 Right, I'd like to welcome our Zoom audience back to the series of perspectives on ancient Nubia. We're very excited for today's speaker, whom I'll introduce in just a moment. But first we start these presentations off with a land state BLM statement. So if I could invite our statement reader from the Vande Museum to provide that for our audience. Hello, everyone, and welcome. We would like to start by acknowledging that Berkeley, California is on the territory of the Houttuyn, the ancestral and unceded land of the Trotenoeloni. We respect the land itself and the people who have stewarded it throughout many generations and we honor their elders, both past and present. There is no question that our society is posed at a moment of change. We see it when fellow Americans are unjustly detained, when our citizens are wrongly harmed, and when our communities are in the streets for months on end protesting in order to be heard. The Bade Museum of Biblical Archaeology and the Archaeological Research Facility, ARF, at U.C. Berkeley wish to acknowledge the pain and outrage of our community members who bear the weight of existing in a society designed to work against them and feel the devastation most keenly. Here at the museum and at ARF, we have been moved by the courage of those most deeply affected and the tenacity of those protesting for change. The Bade Museum and ARF stand in solidarity with the African American community. We join you in your calls for justice. Collectively and individually, our staff condemns the purchase brutality and systematic racism that has long been enacted against the Black community and other communities of color. It has persisted for far too long. It has resulted in the unjust and premature ending of lives, so let us say their names. Breonna Taylor, Tony McDame, Ahmed Aubrey, George Floyd, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, and countless others. Let us as organizations be perfectly clear. Black lives matter. We lend our thoughts and actions to those who every day actively work to make this statement a living, breathing ideal, and to those who continually live the reality of racial injustice. Likewise, we lend our expertise to the cause by incorporating BLM-sensitive material into our exhibits, our programming, and our curriculum. You know very well that this moment has been a long time coming, and we are in the fight for equality, justice, and accountability. Though this lecture series, oh, sorry, through this lecture series, we aim to raise awareness of ancient Nubia, a vibrant region in Northeast Africa with a rich archeological and historical legacy. Learning about the ancient peoples of Nubia is one way to de-center the usual academic focus on Egypt and biblical and classical lands in order to reconceptualize the past. Decolonizing our views of the past as through the research presented in the new perspectives on ancient Nubia series, we hope will lead to a more just, present, and equitable future. Thank you, Jess. So today it's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Solange Ashby. Solange received her PhD in Egyptology with a specialization in ancient Egyptian language and Nubian religion from the University of Chicago. She has conducted research in Egypt and participated in an archeological exhibition at El Huru in Sudan. Her dissertation explored the prayer inscriptions of Nubian groups that traveled to the Egyptian temples of lower Nubia, including Philae. Dr. Ashby's expertise in sacred ancient languages, including Egyptian hieroglyphs, Amodic and Coptic, Biblical Greek and Hebrew inscriptions, underpins her research into the history of religious transformation in Northeast Africa and the Middle East. During the period when monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, replaced traditional religion in each Nubia. Her first book, Calling Out to Isis, the Enduring Nubian Presence at Philae, is published by Georges Press. Her current research explores the roles of women in traditional Nubian religious practices. Dr. Ashby is working on the first monograph dedicated to the history, religious symbolism, and political power of the Queens of Kush. Dr. Ashby teaches in the form of classics and ancient studies at Barnard College. Presentation today is entitled, Sacred Dancers, Nubian Women as Priestesses of Hathamore. Welcome, Dr. Ashby, the floor is yours. Thank you, Erin. I will start by sharing my screen. I'd just like to thank the Bade Museum for hosting this really important lecture series to bring a greater understanding of this amazing ancient culture and still living culture of Nubia. This lecture is based on my paper published in the online journal called Dotawo, a journal of Nubian studies. Volume five, published in 2018, was dedicated to the Nubian woman and edited by Dr. Ann Jennings, an American anthropologist whose book, Nubian Women of West Aswan, Negotiating Tradition and Change, was prominent in my early reading on Nubia. This article focused on the long history of Nubian women as depicted in Egyptian art. In this talk, I will examine intermittent but regular appearances of chocolate-skinned women among the depictions of dancers of Hathor in Egyptian tomb and temple scenes. Although these women are referred to in temple texts and visual depictions throughout Egyptian pharaonic history, today I will focus on the priestesses of Hathor in Egypt's Middle Kingdom, roughly 2,000 to 1,600 BCE. I will explore themes such as the scholarly debate about the ethnicity of these women. I want to make explicit at the outset that I do not view these Nubian women whom I discussed to be foreigners in Egypt. Nubians and Egyptians have been living, working and intermarrying for the entirety of their shared history. Thus it should come as no surprise that Nubian women were depicted as central participants in the religious rites of a goddess who is so deeply associated with Nubia, a land that the Egyptians called Ta-Seti. I will begin by introducing the goddess Hathor and her priestesses, highlighting the roles and often royal status of these women during Egypt's Old Kingdom. I will then discuss six women who were queens of the Middle Kingdom pharaoh Mentuhotep II. They are the focus of this lecture. After describing their funerary goods and the titles they held, I will briefly describe the ritual landscape of the area around the funerary monument of Mentuhotep II, its associations with the goddess Hathor, who was worshipped in two temples located to the north and south of the king's burial. I will then discuss the vote of offerings dedicated to the goddess. Two tattooed women found buried nearby and additional grave goods from the area that allude to the prominent worship of the goddess Hathor and Nubian presence in the region. I will describe a contemporaneous Nubian population referred to as the sea group in order to draw parallels between their traditional female attire and the regalia associated with priestesses of Hathor. Finally, Egyptian textual sources from the new kingdom and Ptolemaic period record the name of a sacred dance called Kess Kess associated with Nubian worshippers of the goddess Hathor as the chief protagonist of the myth of the distant goddess. I will present one such source, a temple hymn from the Ptolemaic period. Hathor, the goddess of love, music, dance, childbirth, sexuality, and divine drunkenness is one of the oldest goddesses worshipped in pharaonic Egypt. She's often portrayed as a cow or a cow headed woman or even a woman with cow ears. The name Hathor is actually a Greek rendering of the Egyptian name Hoot hair, meaning the temple or enclosure of Horus. You can see the writing of her name in the center of this hieroglyphic text. In the mythical realm, Hathor is partnered to Horus who is manifest in the king of Egypt. This inscription links the goddess with Thebes, the southern capital of Egypt. It reads from right to left, Anubis, Lord of the sacred land, Hathor, mistress or ruler of Thebes. Hathor was honored with many epithets. The beautiful one, gifted bronze mirrors, the goddess is most pleased when her beauty is reflected back to her. The gold, she was associated with gold producing regions of Egypt's eastern desert and Nubia. Mistress of foreign lands, she was worshipped in Nubia and in the Sinai land outside of Egypt proper. Lady of the vulva, an explicit reference to Hathor's association with sacred sexuality and recognition of honor given to women for the ability of their bodies to bring forth life. Lady of turquoise, Hathor is associated with the turquoise mining regions in the Sinai peninsula. Lady of intoxication, this makes reference to the consumption of beer in the rites performed for Hathor but also alludes to the divine drunkenness attained by those who participated in nocturnal rites performed for the goddess. Who comes from Ta-seti? In many hieroglyphic texts, the goddess is said to have come to Egypt from Ta-seti, an Egyptian name for Nubia, which means the land of the bow and thus makes reference to the preferred weapon of Nubia. Hathor's association with the land of Nubia is elucidated in a myth called the tail of the sun's eye or the return of the distant goddess to which I will return later. I will suggest that traditional forms of ritual music and dance, a central element in the religious practice of Nubians, were incorporated into Egyptian rites performed for the goddess Hathor, whose origin in Nubia and journey to Egypt would have been celebrated appropriately with Nubian music and dance. A type of dance called the Kesskes dance, attributed to Nubians in Egyptian hieroglyphic texts, was incorporated into Egyptian rites performed for Hathor during the Middle Kingdom when Egypt colonized Nubia and came into intense contact with the sea group people living there. For those of you unfamiliar with Egypt's long dynastic history, this table lists the canonical divisions of Egyptian history into kingdoms, old, middle, and new, each of which is made up of a number of dynasties. While the first priestesses of Hathor appear during the Old Kingdom, the women whom I will discuss live during the Middle Kingdom. Before turning to their story, let's take a moment to explore the first attestations of the goddess Hathor and her priestesses in the Old Kingdom, which consist of the third to the sixth dynasties. The earliest priestesses of Hathor are attested in the mid fourth dynasty of the Egyptian Old Kingdom and reached an apogee under the fifth dynasty. The title Priestess of Hathor appears suddenly in the mid fourth dynasty. It is held by Nefer Hetebes, daughter of King Rajedeff. Her complete title is Priestess of Hathor, Mistress of the Sycamore. More than 400 priestesses of Hathor are attested, as well as priestesses of other deities. I'd like to quote from Robin Gillum who wrote a brief history of the priestesses of Hathor in her 1995 article in the Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt. Quote, during the Old Kingdom in particular, women's role in the central cult was matched by greater participation in positions of authority than in later periods of Egyptian history. From the middle of the fifth dynasty onwards, we also find them holding titles in connection with music, singing, and dancing, end quote. The role of Hemet Necher, that is Priestess, was to feed and clothe a temple's divine statue daily. Gillum notes the presence of Hathor Priestesses in Tehna, where Hathor is called Mistress of the Valley Mouth, and Kusai, both of which were important Old Kingdom sites located in Middle Egypt. During the Mid-Old Kingdom, we have also the first appearance of the Kenner Troop, a group of primarily female musicians and dancers in the service of the goddess Hathor. The fourth dynasty king Mencal Ray commissioned several monuments in which he was depicted with Hathor. We see the king striding hand in hand with the goddess and the deified gnome, as the districts of Egypt are called, of cyanopolis on the left of your screen. And standing next to the seated goddess with the deified hair gnome on the right, both monuments seek to associate the king with Hathor. In each case, the king wears the white crown of Upper Egypt, this elongated tall crown, associating him with the south, just as his predecessor, Khafre, had in the Valley Temple associated with his pyramid at Giza. There, the king was, quote unquote, beloved of Hathor on the southern door jam, and quote unquote, beloved of Bastet on the northern door jam, alluding to a geographical sphere of influence for each goddess, Bastet to the north and Hathor to the south. In the 11th dynasty, now moving into the Middle Kingdom, we see a continued association of priestesses of Hathor with women of the royal family. Six women associated with king Mentuhotep II are designated as priestesses of Hathor. They also carry the royal titles king's wife and soul ornament of the king. The women's names were Khaweet, Ashayet, Hanhanit, Kemsit, Sade, and Mayet, or Ta Mayet. Each woman was buried in an individual shrine located along the rear ambulatory of Mentuhotep II's Funerary Monument in Deir al-Bakri. Unfortunately, almost nothing of the monument survives. The women's burials were excavated by Herbert Winlock of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York early in the 20th century. Many of the queen's funerary objects can be found on display in the Met, which has several rooms dedicated to them. The large stone sarcophagus of Hanhanit is on display in one of those galleries. Regarding the ethnicity of these women, Winlock, the excavator, confirms Dairy's earlier description of the six women as Nubian, and he writes of them dismissively as quote-unquote dancing girls of Neb Hepet-Rae, the throne name of Mentuhotep II, and I quote Winlock here. Dairy had already noticed that the features of the tattooed dancing girls buried in the Neb Hepet-Rae temple showed marked Nubian traits and that Nubian blood had probably flowed through the veins, even of such ladies of the king's harem as Ashaet and Hanhanit. Furthermore, the pictures of Ashaet on her sarcophagus give her a rich chocolate Nubian complexion, and her companion Kemsied was painted on hers an actual ebony black, just like these little figures. End quote. While Pinch, Geraldine Pinch, a scholar who has written about votive offerings to Hathor, notes that the figurines found in Mentuhotep II's funerary complex bear markings paralleled on contemporaneous Nubian sea group figurines, Pinch refers to the mummies of the priestesses of Hathor described above to declare that neither the figurines nor the priestesses were Nubian women, and I quote Pinch. This need not mean that the Egyptian figurines represent Nubians since three 11th dynasty mummies of light-skinned women with tattoos on their thighs, stomachs, and shoulders were recovered from the precincts of Ak-e-sut, the Egyptian name for the funerary complex of Mentuhotep II. End quote. A more balanced interpretation of the possible ethnicity of these women is found in Ellen Morris's discussion of Middle Kingdom paddle dolls, who she suggests quote, were representations of specific living women, namely late old kingdom and Middle Kingdom Kenner dancers of Hathor at Der El Bakri, end quote. Morris goes on to say, quote, the visibility of Nubian styles in the court of Neb Hepet-Rey has been much discussed, and this co-occurrence of bodily decoration in the Theban court and in Nubia need not be a coincidence, end quote. So this is an open bay on the west bank at the site of Thebes in southern Egypt, the capital both for the 11th dynasty and then for the 18th dynasty. And so we see here the well-known funerary monument of the 18th dynasty queen who ruled as Pharaoh, Hath-shep-sut, and then you'll see this sort of sad empty space off to the left. This is where the funerary monument of Mentu Hotep II used to stand. Here is an artist's sketch of both monuments from above. We can see the monument of Hath-shep-sut on the right, and then the artist imagining of what the earlier funerary monument of Mentu Hotep II might have looked like. It's interesting to note that this is the 11th dynasty, so dated to about 2000 BCE, while that of Hath-shep-sut is from about 500 years later in the 18th dynasty. So she's very much paying homage to her ancestor, Mentu Hotep II. The priestesses shrines were aligned along the back area of an ambulatory on the podium of the king's complex, while immediately to the north lay an ancient grotto in which the goddess Hathor had been worshipped. In later times, a temple to Hathor was built at this site, both by Hath-shep-sut and her successor Thut-Mosa III. In pit burials, 23 and 26 as numbered in Winlock's excavation reports to the east of the grotto, two tattooed women were found buried in pit graves. So this is the sarcophagus or a painting of a sarcophagus of one of those priestesses of Hathor and Queen of Mentu Hotep II. This watercolor facsimile of the exterior of Ashaet sarcophagus, now in Cairo, depicts Ashaet as a brown-skinned woman sitting before her shrine smelling a lotus blossom associated with rebirth and receiving funerary offerings. Julian Cooper has recently written about the name of one of the two dark-skinned women on the right. He suggests that the woman's name preserved in hieratic script above her image can be identified as derived from a Khashidic language ancestral to Beja, now spoken in the eastern desert of Egypt and Nubia. The label identifies her as the Medjai lady, Mekkenet, depicted on the far right. To quote Cooper from his recently published article in the online UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, quote, the name Mekkenet perfectly matches the Khashidic lexical root keken, so k dotted hn meaning to love, known in Beja, Saho Afar, so spoken in Ethiopia, and Somali, with the common Afro-Asiatic nominalizing M prefix appended to the root, end quote. I'd like to also just point out that this Beja or Medjai lady has a basket carrying case and you can see the handle of an up-ended mirror in that case, so yet another reference to the worship of the goddess Hathor. Here we see Kawit as depicted on her stone sarcophagus, having her hair fixed, holding a mirror and being offered a drink, all ritual actions associated with the celebration of the goddess Hathor, and you can see the handle of the mirror looks very similar to that one in the previous image from the sarcophagus of Ashaet. One of three tattooed women found buried near the funerary complex of Mentuhotep II. Amunit held the titles Soul, Royal Ornament, and Priestess of Hathor. A sketch of her tattoos shows that they are meant to emphasize the erogenous zones of her stomach and pelvic region. Some of these markings were cicatruses, raised scarification in addition to the tattoos that decorated her body, and I'd like to say you might notice that I'm switching back and forth between two or three mummified women with tattoos, and that's because we, the knowledge of where Amunit's original place of burial has been lost in the more or less 100 years since it was excavated, so we're not quite sure if she was buried in the funerary monument of Mentuhotep II or slightly north of it in the pits near where these other two women were excavated. So on the right, a sketch of the mummified remains of two other tattooed women found in pit burials to the north in the North Courtyard show this diamond-shaped tattooing on the breast, down in arm, and on her thighs. Tattooed women preserved as mummies from the 11th Dynasty Funerary Monument of Mentuhotep II at Der El Bakri for designs otherwise found only on contemporaneous sea group women of lower Nubia. The diamond-shaped tattoos are similar to those characteristic of sea group Nubian pottery, which continue a decorative pattern visible in earlier agroup pottery and on female figurines from Nubian prehistory, so this pattern is very long-lived. The attire of Egyptian priestesses of Hathor exhibits many similarities with that of sea group Nubian women. So cowrie shell belts, you can see that on these figurines here and on this young woman sketched from, I think the date is 1820. These cross-feed necklaces that we also see on the figurines, see those in sea group women and colorful worked leather skirts. These brightly patterned skirts of worked leather were found buried with high status women in the royal city of Kerma, so far south of the area under discussion today, as well as in the sea group cemetery at Hierocompolis in Egypt. In many instances, sea group women's grave goods included bronze mirrors and cistra, so these sacred rattles, sacred to the goddess Hathor. Both of these were cultic instruments related to the worship of Hathor. How might the typical attire of sea group women have come to be incorporated into the regalia of priestesses of Hathor? The myth of the distant goddess might offer a clue. In the Ptolemaic period temple, so now quite a bit later, about 330 to 30 BCE, this temple dedicated to the god Mantu at Mehta Mood, located just north of the great temple of Karnak, contains hieroglyphic text of a hymn dedicated to Hathor and describes the dancing Nubians who accompanied the goddess on her return from Nubia in her manifestation as Tefnut, the Eye of Rey, and so I've just included some images here from the temple of Phile where we see this lion-headed goddess that's Tefnut with a very large solar disk on her head to represent her father Rey, the sun god, and then in front of her the god Shu, who is leading her back to Egypt. The myth or legend of the sun's eye is preserved in 11 different Egyptian Demotic texts dated to the 2nd and 3rd centuries of the common era, so AD, although the tale itself may date as early as the New Kingdom. Additionally, a Greek papyrus now in the British Library is a translation of this Egyptian myth. Although these tales all post-date the Middle Kingdom priestesses of Hathor under discussion here, this tale was likely transmitted orally for centuries before being committed to writing. In the myth of the sun's eye, an enraged Tefnut in the form of a blood-thirsty lion goddess stopped the earth devouring humanity, which had rebelled against her father Rey while he reigned as king in Egypt. The Egyptian gods Shu and Thoth traveled to Bougam in southeastern Nubia, where they transformed into monkeys in order to safely approach the lion goddess. The two gods danced, plied the goddess with copious amounts of wine, and spoke magical spells to pacify and beguile Tefnut so that she might be calmed and enticed to travel to Egypt, soothed by the dance of Shu and the magical words of Thoth and thoroughly intoxicated on the wine they offered to her. Tefnut was convinced to make the journey from Nubia to Egypt. At the border between the two lands, the flames of the goddess's wrath were cooled in the waters at the mythical source of the Nile that emerged in the vicinity of the island of Phile at the first cataract. At this initial point of entry into Egypt, Tefnut was transformed by the cool waters and became Hathor, the goddess of music, dance, love, and drunkenness. Her arrival and transformation at the temple complex on Phile would have been celebrated with singing, dancing, and rejoicing to mark the return of the distant goddess from her sojourn in Nubia. Performing sacred dances for Hathor, Nubian dancers, musicians, and acrobats were a recurring theme in representations of Hathoric rites, jubilees, and banquet scenes for millennia. Sea group women participated in the worship of Hathor by engaging in traditional Nubian dances which were viewed by the Egyptians as exotic and erotic. A close examination of Egyptian depictions of Nubian women dancing reveals the characteristics of the woman's dance and provides the Egyptian name for their style of dance. The Kess Kess dance was acrobatic involving leaps and flips. The women performed wearing leather skirts, cowry shell girdles, and bore tattoos on their breast, abdomens, and thighs. And I should say that these images I'm using simply to depict, to show how dance was depicted in ancient Egypt, these were not necessarily Nubian women that I'm showing here, although they might have been. The beautiful, this beautiful jewelry belonged to the 12th dynasty, Princess Siddhathor Euneth, whose name means daughter of Hathor of Dendera. She was probably in life the daughter of the Egyptian king, Sanwasrit II, because her burial is incorporated into his funerary complex in Lahoon in the Fayum, so in northern Egypt. Siddhathor Euneth's jewelry contains the motifs that we have seen associated with Nubian worship of the goddess Hathor. Cowry shells now formed from gold and silver, the ostrich feather of the god Shu, shown here in silver, one of the two gods tasked with retrieving Hathor from Nubia, as well as Leopard's Claws, perhaps a reference to the goddess Tefnut, the form taken by Hathor as she raged in the deserts of Nubia before returning to Egypt. The prophecy of Neferti foretells the coming of a savior king, a many, likely a reference to Amenem Hot, founder of the 12th dynasty, and I quote from that Egyptian literary text. But then there shall come a king from the south. His name will be Ameni, justified. He will be the son of a woman of Toseti, an offspring of the royal house of Nekhen. He shall receive the white crown. He shall wear the red crown. He shall unite the two powers, end quote. And I thank Dr. Salim Faraji for bringing this Egyptian literary reference to a woman of Toseti to my attention. Amenem Hot asserts his legitimacy by claiming descent from a woman of Nubia, Toseti, and by proclaiming himself an offspring of the royal house of Nekhen, also known as Hierocompolis. Not coincidentally, there was an early Nubian presence at Hierocompolis. The discovery of the preserved remains of tattooed Nubian women in cemetery HK 27C is quite relevant to this talk. Why does Amenem Hot claim for himself descent from Nubia and Nekhen, a very important city in the pre-dynastic period? I would like to suggest that these Nubian priestesses from the cult of Hathor served to legitimize their son to rule as king of Egypt. Mentuhotep II, married to Nubian priestesses of Hathor, also claims legitimacy to rule Egypt by stating that he is the son of Hathor. A stele shown here on the right depicts the king suckling at the udders of the goddess Hathor in her cow form. So you can just see his head underneath the cow at this point of break in the stele. The upper part of a round-topped limestone stele depicts the Hathor cow suckling the figure of the king. Only his head is visible. Another royal figure stands beneath the head of the cow. A representation of the mountains of Deir el-Bakri in the background is indicated by two parallel wavy lines. Three columns of hieroglyphic text above include an epithet of the goddess Hathor as Lady of Chesserit. Priestesses of Hathor were well-attested in the 11th dynasty, most prominently during the reign of Mentuhotep II. However, by the end of the reign of Senwasrit III of the 12th dynasty, priestesses of Hathor all but disappear from the historical record. The disappearance of priestesses of Hathor was part of a larger removal of women from public life that was all but complete by the end of the Middle Kingdom. So we can see this period during Mentuhotep's reign as the most prominent period of Nubian women appearing as priestesses of Hathor. So now to look at the culture of these Nubian women. The sea group is closely related if not identical to the earliest phase of the Kerma culture, south of the third cataract in the Sudan. The sea group likely migrated from the south or southwest and settled in the most fertile places between the first and the second cataract of the Nile. Primarily, pastoralists, herders of sheep, goats, and cattle, their homes consisted of circular structures, population centers developed in areas where the alluvial land was more spacious such as Dhaka, Aniba, Kustul, and Balaana, and Pharas. Each of these sites continued to be important centers throughout Nubian history. In Egyptian depictions, sea group men wear a half-length quaffer with a headband and tight kilts covered with beadwork. They often have a bow and arrow in their hands, while the women wear brightly colored, worked leather skirts. Freedmen, who excavates at the site of Hierocompolis in Egypt, notes the appearance of such articles of clothing in the sea group cemetery at Hierocompolis. Quote, garments made of a patchwork of brown, beige, pink, red, and yellow leather panels were found in several graves, but almost exclusively those of women. In these cases, they may be the multicolored skirts as described by Reisner, who excavated at Kerma, discussed by Junker, who excavated at Kubania near Aswan and Filet at the first cataract, and depicted on Nubian women in the tomb of Hui. Similar attire is seen on tattooed dancers on Rammacid Ostraca, one of which clearly shows dancing girls, some of whom are tattooed in a manner similar to the female in Tomb 9 at Hierocompolis, wearing cut work, presumably leather loincloths as part of their special performance attire. And so I've shown this Rammacid Ostracon that Dr. Friedman is referring to, and you can see this woman is doing clearly an acrobatic move in her dance and her cut work leather skirt here, and then this diamond-shaped tattoo on her thigh. Geometric ornamentation, which shows not only on pottery and basket work, but also on beadwork and body tattoo, can be considered a specific feature of the C-group culture. The priestesses of Hathor, whom I contend are of C-group Nubian ancestry, would have lived during late phase 1b on this table in the bottom center of the screen or early into phase 2a of the Nubian C-group. This is a period when bronze mirrors begin to be buried with the deceased, and we see a prevalence of this lozenge pattern on their pottery. As the northernmost C-group population center was in the vicinity of Dhaka, so close up by southern Egypt, I will describe the rites of Nubians who arrived at the temple of Phile from Dhaka. However, keep in mind that they are much later than the period under discussion. In the first century CE, Nubian worshippers made an annual journey to Phile to participate in rites for Hathor, and the Nubian gods Arans Nufus and Thoth of Penobs. Egyptian Demotic inscriptions found on the temple walls at Phile tell us that the Nubian worshippers arrived at the temple during the harvest season. Parit. Rites enacted in the evening as promised in the Demotic inscription Phile 24, recall the nocturnal celebrations in honor of Hathor, which included drinking, music, dancing, and the hen gesture of bending the elbows in worship. So looking like this. Circumstantial evidence suggests that such rites were the focus of the early Nubian inscriptions at Phile, which were engraved on the structures in the open area in front of the main temple. So you can see on this beautiful aerial shot of the main temple dedicated to Isis here, this is the open forecourt area where these rites would have been performed in the first century AD. The forecourt was the area traditionally reserved for public celebration of rites, an area accessible to worshipers who were not allowed to enter the temple. A quote from a hymn inscribed on the temple walls at Meadow Mood describes the nocturnal celebrations for Hathor, quote, come, O golden one who eats of praise because her desire, the food of her desire is dancing, who shines on the festival at the time of lighting the lamps, who is content with the dancing at night, come. The procession is in the place of inebriation. And so here are a couple of images from the very small temple of Hathor located off to the right of the main temple of Isis. So if you could see through this kiosk here, it's the small little temple of Hathor and on the columns in the forecourt of that temple, we see images on the right of a dwarf, a dancing dwarf playing a tambourine and a baboon playing a lute as part of these, this music performed for the goddess Hathor. And so I'll just conclude, oops, there's the temple of Hathor. I'll just conclude with this modern observation. I couldn't help but be struck by the similarity of the Kess Kess dance with the right arm raised, left arm lowered behind to one that I saw described in the New York Times Sunday magazine in September of 2016. In an article entitled the knockout depression appeared the following quote along with the image you see on the screen. So those of you who don't know the knockout depression is a vast open salt bed, very, very hot lowlands in the east of Ethiopia where the Afar people live. So this is the quote from the New York Times. But there were moments so full of joy and so pure, like when my guide Ali ran into his friend in the middle of nowhere, this vast white desert and they were so happy to see each other. They did the keke dance, a dance of joy. He told me that when you meet an old friend, you dance like this with your hand in the air. It was so beautiful because it was so unexpected. So thank you for your attention. And I will wrap up with this image of me in front of a Nubian house in the village of West Aswan in Egypt. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Ashby for that wonderful talk. I especially loved your modern connection. It seemed like it was a time of jubilation. So I can see the correlation to what you spoke about briefly. You do have a lot of questions, which is fantastic, should lead to some great discussion. And so I will start with this question that asks, I'm wondering your opinion on the goddess bot and her relationship to Hawthor within the context of Nubian priestesses and the role of the system. The goddess bot. Yeah, she she does appear as probably the person asking the question knows on these very early ceremonial palettes, right, before there even was a pharaonic Egypt. She's shown at the top of the palette with her beautiful curving horns. I just will say that I think that that goddess bot and Hawthor are part of this whole pantheon of cow goddesses that we see in ancient Egypt. And they have many names, even this late temple at Philae that was built like 260 BCE preserves names of different cow goddesses that had been worshipped since the old kingdom. So Hesot, for example. I'm fairly certain, although there is of course no textual evidence that these cattle pastoralists see group Nubian people also certainly revered the cow as part of their livelihood. This kept them alive and it was also a status symbol. It had so much it had so much important in this pastoralist culture. And that's the point that I'm trying to make that there probably was an indigenous idea of the sacredness of the cow, if not an outright cow goddess that made it natural for these sea group Nubian women to participate in rights for the Egyptian cow goddess Hathor. Okay, yeah, there was actually another question asking that specifically, the relationship or the significance of the cow and Nubian culture, how that might be related to Egyptians and Hawthor. So thank you for addressing that. I had another question specifically about Hedshepsut which is interesting. Someone asks, you mentioned that Hedshepsut constructed her temple near and in a similar style as her ancestor Menti Hopa II. Is there any indication of what ancient Egyptian rulers thought about their ancestors or did they have sort of a consciousness about previous dynastic rulers? Absolutely. I mean the Egyptians blessed us with a very complete and long king list where they just inscribed the names of Egyptian kings for hundreds of years. So clearly records were kept of these names. It was very much a part of the presentation of oneself as a legitimate ruler to honor these predecessors. We could only wish for such a thing in the Kingdom of Kush to the south. I'm sure they did their ancestor worship in a way that didn't involve text. But yeah, it's very striking to me that both of these powerful rulers Menti Hotep II and Hedshepsut are very Theban in origin. Their power base and their home is in southern Egypt at Thebes and so Menti Hotep of course built his funerary monument there in his home in his power base and the same with Hedshepsut. Even though in the interim the capital seemed to always move up north to Memphis, Hedshepsut is I think making a clear statement about her roots and her power base being at Thebes in the south and to associate herself with this ancestor who so 2000 BCE to about 1400 it's almost a 600 year difference and an inconceivable amount of time but to still acknowledge this predecessor by building her funerary monument in this area very sacred to the goddess Hathor. Yes, I definitely agree. You said there's a huge span of time in between Hedshepsut emulating Menti Hotep II and it just alludes to sort of the longevity of the history that people might think about their predecessors. And I just want to add one other point. They also were both in dynasties and at points in Egyptian history that had intense contact with Nubia and so I think there's a lot of richness there still to be explored in future scholarship. Okay, yeah that's a really interesting point about what the relationship might have been, how it might have manifest that we just don't know about yet. Okay, I had another question that asked could you talk more about the music and instruments that would have accompanied these dances? You referenced briefly the Systrom was that particularly important or was there anything else that added to the jubilation of the dance? Absolutely and so I had to take out a lot of slides to make it work for 45 minutes but there were tambourines so like we saw in that image from the columns in the Temple of Hathor at Filet so that small man playing a tambourine. There was a lot of hand clapping and so that seems to be really a prominent part. Further south in Kush we see images and also actually in Egypt associated with Nubians they're playing a drum called the Deluca in Sudan but it's a double-headed drum sort of worn on a strap around the neck and this in Egyptian imagery is really tightly associated with Nubians and so I'm imagining that this type of drum would have been played as well and certainly singing and I'm just going to extrapolate there from the inscriptions that I studied at the Temple of Filet because a lot of the agreements the so-called agreements that were inscribed in that four court area promised to come and worship the goddess Hathor but they're also making financial commitments that they're going to bring donations of wealth to the temple and they will be distributed amongst singers Shamayit at the Temple of Isis and so certainly singing was also part of this ritual and sacred performance. Okay connecting to the singing and the instruments was there any significance to the placement of the tattoos specifically on these women? You would mention the the stomach the thighs and the chest or the breasts I believe? Yes all very much highlighting female erogenous zones right so in between the breast on the chest definitely on the thighs that would have been exposed if you can imagine the acrobatic flips in leather skirts would have been just flying everywhere so there would have been exposure and this actually is part of the performance of the right it's sort of encoded in a myth about Hathor exposing her genitalia to her father Ray to cheer him up and bring him out of a funk and so these tattoos on the thighs would have been meant to be seen as part of the movement of the dance and then down the arms as well. Yeah it's interesting the more that we talk about this there's so many different facets you know you have the the visual with the tattoos and the dancing and then you also have the sound with the instruments and this overall performative aspect which I'm assuming would have been a fantastic thing to be able to witness. And I want to just sort of tag on that because I believe and it's been written that this was all meant to stimulate a so-called epiphany right so these would have these music and dance performances would have happened at night with the torches lit in front of the temple it would have been very communal and a large group of people lots of beer passed around so drunkenness very erotic and sexual dancing going on and the the shaking of the sister the sacred rattles and the tambourine and the communal singing was all meant to sort of do something like the whirling of the dervishes right to put people into a kind of a trance where they can then expect to have an epiphany of the goddess Hathor and probably maybe even her divine statue would have at Filé been brought out from that small temple out to the front of the main temple to then appear before the worshipers sort of at the the height of this whole communal sacred ritual. Absolutely given everything that you've said I have a question from the audience that asked specifically do you think that Hathor could have originally been a Nubian goddess that was adopted by Egypt obviously this is a bit of a wormhole question right there's a lot of connotations around perceived race or blackness and perceived cultural identity and you know and whether that factored into the priestesses being emphasized in this role in the Hathor cult but do you think that that's a possibility at all that Hathor had those origins? Yeah yeah and it definitely will underpin my future research so I want to really dive deeply into looking at these sea group women and they did not engage in writing and so it's much more looking at the artifacts that they were buried with and that have been excavated in this area between the first and the second cataract but yes it's um it's quite possible that that the goddess Hathor were told in Egyptian text that she comes from several named areas in southeastern Nubia so Knesset or Bugem and so there is a very tight association of her as being Amtaseti so coming from Nubia um and this may be because there had been a continuous prehistoric worship of some type of a cow goddess um it's I think it's not particularly helpful to sort of distinguish which gods or goddesses or people were Egyptian or Nubian because these cultures were so intimately connected throughout all of their history and of course derive from a common group of people who started moving into the Nile Valley around 5000 BCE when the the so-called green Sahara started to dry up so um but yeah I find it very interesting and I feel like the Egyptian texts testify to that uh her association with these named places um in Nubia Wonderful um and I do want to leave the audience before I conclude here with a little bit of a teaser you had mentioned in the beginning that you are writing a monograph on the queens of Kush uh could you speak briefly about the process of writing such a unique and I'm sure to be foundational publication and what do you think that will mean for scholarship as a whole how we maybe view the relationship between Nubia and Egypt yeah it's um it's a kind of a gaping hole in what's available to the larger public because I am only aware of one full length book that is dedicated to Kushite queens and it specifically focuses on the queens of the napatin period of which Egypt's 25th dynasty was a part um but it's written in German by an amazing scholar but it's not available to everyone and so I think I know that this information is really important to correct of unfortunately still a living concept of Africa is not having any history and so highlighting this um incredibly important culture that that starts as early as Egypt does right we have herma napata and meroe as three uh phases of this kingdom of kush it's just it's really important knowledge to have for scholarship so if we're talking about trying to diversify our idea of what is the classical society that this is an african classical civilization um yeah it's important it's very important yeah I couldn't agree more um well that is our time that concludes our lecture as well as the question and answer segment for today thank you again to dr ashby for sharing your time and your expertise with myself and our wider audience thank you also to our viewers on youtube for their interest in this scholarship and history and their efforts to engage in recontextualizing and reconceptualizing our past uh please make sure that you join us for the next part of the new perspectives of ancient newbia lecture series which is brought to you again by the body museum and arse that one is scheduled for april fifth so it's a slight change from our normal thursday since the fifth is a monday the lecture is titled like the coming of the winds kushite pharaohs and their armies in the near east will be a lecture by dr jeremy pope at our usual time of 12 p.m pacific standard time so thank you again and have a wonderful day thank you