. So this is in cursive Meroitic, as I said, that looks almost like Arabic. There are no recognisable images, like pictures, like you see in hieroglyphs. So it's been quite difficult to translate, but we now thankfully can translate a good chunk of the language. So this one tells us that it belongs to an individual known as Kennebalile. So what's interesting about Merority, because we're not sure of the gender, there's no gender,

so Kennebalile could be a man or a woman. And it mentions praying that he receives bread and water. So it's not a huge inscription, quite formulaic, but it was clearly quite important to the people who placed this here. And we can picture a cannibal lillies, children, grandchildren, maybe even great grandchildren, they would come on special festival days and they would pour a libation of water, beer, maybe wine, maybe even milk. Milk is very important in kosher culture into the basin. It would overflow and go down through. There's a spout at the front. It would go out and symbolically nourish the ancestor that you're trying to remember.

Toby So, coming back time and time again, it almost feels like a comparison, although without the practical purpose, it's like laying flowers on the grave of a loved one that you can go back time and time again, isn't it? It's really interesting. And that it's in sandstone, and to have survived, that feels quite rare. Emma So, sandstone is very common in Sudan. It's a very common rock that people can access. This does often mean that a lot of monuments are eroded, particularly, I mean, there's a lot of sandstorms in Sudan. It's very, very windy.

And if objects or temples are uncovered, particularly by tourists, and not recovered by sand, the sandstorms can absolutely strip detail. So we always, when we're excavating, try and cover things back up to make sure they're protected for the future. The offering table, we're very, very lucky. This was excavated in the early 1900s by Francis Llewellyn Griffith, found in Sitchew in front of the Tomb Chapel, which is amazing. So where somebody thousands of years ago laid their last libation,

it must've just got covered by the sand and then protected that way. So sometimes we're just lucky. So sometimes we're just lucky. So sometimes we're just lucky. So sometimes we're just lucky. So sometimes we're just lucky. So sometimes we're just lucky.

So sometimes we're just lucky. So sometimes we're just lucky. So sometimes we're just lucky. So sometimes we're just lucky. So sometimes we're just lucky. So sometimes we're just lucky. So sometimes we're just lucky. So sometimes we're just lucky.

So sometimes we're just lucky. So sometimes we're just lucky. So sometimes we're just lucky. So sometimes we're just lucky. So sometimes we're just lucky I have to ask about crocodiles. So naturally they are, they live in the River Nile. So do we know what Kushites, particularly those, let's say the farmers or those everyday people who would be living along the Nile, do we know how they viewed crocodiles? I think it would be remiss not to say I'm pretty sure they would have been terrified of them. I mean crocodiles kill huge amounts of people and they would very much have in

pre-industrialised setting where if there's just a couple of homes by the river there's nothing to stop a crocodile coming up and eating one of you while you're doing your laundry or collecting water. But there's obviously a recognition that we see on the pottery that crocodiles are linked with water and in a desert environment, water is life. Water is everything. I mean, we obviously, we see that in Egypt and even more so in Sudan where a lot of the Nile Valley is very, very narrow with large cliffs coming up either side of the water. So there's not as much arable land. That's why when we get places that have floodplains like Kerma, you get huge amounts of people congregating.

I think we're going to move on now to our last big theme of today, which is of course Kush and Rome. So Loretta set the scene for us in the first century BC what does the Kingdom of Kush look like? Is it powerful? Is it lots of urbanism going about? What do we know about the Kingdom of Kush as the Romans are about to enter this arena? So by this period of the 25th Dynasty is long gone but Cushet-Stalf is still massively strong. It still controls a huge amount of the Middle Nile region. We think it controls as far south as Khartoum. It seems to have influence further south but we're not entirely sure what exactly

that means. There's obviously people pushing back and forth between what we now know as Egypt and Sudan. That's when the Greeks rule Egypt as well as the Ptolemies. That there is a relationship with Egypt. People are still importing and exporting goods between the two kingdoms. After the 25th dynasty, we know the names of many of the rulers, but we don't always know everything about them. And when Rome enters the scene, that's when we start to get a little bit more of an idea of some of the rulers. And this is when, particularly when Rome comes on the scene, we start to get these famous warrior queens who rule in their own right. Let's do the story because this story I think epitomises it, isn't it? So what is the story

about when Rome meets Kush? But it's also a hostile one. So Rome takes control of Egypt in 30 BC. So Antony and Cleopatra are defeated. Exactly. And then Egypt becomes a province of Rome. The grain basket of the ancient world. Obviously it was a massive prize. But once you get into Rome, realise that this is this other kingdom further south and Sudan has always been pushing Egypt's borders. Kush is very powerful and it's a threat. So we think between 25 and 22 BC Rome decides to encroach on Kush. So there is a prefect called Petronius. He brings a huge army down and begins to sack Kush. Unfortunately for the Romans Kush wasn't as much of an easy prize as they were thinking. They seem to certainly sack several cities but they are pushed back

by what the historian Strabo calls a one-eyed queen called Candarco. So they're pushed back by this one-eyed queen called Candarco. They then managed to push back again, Sack Napata, the capital of Kush, and then they get pushed back again. Is that the present capital or was that the former capital? So that was the former capital. So in the earlier period of Kush, Napata is the capital. Later it moves to Merui further south and modern Sudan the capital is Khartoum. We're not entirely sure what happens at this point. Strabo talks about how the Romans are winning and then yet somehow the Kushites decide to sue for peace and they send ambassadors to Rome and the Romans agree with no terms,

no tribute that has to be sent every year. Kush is just allowed to be on its own and doesn't have to be a province. Now to me that sounds like Kush was winning and in a good position and so they come to this uneasy alliance and the treaty actually lasts until the end of the Kush period. So it has a hostile beginning but then after that relations between Kush and Rome are actually very good. Exactly. So I mean, throughout this war, Kush is raiding Egypt. Rome is attempting to raid Kush. It's obviously going back and forth.

Very fluid, yes. Yes. Now, as we've studied ancient Sudan and Meroitic more closely, we now know that Kandake is not a name, it's a title. Toby So for the one-eyed, this one-eyed queen that they talk about. Emma Well, it's not just her, it's any queen. Kandake means queen in Meroitic. And so we actually think Strabo is getting a bit confused here. The one-eyed queen, whether she was one-eyed, we're not sure, we think is Amane Renas, who

ruled around, we think, the first century BC, first century AD. The problem is with a lot of these dates, we're not certain of them because we don't have a huge amount of inscriptions then. But we know that Amani Renas is one of a number of women who rule in their own right at this period. Archaeologically, should we go to this amazing story that is linked to that you've just told? Emma So in the 1900s, an archaeologist called John Garstine was excavating at the site of Merriwe, the capital of ancient Kush. And while he was excavating at a temple in front of the temple underneath the the stas, the portico, he found this amazing discovery. It's that bronze head of a Roman statue, larger than life size,

that we now think is the head of the Emperor Augustus. Emperor Augustus, who is the emperor at the time of this war. Exactly. This was amazing. Nobody expected to find this in Sudan. It's so classically Roman. It looks like it would not be out of place in a Roman city. It's very much designed to tell you that the Romans are present, they're in control, and yet it's buried under this temple. Now when you look more closely at it,

this head, which as I say is larger than life size, bronze and still has the beautiful inlaid eyes. So this has never been found before, before the early 1900s, because they would have been removed. Made of calcite and glass. Still staring out. It's very powerful, this statue. But when you look at the neck, this statue has been decapitated. Toby So, decapitated. J.K. And we know based on Strabo's story that Dandake, probably Amane-Renas, had swept into

Egypt, burned temples and decapitated statues. And we think what's happened is that she has brought this head back as a symbol and buried it beneath the steps of this temple to symbolically tread on her enemies, on the Romans, every time she enters it. And actually there are traces inside the temple of paintings of foreigners, similar to how you see in earlier Egyptian scenes of prisoners and tributes where the Egyptians are marking that power over the rest of the world. The Kushites do something similar. There's rows of these foreigners, these prisoners with their arms tied behind their back and one

of them looks very Roman. So archaeological evidence that seems to corroborate with that amazing story from Strabo of these Kushites raiding Roman Egypt. And I think Strabo says cutting off statue heads as well. So taking a statue back and then you've got that evidence that it's one of the best stories that I've ever heard from ancient history. And I love it. And I'm so glad. And it is such an incredible artifact to have endured and survived as it has rather briefly. I know it's a long period of time, but do we see much Roman architecture, much

Roman art in Merriwe in the Kingdom of Kush once this period of hostility has passed and then there is this more cordial relations between the two. Yeah, absolutely. So as I said, the treaty lasts until the end of the Kushite period. The border is at the beginning set at Khazar-i-Brim, an ancient premise, which is now in modern Egypt. And then good sweep between the kingdoms. We see in Merri, the capital of the later period of Kush, something that we call the bath house. We now know it's not a bath house, but it was originally thought to be. It seems to be some kind of water sanctuary. But it's this very, very large swimming pool, basically, surrounded by statuary and statuary- like lounging figures in togas with the hair swept to the side and there's a statue of Pan the fawn playing pan pipes, there's grapes, everything's in blue, painted

in blue. It looks very, very influenced by Rome. And this is again what we were talking about earlier, the height of fashion among the elites. You would want to borrow these fancy trends from Rome. We see it among in other things too, like tableware. People want to have the best Roman tableware and the best Roman wine for parties. Lastly, do we know what ultimately happens to the Kingdom of Cush? Yeah. So to start with, we're not entirely sure who else is around Kush to the south.

Again, it's the problem with having a lack of textual sources and a lack of archaeological excavation. There's not been time, it's not been safe to excavate in some places, but there will be kingdoms, there will be these amazing cultures and civilisations that we just don't know anything about in all these places, everywhere has them, and we know Kush was trading with people to the south because we can see evidence of that in the objects in their settlements. Now with Ethiopia it seems slightly different, there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of contact in the early periods. Possibly because of the mountain ranges separating the kingdoms. Ethiopia was

a hugely powerful kingdom in its own right. By the end of Kush there seemed to be a lot of raiding groups incurring into the Nile Valley. We know that some of the rulers are busy fighting them off. We're not entirely sure where they're coming from. Perhaps the changes in weather have driven them closer to the river as happens in every every kingdom. But for Ethiopia we find a couple of aximites, so ancient Ethiopian objects, coins and a few graffiti and there's a steela. We're not entirely sure if the original find spot of the steela, which problematises that obviously, but there seems to be this idea that King Azuma of Axum sweeps into Kush and conquers Meroe. Now this is what early archaeologists

have thought, we think it's a lot more complicated than that. We think there may have been some strife with Ethiopia and there's certainly evidence they were there, to a small level, based on a few of the objects. But regardless, by around 350 AD, Kush is starting to lose power and eventually it fragments into smaller kingdoms. Well, there you go. That's the end. But the Kingdom of Kush still endures a thousand years of history that we've covered today, going from the 25th dynasty and links to ancient Egypt and the new kingdom before that, all the way down through to the Roman period and the Axumites in the fourth century AD. Loretta, we've covered a lot. Thank you so much,

very thematic as well. So really happy with what we've covered. Last but certainly not least, tell us about this new exhibition that you have curated, part of the British Museum but touring the UK, that is very much promoting and focusing on ancient Sudan and its amazing heritage. Yes, so we will be covering an exhibition that's opening in Portsmouth on the 31st of January and then Stirling on the 8th of August that will showcase a selection of some of our amazing pieces from ancient Kush. We'll be showing the figurehead that we mentioned, the Isis figurehead, the crocodile part, as well as some objects from our modern Sudanese collection that tell us how

Sudanese heritage and culture is obviously so rich and alive and well across not just Kush, but thousands of years, and not just the Nile Valley, but Darfur, the deserts around Sudan, the Nile River and further to the south. In each city, we will also be collaborating with local Sudanese communities who will be having their own display, which I'm really excited to see. Brilliant. Loretta, well, you've put so much work into this and you've been so generous to us with your time. It just goes with me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

Thank you. Well, there you go. There was Dr Loretta Kilrow giving you an overview of the ancient Kingdom of Kush. Their new exhibition, Ancient Sudan, Enduring Heritage is touring the UK in 2025 and you can learn more about it on the British Museum's website. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, it really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Don't forget you can also listen to us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV

documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com slash subscribe. That's enough from me and I'll see you in the next episode.