 Hi, welcome back everybody to the new perspectives on ancient Nubia talk series. Before I introduce today's speaker, I'd like to take a moment and actually introduce the Bade museums associate curator, Brooke Norton, who will give us a brief introduction. We would like to begin by acknowledging that Berkeley, California is on the territory of the Huchon, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo Olone. We respect the land 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 Archaeology and the Archaeological Research Facility, ARC, at UC Berkeley acknowledged the pain and outrage of our community members who bear the weight of existing in a society designed to work against them. We feel the devastation most keenly. Here at the Museum and at ARC, we have been moved by the courage of those most deeply affected and the tenacity of those protesting for change. The Bade Museum and ARC stand in solidarity with the African American community. We join you in your calls for justice. Collectively and individually, our staff condemns the police brutality and systemic racism that has long been enacted against the black community and other communities of color. It has persisted for too long. It has resulted in the unjust and premature ending of lives. So let us say their names. Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Almed 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 and racial injustice. Likewise, we lend our expertise to the cause by incorporating BLM sensitive material into our exhibits, programming, and curricula. We know very well that this moment has been a long time coming, and we are in the fight for equality, justice, and accountability. Through this lecture series, we aim to raise awareness of ancient media, a vibrant region in Northeast Africa with a rich archaeological 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. Great. Thank you, Brooke. Well, it's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Aaron D'Souza, who will be our featured speaker today. Dr. D'Souza is an archaeologist specializing in Nubian material culture and is currently a Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow at the Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. His first monograph entitled New Horizons, The Pangrave Ceramic Tradition in Context, was published in 2019. Aaron's current project, In Between, reexamines Middle Nubian material culture as a reflection of the complex identities and social-cultural interconnections across Nubia and Egypt during the mid-2nd millennium BCE. Aaron is Nubian ceramic specialist on the Tel Edfu project run by Yale University, and has previously worked on excavation projects at Hierocompolis, Elephantine, Oswan, Dendera, and Helwan. In addition to grant-funded museum-based research projects in Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Italy. Today, Dr. D'Souza's presentation is entitled More Than Kush, Capturing the Complexity and Diversity of Ancient Nubia. So welcome, Dr. D'Souza. The floor is yours. Thank you, Aaron. And thank you to the Bardet Museum and the IRF for inviting me to be a part of this series, because it's really great for me and for many other people that Nubia is getting along over to you in this time. So just give me a moment to share my screen. Okay, how's that? Can we see that? Great. So, as some of you would have seen from my social media things, that this will be my last public lecture as a Marie Curie Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. So what I wanted to do is to use it as an opportunity to make some broad statements about the project, but also to use it as a way to discuss how and why we study and approach the material and the way that we do. So there will be some results and findings that I'll talk about throughout the talk, but what I really want to do is to highlight this diversity and complexity of ancient Nubia, which has been at the center of the project, because it's that complexity that makes this subject so interesting, but it's also what makes it incredibly challenging. And so what I want to do today is to talk about those challenges and to discuss how and why it's so difficult for us to break out of these old colonial cultural historical frameworks we've inherited from the last century. Oops. What's happened? Okay, so the cultures that I am focusing on, as Aaron said in the introduction, are called the Middle Nubian cultures. And there are three of these called the Sea Group, the Pan Grave and the Kermit traditions. And they were all active in the Nile Valley of Lower Egypt, Upper Egypt, sorry, Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia, and a bit further around as well. Between the years about 1850 to 1550 BC-ish, which is roughly contemporary with the late Middle Kingdom and second intermediate period in Egypt. I won't go through them all in detail because you can find more information about them in various books and things. But what I want to drive home now is that they were all defined and described and conceived by Petri and Reisner in the early 20th century. So these are not ancient groups, these are modern constructs. And each of them was defined by a set of object types and practices, which is very much in keeping with the cultural historical essentialist models of the early 20th century that dominated by Petri and Reisner were working. So again, these are not ancient divisions, they were modern things that were imposed upon the archaeological record in order to highlight the differences between the groups. But what I'm trying to do with this project is to not focus on the differences but focus on the things that link all these cultures together. And because actually you can see that there are even just in the slide with the selection of images. You can see that there are a lot of similarities and if we zoom in to a few of them, we can see that just from these objects there we can tell that there is some connection to pastoralism, or some connection with cattle and livestock animals that connected all of these cultures. And it's just that this importance of livestock and pastoralism is reflected in the material traditions and their customs. So we can see that for example in the sea group on the left hand side of the screen, where there are cattle depicted on the bowl, but there's also this Kermit vessel which has a ram headed spout on it. And you can also see that there are cattle surrounding the graves that in some cases in the numbering of the thousands around Kermit to really down in the bottom right there, which is similar to the pan grave burials where there are circular troughs around the graves it contained animal skulls and those animal skulls but like this painted one in the center of the screen so you can see that there are a lot of things that actually do link these cultures together, and that cross the boundaries between them. So in terms of geographic description distribution, all three were active in the Nile Valley of Egypt and Sudan, and we can see that the sea group was active mostly in lower new beer and heading up towards thieves as well. And the pan grave is by far the most widespread of them all and this is spread in terms of material culture not necessarily of people, mostly concentrated from middle, middle Egypt sorry down to the second cataract and then also in the desert surrounding and Khmer of course is centered on Khmer but we also have Khmer material culture turning up further north into the Nile Valley into Egypt. So we can see now that the cultures were all contemporary with one another, but they also overlap geographically. So we can from that simple fact we can deduce that contact and exchange between these groups and peoples and populations would have been inevitable. So we can see that Egyptian texts contemporary with this period show us that the Egyptians also recognize that there were various and multiple different groups and regions in new year. But those ancient groups of the ancient Egyptians identify of course don't necessarily corresponds with the new beings themselves would have recognized and again, those groups certainly don't correspond to the middle new being divisions that were created by Peter in Reisner. And in this text here on the left hand side of the screen in the first lecture in the series by Dr. Selim Faraji. And it's a text from the two of Sir Bekhnaht governor at Elqab from his tomb at Elqab. And in this text he tells us about Kushite led raids that were that were conducted against Elqab. And in this text he names five regions so he refers to Kush who was in charge which is what we know as Khmer. So he names, Sir Bekhnaht names five new being groups and new being regions, but we only have three more new being traditions so from that you can see that there is no one to one correlation between the groups that were recognized by the ancient peoples, and by us in the 20th and 21st centuries. And if we just go back to those distribution maps and then we plot the, those regions on the map that we know of so what major and Kush, we can see that there isn't really any correlation between the distributions and these regions at all so we can see that this is usually associated with lower new bureau, while what as it was called back then, but you can also see that the secret material culture is attested further north up towards themes. The pan grave tradition is often equated with the major will come back to that in a second because there's something I want to say about that, because it's a problematic thing. But you can see that the pan grove material culture is attested way further than just what we think major land was. And same goes for Khmer which is supposed to be concentrated in up in Ubia or Kush but again you can see that Khmer material culture turns up elsewhere. So there is this disconnect between the historical records and also the archeological data that we have. But to return to this issue of the major, and this is leading me into the next couple of slides. One of older scholarship has drawn a link between the major and the pan grave at the major being the Egyptian term for these peoples from this region and then pan great being the archaeological culture that was invented in the 20th century. I've never really been an advocate or a supporter of this line of reasoning, even though I know that there's been some criticism of that lately. There could have been a link between these two, the pan grave and the major that might be possible, but we can't conclusively prove these things based on the evidence that we have because we don't really actually know what major means. The term major, the meaning of major changes over time. This has written a whole PhD about this and we've got a chapter coming out about it in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Ubin archaeology. So this is a problematic connection and it's always been problematic and it's indicative of the problems that we face when we're trying to marry the historical records with the archeological records. And so the reason that I'm showing you this in this context linking these regions to the distributions is not to say that they are the same thing clearly not it's to show that there is a problem that we need to address. So if you continue with the discussion of the Medjai. They are a really good example for how new beings are not just new beings. We can't just call anyone from south of the first cataract new being because we, as we've seen there, there are all sorts of different groups and regions and communities and populations. But we know that even the ancient Egyptians recognized that Medjai could both be friends and enemies. Because we know that way back in the old kingdom the Medjai were working as soldiers in the Egyptian army. We know that there are women labels as major on the psychophysicist sorry of Queen Ashaid. But at the same time, we know that the Egyptians tell us that Medjai were involved in these raids against Egypt. So we've got this conflict between Medjai working with us and for us and Medjai working against us. But it also tells us that the Egyptians were aware already back in those days that you couldn't just paint everyone with the same brush new be a new beings were not just new beings. So we also then need to break down the boundaries that we've imposed on the way that other people before us have imposed upon the the ancient record that we have. So the key points that we need to remember at this point are that the groups that we have see group hand grabbing karma were created in the 20th century they are not ancient groups and their things that have been imposed upon them, upon the archaeological record. Those groups and their definitions are essentialist, they imply that culture is bounded and that it's fixed and that it's immutable and that it's got, you know, clear definable boundaries, but we know that that's not actually the case. The archaeological record is also messy. And this is a way that kept coming up in a conference that I hosted in September. And this messiness doesn't really lend itself to fitting neatly into boxes in the way that we wish it would. It just doesn't happen. But also quite problematic is that the our perspectives that we've inherited a new be a heavily Egypt eccentric. They were created by people who had ulterior motives and wanting to make Egypt sort of not African. But in that way if we separate Egypt from Africa, we're losing a huge part of the story because we can see that these regions were really interconnected. And so instead of dividing which is what this culture historical system does, we need to find ways that these cultures were actually interconnected. And that is what makes more complex more challenging. To illustrate this idea of interconnections. I want to show you a series of maps that sort of schematically lays out where my brain is going with all of this stuff. So we'll start with the big, big division which is Egypt and you be a, of course, bearing in mind that these terms are anachronistic but that's another lecture for another time. But these two things are very often presented as if they're distinct cultural entities that don't mix like oil and water. Egypt we know from ancient texts and also from Egyptian ideologies that the Egypt goes is the narrow valley from the Mediterranean coast to the first cataract, and then everything south of the first cataract is Nubia. And we know that the first cataract was perceived as a sort of frontier where Egypt ended it's where the known counting system started moving north. So there was there was always a sort of divide. But in reality, if we look at the archaeological evidence, we can see that there is really a lot of overlap between Egypt and Nubia because Nubians we know were always in Egypt. There are Nubian burials and cemeteries coming way back into the pre-denastic period. We also know that Nubians were involved in the military. They were involved in mining and trade. They were working as temple staff for Egyptians. They were doing all sorts of things in Egypt. They were probably leaving there for centuries. Conversely, we know that Egyptians were always in Nubia. There were royal expeditions during the old Kingdom into Nubia. There were fortresses in the Middle Kingdom. There was a new kingdom colonization. So really the division between Egypt and Nubia is purely ideological. This first cataract was never really a frontier. And we can even see this reinforced when we look at the Egyptian words for various regions. They had this term Tarseti, which we've heard from previous lectures as well, which was used as a generic term for the land south of the first cataract. But it was also the name of the first upper Egyptian nomes. So already the Egyptians recognized that the southernmost part of Egypt, north of the first cataract, was sort of almost considered as if it was part of Nubia, at least in name. But if we project forward into the new kingdom, we know that the Viceroy of Kush, which was set up in the early 18th dynasty, we know that he had jurisdiction over the region as far north as Hieroconpolis. So again, that's in Egypt, it's north of the first cataract. So administratively, and maybe even a little bit psychologically, the Egyptians did recognize that the southernmost part of Egypt was actually sort of Nubia, or that this region was some kind of overlap between the two. And then we can even add more layers onto this, we can divide Egypt into lower Egypt and upper Egypt, we can divide Nubia into lower Nubia, lower Nubia which is Kush, and so this is showing that there's even more complexity and we even know that the ancient peoples were more, were also recognized this complexity because in the story of Sinuwe, we're told that a Delta man would be lost in Elefantines. So a person from the south would not recognize anything, sorry, a person from the north would not recognize anything in the south. So the Egyptians were also cognizant of this diversity and these differences in their own land. So we can take it a step further again by adding some regions from the eastern desert, which we know from the Egyptian words Ibhet and Meja in the purple and yellow circles there. There are other regions, which I could add but I think what I've done here is tried to demonstrate that all of these regions from the ancient texts and all of the ones that we think of in our heads, all of them overlap. So therefore contact between all of the regions and all of the peoples was surely inevitable, and that we can't really draw hard boundaries on ancient socio cultural landscapes. But of course, as humans we do try to do that and if we superimpose the modern boundaries onto the map that I've just created with all the ancient ones. We can see that there is actually not any correlation between the modern boundary what was going on back then. And in fact the key point that I want to get across here is that lower Nubia, which is in the pink circle towards the center there is actually entirely in modern Egypt. And so we can then extend that to a consideration of how we approach this region as scholars and in our disciplines, that when we divide Egyptology and new biology that is that kind of reinforcing these boundaries that we know didn't exist and that don't work, but they were also trying to undo. And this is a struggle that I've also had for a long time in Egyptology where you know I study a lot of Nubian material and I'm often perceived as not really being an Egyptologist. But that's that's that's a problem, because we can see that a lot of Nubia is in Egypt so we need to think about how we think about our disciplines and how we perceive our disciplines and where their boundaries lie if they were, or even if there should be boundaries at all. But to come back to this theme of diversity and complexity. This is what it looked like in the archaeological record. So I'll show you a couple of examples where we can see a lot of mixing and a lot of contact going on. The first one of these is grave number seven from a site called SGC site 410, which is located in the second cataract so on the map that you can see that little green star. And this cemetery was identified and excavated in the 1960s by the Scandinavian Joint Expedition to Sudanese Nubia. The excavators identified this great cemetery sorry as a Pangrave and Kerma cemetery, but they noted that Pangrave and Kerma elements don't seem to occur together in the same unit. But I went to Sweden last year. And I spent a number of weeks in Uppsala, the Museum Gustavian studying this collection and notice that in fact, Pangrave and Kerma elements or at least what we think of as Pangrave and Kerma elements do occur together in the same burials. So here on the screen you can see that the pot in the blue square is or has parallels from Kerma sites like Kerma itself and from Cy island. The pot in the red square fits all the criteria for a Pangrave vessel at least by according to our current definitions. In gray square, there is a bead presumably Egyptian made in finance, which is inscribed with the name of the ferris and what's with the first. So we've got three different material traditions in one intact burial in low in Nubia. We've got a Kerma type vessel we've got a pangrave looking vessel and we've got an Egyptian bead. We're not in Egypt, we're not new Kerma, and we're sort of at the fringes of where pangrave is supposed to end so how did all these three things end up together how do we explain it. Does it mean we've got our classifications totally wrong. And also the bigger question is, can we or should we even try to assign this grave to any particular tradition at all it could be a Kerma burial the pangrave burial and Egyptian burial or none of those at all it could be something else entirely different. We can see this sort of thing again at the site called Elwood day which is down in the fourth cataract of again on the map you can see the little star. This actually has a really mixed assemblage that actually seems more like a local variant. So this was excavated by the Oriental Institute Nubian expedition back in 2001 and I went to Chicago in 2018 to study the material firsthand. And this material is quite strange so here in the center of the screen you've got these two pots, and if I use my cursor. These two vessels here which look like they should be pangrave in terms of their shape and the technology and their overall style but they're not really there's sort of a little bit weird. This one over here looks like what we should most of this will be familiar with classic Kerma beakers those beautiful bell shaped things. This looks like it's one of those but it's kind of it's sort of heftier than a normal Kerma beaker. The jar in the middle doesn't really fit into any type of category. And then this down here. This little thing down here this piece of bronze or copper is from a razor which is a type that we find normally quite often in Kerma burials. And the grave you can see also it's not like other pangrave burials it's not really like Kerma burials it's got it's it's a pit lined with large stones the burials in a contracted position I did to build it there. So we've got this sort of weird mix of things that don't really fit into boxes. So nothing really fits into any of the boxes at all. So it seems like we're looking at some kind of local variant. We can also find some interesting connections if we look out into the desert so away from the Nile Valley we're still fairly close to the Nile Valley but not in the Valley proper. And the one that I want to raise today there are a number of them that I could talk about but because of time I just want to focus on this one called the Hadesi horizon, which is off to the west here. There's a there's the Wadi Hawa which runs off the Nile Valley there. It's sort of roughly between the third and fourth cataracts. But the this site or the Hadesi horizon is mostly known for its pottery it's like named after the style of pottery. What we don't want to do of course here, which I sort of stress is that we're not trying to use pottery to identify culture because that can always be quite problematic because we don't want to head down that road of pot sequel people so we need to be careful of that. But pottery is also incredibly useful because it is so abundant and often in Nubian contexts, it's all that we have. So it's really useful but we have to be careful with how we use it. So here we can see with the Hadesi horizon that the decorative styles are very similar to some new middle Nubian traditions from the Nile Valley so we can see that there's isn't impressed into locking triangles. These insights diamond motifs which are occurring the secret fairly frequently and also these sort of triangles with comb impressed decoration. Of course we're trying to avoid reducing cultures to pottery decorations and pottery styles. We are to deny there are that there are some remarkable similarities between the Hadesi pottery and materials from the Nile Valley. We can also see that it goes beyond decorative styles and starts to also head into technology and pottery making techniques. And so here we can see on the left hand side of the screen some Matt impressed pottery from the Hadesi horizon, which is found at the Wadi Harik which is a bit further north, a little bit closer to Kerma. The matting impressions are a remnant of the the forming techniques of the pottery was built on a mat, and these are the impressions of that mat. We also find the same mad impressions though at sites in the fourth cataract, we find it at Kerma itself we also find it way way north a teled through in in modern Egypt. So we can see here that there is some kind of continuity with with the technologies. I'm not saying that the people who made this pottery were in all of these places I mean to say that a person from Wadi Harik was living in teled through because you find the same type of shirt is a real stretch of course. But what does seem to be moving around is objects and ideas and ways of doing things seem to be mobile. And this is this is another element of this, this particular period is that there was a lot of mobility going on people and moving around objects moving around ideas moving around and being exchanged all the time. So, when we think of that we then have to ask ourselves well, why is the Hadesi horizon if it's got all these similarities with not only stuff why why do we treat it as something separate. What we're doing here is sort of we're putting things into boxes again we're really we might be able to start to think of things being more common and connected. So from all of that variation but all of also all of that complexity and all these interconnections. There are three things I think that we need to really stress here there's of course a lot of things that could be stressed but these are the three that I think need to be thought about. So we need to rethink the cultural divisions that we imposed upon the archaeology of the Nile Valley, and the key word there is imposed because as I said the framework was forced upon the material, but like any framework, it can be taken down and rebuilt. The second thing we need to do is we need to widen the catchment area to include the surrounding region so we need to look out into the deserts on the east and the west, and we also need to look further south into Africa. The second thing we need to do is we need to really focus on the importance of mobility because as I said, this period was characterized by a lot of mobility of people and ideas and objects. And so those also will give us some clues as to how things developed in the region. So now I've dealt with with you, I want to also move to north and look to the new being evidence that we find north of the first cataract and I say north of the first cataract very deliberately and not Egypt. So remember that as I said lower new be a is entirely in modern Egypt. So to say that we're dividing new viewer in Egypt in the Egypt and Sudan or whatever is is a bit misleading I think so I'm focusing here instead on the land north of the first cataract which is that ideological boundary that we talked about earlier. So here is a list of sites when new being material culture or new being evidence has been documented north of the first cataract. It's a fairly long list but the list is not comprehensive and it doesn't actually denote every single individual site so for example at most together. There was something like eight places when you've been burials were found at our accomplice there are three new being cemeteries there. And that covers a period in question there is other new being evidence from other periods from from different places. And the new beam cemeteries there's there's dozens of them in Egypt. They range in size from isolated burials to cemeteries and more than 100 graves. We also have new being evidence in Egyptian settlement context from the delta down to the first cataract that elephantina and also back to the OACs and over to the Red Sea coast. There's a new material culture that appears in otherwise Egyptian burials in Egyptian tombs. So for example we have new being pottery occurring at tombs at Drago or Naga. We have painted animal skulls at the ones we saw for the pan grave occurring in terms of Doha Bersha. So there's all sorts of mixing going on but the main thing is is that there is a lot of new being evidence in the north of the first cataract as I said earlier. And in presenting this like this I kind of have a bit of an ulterior motive and I've sort of touched on it earlier. And that's the state that that people who do study new being material culture like myself, where can still be part of Egyptology. Because in fact, and this is an admission I've never been to Sudan, I've never worked in Sudan, I would love to work in Sudan but I've never had the opportunity. But also, fact of the matter is is that I've been too busy working with all the material that was excavated in Egypt at Tel Edfu and all of the sites in lower Nubia that I've studied for the last decade or so. And there's still plenty more to do with that stuff. So we, this is again me trying to get get this message across that we can't separate the two the two have to go hand in hand. And this map alone to prove that the story, the stories of Egypt and Nubia, completely intertwined and inextricably linked, and that it's all one big complicated story. So now that I've got that out of my system that will run. I will look at this little square here this little green square that's just popped up on the map, which is focusing on the region between El Cap and Edfu all the Nile so it's a 15 kilometer stretch of the Nile. So this 15 kilometer stretch, there is a lot of new being evidence. So at Hieroconpolis, we've got one secret cemetery, we've got two pangrave cemeteries, we've got a possible new being campsite, we've got new being style pottery from the settlement remains at El Cap. We've got masses and masses of new being pottery to lead through that I go and look at every year except this year because of the coronavirus. We've also got a lost pangrave cemetery near the Pyramidic enemy. And remember that this is just a 15 kilometer stretch of the Nile and we've got all of this evidence. So this is a really good demonstration of how intensive the contacts between Egyptianness and Nubianness must have been during this period this late middle Kingdom of the second intermediate period. This I think raises a couple of issues or a number of issues that we need to think about and to address. And the first is that we're now confronted with this contrast between ideology and reality. The Egyptian texts describe Nubians as being vile and wretched and all these sort of terrible things were told that they were raiding Egypt, they were taking things that were destroying stuff. But we also know that Nubians and Nubianness and Nubian objects were like an integral part of the fabric of ancient Egyptian society. So we also need to question. What is this duality that we impose on the on the material what is Nubian and what is Egyptian what does those things mean and why do we think that they're different to use a really simple simple single example. If we think about the Nubian style pottery tell that food, I've given other talks about this and there will be one coming up in the future. So it's been there for centuries. Is it really Nubian or is it now part of the Egyptian repertoire and a part of the Egyptian culture, if we can call it that. So why do we divide things the way that we do. We also never know how the people that uses it will be done. We won't ever know who uses objects and we won't know how those people self identified if they considered themselves Nubian or Egyptian or even if that was important to them. But we also need to rethink these disciplinary divisions as I talked about earlier. You know I had my little rant in the last slide, but if we can see that the archaeological record is so mixed and so very why do we separate things. We need to really be more integrated in how we approach things. So in order to remedy this and to try and come up with some answers I organized a conference as I mentioned briefly at the start of this talk back in September. So the workshop is part of the in between project that I've been doing for the last couple of years and it was called deconstructing Nubia we had 12 speakers. And we all sat down for two days and we presented some papers on day one and then the second day we all talked it out about what are the problems and how do we fix them and how do we move forward what can we possibly do. There was a consensus across all of us that we need to change things that things don't work, but we couldn't really get to the bottom of how and what will be the best way to do it. So what do we need to find new terminology but then the question was if we just replace all terminologies with new terminologies. Is that just creating another problem that someone has to undo in another hundred years time. Do we dispense with typologies and move towards looking at more functional aspects of material culture. Do we need to look at more theoretical approaches so one that I'm working on with Marie Gato is assemblage theory which looks not just at the objects, but at the relationships that are inherent in those objects in between the objects. And maybe if there's time I can talk about that in the question time. We need to take more macro region wide perspectives and also micro object specific analyses that look at specific object types in great detail. But most importantly, all of this work has to be done collaboratively and that was the one thing that we all could agree on that this job is too big for one person it's too big for 10 people. And it needs to be done by everyone who's working on this material on this period, if we are to really get to the bottom of it. So to finish up I just want to run through one last time this series of slides that if you've been to a lecture of mine you've probably seen this series of slides before. But I promise for those of you that have seen it before. I will take it one step further so just stay with me. Let's start with what things looked like 100 years ago and even up as more recent as 50 years ago. We've got three middle Nubian traditions the sea group the pangrave in the coma, each of them are completely self contained unique bound identities with their own material traditions and their own cultural traditions that got very clear boundaries and they don't really mix. So we know that that wasn't the case and that there was in fact a lot of overlap. And the overlap isn't just between the Nubian groups. It's also between the Nubians and the Egyptian and the Egyptians, but it's also with these other groups I mentioned the Hadesi earlier which you can see they're linking up the sea group and coma groups but also there's this other thing called the Jebel Mokram and the gas group from the eastern desert which I didn't talk about today. And so what I was trying to do with this project and where I think we need to head towards in the future is a picture that looks more like this, which is, rather than looking at these groups as being single cultural entities, we can now see that there's a multitude of variants of each group that those variants probably have sub variants, and all of those things and sub variants interact in exchange with one another with variants from within their own groups or within, or with variants from other groups or other traditions. So the picture then becomes suddenly much more complex and diverse and colorful, literally. And normally this is where I would stop with this sequence of slides, but I realized in preparing this lecture that even this image is a little bit too restrictive because you can see that the little sub groups all still have nice hard edges. So what I think we need to do is to look at it more like this, where the sub groups and the groups are all still there, the variants are all still there, but the edges are now less defined and they start to bleed into and out of one another. Because I think that that's more like what was happening back in the ancient world, is that all of these groups were constantly in contact, constantly exchanging, and things were always in motion and always in flux. So the whole picture literally becomes quite blurry, and much more complicated but that seems to be the reality. And before I go, so that was the lecture but before I go I have one final exhortation that I want to make. And if nothing else, I hope that in this last half hour or so that I've been able to demonstrate that the ancient world was incredibly complex and completely interconnected. So therefore, if we want to understand that complexity and that connectedness, our research also has to be complex and interconnected. So we can't pigeonhole ourselves into our disciplines we can't just be Egyptologists working with Egyptologists we can't be new beings, after archaeology people working with new bean archaeology people and so on and so forth. We have to work together we have to build bridges, because that's that's what the material wants us to do. And of course we have to do it's not just between the branches of the humanities but we also have to bring the natural sciences and anthropology. We also should work with local communities where it's possible to do so who can give us more information about their, their home in their environment in their way of doing things. And as I said at the beginning or sort of a few minutes ago. This is not something that one person can do this has to be a collaborative effort so we all have to work together, and we'll all be very complicated. It will be messy. People disagree on stuff. It might get heated from time to time. We'll all get things wrong. But in my opinion, it's this collaborative and this constructively critical that the key where they've been constructively critical that we have to do those things if we really want things to actually work together. And so with that, I thank you all for coming along for paying attention and I'm happy to take any questions. Thank you very much for your your wonderful talk. I think that was a wonderful way to to enter talk as well for a clean for more collaborative research. We have a few questions coming in. One person wants to know if any of the new being tribes were nomadic. So all of them probably were to some degree so that the secret or the pan grave is the most mobile of these groups which is probably why it's so widespread if you remember that with the red one with this sort of big cloud. So the pan gray tradition or what at least we call the pan gray tradition seems to have been small groups of mobile pastoralists with those of goats and cows and things. The group also might have been partially mobile or seasonally mobile comma maybe also. But yeah, but mobility was, which is why I brought it up a couple of times that I think that this this movement of groups and peoples and objects and ideas is one of the really key things that we need to look into for this topic. So, can you imagine a new be an ethnic group. That is an incredibly complicated question. So, I, it's, it's really complicated so I mentioned Kate Lisco who's now a associate professor at University of Southern California is at San Bernardino. But Kate wrote her whole PhD on the major and we still don't really know what it means. So is it is it a ethnic term for a particular group of people. Is it a geographic term for people that come from a ticket particular place. Is it an occupational term. What is what is it. The pan grave in the major I have often been connected but as I said that this is a real this is such a problematic thing that we cannot be proved one way or the other. Did in the old kingdom we see major working as soldiers in the middle kingdom they're doing mercenary stuff and then in the new kingdom they become police but at sometimes they're also temple attendance. So I'm just trying to get into Egypt at the, you know, in the seminar dispatchers talks about Medjai trying to come to Egypt they get turned back to the desert. So, we don't really know what, what Medjai actually means at least to the Egyptians but but yeah it's it's. I guess, yeah, maybe, I mean, and also the whole idea of ethnicity and ancient Egypt is also problematic is, we don't know whether that was a thing that actually was important to them. Yeah, it's really complicated and I'm not sure that I can answer it in a simple way. I guess as a follow up to that question. So I want to know if some of the newbie and ethnic groups were nylotic. Okay, the three groups that I talked about so the Pankrave Sea Group and Kerma so Kerma and sea group were concentrated mostly on the Nile Valley, Pankrave. We think came from the east, and then some for some reason moved into the Nile Valley, and then sort of some maybe some population settled in there, sort of by the late 12th dynasty and they were there until the beginning of the 18th dynasty. But that's of course not to say that they were all in the Nile Valley so I showed you those pictures of the Hadesi pottery for example which has a lot of similarities in terms of technology and style to things from the Nile Valley so maybe that's like another sub branch we also have one that we can talk about, which is the Jebel Mokram Group which comes from the northeast and desert in Sudan near Kasala, and their pottery very often is completely indistinguishable from Pankrave pottery from the Nile Valley. So are these also two branches of the same thing or are they actually different or what's going on there. So yes, primarily they are in the Nile Valley but that's again according to the frameworks that were given to us by Petrie and Reiser, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it was that way, and it doesn't really seem like it was that way anymore. All right we have some questions about the pottery. Are Egyptian deities represented on Nubian pottery? Not for this period. I can think of. I mean, you might, I guess you might want to maybe possibly make a connection between the ram head on that that ram headed spout that you saw, and I will know something. But that's of course very, very, that's a very tenuous link and please don't quote me on that I mean I know this is now on YouTube forever. Yeah, but no, apart from that no, I don't think, and that but there is not on the pottery but on those painted skulls. In a Pankrave symmetry most together, there is a painted skull that has lotus blossoms painted onto it, which is strange and doesn't really occur on any of these other objects. There's also one for also from us together that has the depiction of a Pankrave person we think or a person at least on this skull. It's quite a big ox skull it's quite huge. But the person is depicted following Egyptian artistic canon so with his face and profile with the show two shoulders and so on. And he's also got a small text written extreme in hieroglyphs. And we don't know what that means my good friend Julian Cooper with Hans Barnard wrote an article trying to figure out what what this text says. So they don't have deities but there are some Egyptian elements trickling into their art and styles are doing things as well. Is the disciplinary divide between Egyptology and new theology changing. And is there still resistance among scholars who take a more traditional cultural historical approach to blurring these boundaries. Okay, so the first half that question, I think so or at least I hope so. And I think now that in the last 810 months or so this has become a really people are focusing on this topic now that you know we can no longer separate Egypt and Africa that the stories, as I said are completely intertwined. And I think that it certainly with with, you know the last maybe one or two generations of scholars and the current generation when we're now understanding that this is something that needs to change. But in terms of is there still resistance. Yes. And I've you know I've, as I said you know a couple of times I've been told that I'm not really an Egyptologist because I do Nubian stuff, which is why today I specifically pointed out that all of my work is in Egypt. So, there is this sort of, there is a bit of a hangover from the last century of Nubia being African and Egypt being special. But I think when I realized that Egypt isn't actually that special and that it was just part of a very big interconnected ancient world and it's and not just with Africa with the Mediterranean with the nearest with with Arabia all these sort of places. So yeah, I think that it is, it is changing, I hope. So how much evidence is there for East to West movement in exchange, for example, caravans or trading out posts. Not a huge amount, really, and I guess because with, especially with mobility because it is often so ephemeral. It's it's hard to know it's hard to make these sort of observations so usually you find things that point A and point B. So you don't necessarily that that might look like they're related but you don't have anything in the middle. So you don't know whether there is something, you know, connecting those two things I mean we do have, for example, a lot of symmetries and pangra evidence on the West Bank of the Nile even though we think that pangra people came from the East. So there was, they were able to cross the Nile. So that there is, you know, there is a little bit of evidence for there being you know, start points and end points. But in terms of the roots that talk it's, it's anyone's guess although one thing that I can maybe say that might answer the question a little bit. I think that what I found in my PhD is that most of the sites or that where we have the densest evidence for pangra activity is usually at major bodies that come out of the eastern desert. So it's like that they were sort of settling near where these roots were that led to and from the desert. So you can draw inferences certainly about mobility patterns but it's it's it's difficult because of the evidence is so ephemeral. So projects north or south of the first cataract that combine characteristics of any of the new bean material culture groups with Egyptian writing. With Egyptian writing, apart from that, that the cow skull that I mentioned. I think so I mean like I know that that Kerma for example had its own sort of ceiling practice but whether that is a somehow related to Egyptian stuff or whether it's just that it's a Nile Valley practice is another question but but I can't think of anything that had Egyptian text I mean we certainly have objects that combine Egyptian and new bean elements so whether it's new being to a new being technology with Egyptian style or vice versa. I don't think so. Right, there's a question. What are the greatest logistical a publishing funding challenges to moving beyond the Egypt to new be a binary that reduces the complexity of this region. Okay, so the biggest one is funding of course, but also time, just the volume of material that one would have to go through to do this properly. And this is one of the things that we talked about in the workshop is that is the is the only way to fix it just to go back to the start and go back through all of the material and forget about the groups we've got forget about a group C group handgrave Kerma, and just look at the material, record the material document the material and let it tell us what to do. And the problem with that is that a lot of the material that was excavated when they established these groups so in the early 20th century so risers surveys and things. That material sort of been scattered to the four corners of the globe or it's been lost, or it's in a museum basement somewhere that no one knows about, probably completely unlabeled. So, there's also that difficulty and I mean even just going to the UK like you can go to one site that was excavated by Petrie and that site has been scattered all over the United Kingdom. So you can go to once one museum that's got one grave from this site one other museum that's got another grave so to put it all together is a really big job so that money of course yes, but just the actual act of going and looking at this stuff again is is really really difficult. So I guess as a follow up to that question. What basic steps can researchers publishers museum curators do to begin to make doing this kind of research possible. I think, for me, I think one thing that would be really useful is is publishing the objects just just as objects or data or even archives if there are archival documents I know that for example the UK that got the artifacts of excavation archives which is really useful. But if museums could put objects up on their catalogs and make them accessible online so just, and not even to say that it's a Kerma pot just to say that it's a pot, and where it came from, and it's excavation history, and then let the researchers do the work. So for all researchers, I think you know it's important to publish data. There's I mean, of course working in Egypt as you know as all of us who work in Egypt know there is a huge amount of data and because we can't take that material out of Egypt and do it away from Egypt. It slows the process down a bit. Really we really do need to just put the material out so that people can can use it. And try as much as possible, not to impose our and okay look, I'm guilty of doing this I've written a book about pangrave ceramics, which I'm now realizing in hindsight if I could go back and undo what I maybe I would. But, but the material needs to get out. And so I would say that if we do it now maybe don't force labels on to it. Very judiciously and let, let, let the everyone work it out together. I think I'm still very pie in the sky and utopian I know that I mean. Would the Egyptian Empire consistently think of Nubia as a conquered or subject to territory. At least in words. I think they did I think that they in their ideologies and the text, they at least said that they did. But when you actually look at what's happening on the ground. I don't think it was ever really the case. So, like I said, one of the last slides that the Egyptians tell us Nubians of Ireland Richard blah blah blah they're there to be destroyed they've got them on the souls of their sandals so they can trample them with every step. But then there are Nubians, well there's that they were always in contact with Nubia whether Nubians were living there I mean, Nubians were certainly dying there and were burying their dead in Egypt. And importantly, they were allowed to bury their dead in a non Egyptian manner. So the Egyptians were quite happy to have these people doing that displaying their otherness in their territory. And that's that's an important consideration as well is that that then breaks down this whole idea of Egyptian superiority and dominance and that rather everything was all mixed together. It looks like there's one more question. Is there evidence of significant interaction of Nubian culture with cultures further south along the Nile, and how far south to these connections extend along the Nile. And that's to get a little bit sort of thin. Once you go past the fourth cataract but that's that's probably primarily primarily because it hasn't been as much work done down there. I mean there are other other groups and cultures that we know of. For example, Jebel Moya, which is further down past the six cataract and I think maybe Michael Brass and Isabella Isabella Gregory watching. They work down there and they gave a lecture about Jebel Moya a few days ago. But the drawing the links between Jebel Moya which is way way way way south and the Nile Valley is difficult. Maybe not possible at times but but it's worth exploring connections with with regions like that and also further out into the sub Saharan regions, and also heading eastward stand to Eritrea and towards the Horn of Africa and I think that that's maybe where we'll find a lot of the connections that became or were connected with what we see in the Nile Valley. Looks like we have one more. How can your approach be scaled up to encompass an even broader spectrum of neighboring groups that interact with the Egyptian world that are studied in other subfields so the Canaanites. I guess the question means like, how would we apply the same ways of thinking to other regions I guess is that, yeah. I think we just have to do it. I mean, we can we can already see that Egypt was that there's all this Near Eastern stuff in Egypt and Egyptian stuff all over the 11th, the Levant and I was part of a workshop the other day for the Getty and I was presenting Ivory's from Persia that looked completely Egyptian, at least to my eyes but but they're not so it's so we can see that there was this interconnectedness and also like I've got a good friend who's got an archaeologist that works in Anatolia, and he found this Lusian stealer that's got this winged sun disk on it. So it's like you know that there's, there's, there were connections everywhere and I think that we just, we just need to find them and explain them, but without forcing them into you know this is Egyptian or this is whatever it's just think of it as objects and look for the relationships between things and try to understand the complexities rather than just shoving a label on something. That's what I think. Thank you again for sharing your fascinating work with us today. No problems a pleasure.