 Okay, hello and welcome to the final event in our new perspectives on ancient Nubia lecture series. I would like to welcome everybody here and introduce Jess Johnson who is going to read the BLM and land statement. Hello everyone and welcome. My name is Jess Johnson. I'm the assistant curator at the body. We would like to start by acknowledging that Berkeley, California is on the territory of the Hootune, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyua Loni. 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 poised 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 Baudet Museum of Biblical Archaeology and Archaeological Research Facility, ARF, at UC Berkeley wished to acknowledge the pain and outrage of our community members who bear the weight of existing in a society designed against them. 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 Baudet 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 police brutality and systematic racism that is long and acted 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 McDade, Ahmet 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 very 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 Nubia, 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 and the new perspectives on ancient Nubia series, we hopefully to a more just, present and equitable future. Thank you. Thank you, Jess. So we would like to introduce the Nile Valley Collective who are joining us today. The Nile Valley Collective are a group of scholars who promote an African-centered approach to the study and presentation of the Nile River Valley because African people created these cultures on the African continent. Here with us today from the collective are Sally Ann Ashton, Vanessa Davies, Debra Herd, Kimani Nohusi, and Stuart Tyson Smith. Elizabeth Minor unfortunately had a last minute obligation and will not be able to join us today. And to begin, so Vanessa will provide us with some background on the formation of the Nile Valley Collective. Thank you all for the invitation for all of us to speak with you all today. We're really excited. The Nile Valley Collective is a group of friends and colleagues who have grown tired of hearing a one-sided discourse about the Nile Valley cultures that only acknowledges connections with the Northern Mediterranean, with the Levant, and with Mesopotamia while ignoring or disregarding connections in Africa among other African peoples. So we offer an alternative to the dominant narrative by focusing on the Africanity of those cultures. Collective, we support one another and we collaborate in a scholarly activism, which takes many forms. Beyond giving talks and publishing research, we also consult with and work with cultural institutions and anyone who wants to consider these cultures from an African-centered perspective. We are developing community programming with social justice aims. We are collaborating with teachers on curricula and with a diverse array of people who interpret and present these cultures to others. So architects, artists, and others who reach out to tell us about their work and to ask about ours. So for anyone listening today, if this sounds like you, we'd love to hear about your work. Please reach out to us by visiting us at Nile Valley Collective.org and fill out the contact form. So first, I'd like to ask all of the members to introduce themselves. I'll begin real quickly. My name is Vanessa Davies. I am an Egyptologist and I work on early 20th century contributions of scholars of African descent to the disciplines of Egyptology and new biology, specifically people who were living in the US in the early 20th century. I didn't hear who you said, but I'll go next. My name is Deborah Hurd. I am a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago in Anthropology. My area is Nubian archaeology. My current research involves looking at the second Kushite kingdom, so the Napotin and Merawitic periods of the Kushite kingdom, looking at the inscriptions and iconography. My entry point into Nubia really was through Egyptology, so looking at Egyptian texts and finding out about Nubia, this area that I did not know about and had not heard about previously. And I started doing research on all of the archaeological cultures, starting from basically the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods and moving up towards the colonizations by Egypt, but also the 25th dynasty. And so I ended up doing my research on the second Kushite kingdom because there are inscriptions, so my research combines looking at doing translations in addition to the archaeology. Thanks. Salianne, can you go next? Yes, of course. My name is Salianne Ashton, and I have a PhD in Egyptology from the University of London. From 2002 to 2015, I was the senior assistant keeper in the Department of Antiquities at the Fitzwilliam Museum, which is part of the University of Cambridge in England. I had curatorial responsibility for ancient Egypt and also Sudan, Nubia. During this time, I worked very closely with my colleagues at the Sudan National Museum, and this was with regard to interpreting the Fitzwilliam Museum collections. And I also undertook a two-year fieldwork and community focus project exploring Nubian cultural heritage. In the past, since 2003, I'd also run outreach programs in English prisons, and I used my research on Nubia to develop a series of prison-based programs. These included an accredited course on the history of Nubia, rehabilitation workshops exploring Black identities, and cultural awareness training for prisoners and staff. And in 2019, I completed a second PhD on juvenile offending and psychology, and I now focus on this area of research. But I remain involved with the study of ancient Egypt and Sudan and its dissemination through the Nile Valley Collective. Thanks, and Stuart. So I'm Stuart Tyson Smith, and I'm a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and not so far from Berkeley, but sadly can't be there in person for obvious reasons. And my interest in Nubia comes through Egyptology, but also anthropological archaeology. So my PhD is actually in archaeology from UCLA. I started off excavating in Egypt, but then got interested in Nubian archaeology from finding a collection from the Aswan High Dam salvage campaign in the collections of the Fowler Museum of Cultural History at UCLA. And so I've been working on that material for some time, but that got me interested in excavating in Sudan. And so my first trip to Sudan was in 1996. And after some survey, archaeological survey, I started excavating at Tombos in 2000, along with Professor Michelle Bouzon, who at that point was a graduate student, actually, and we now are colleagues who is a bioarchaeologist. We've been excavating in a kind of colonial cemetery that also transitioned into a post colonial era. And recently, another graduate of UCSB, Muhammad Ali Muhammad Farooq Ali, who's now a professor at Africa International University in Khartoum is also a co-director on that project. And I've been working with, you know, Sudanese colleagues and the rest of the colleagues in Sudan has been a really, really a great pleasure. And we found some really interesting things. Great. And unfortunately, Kamani Nukusi is not here at the moment. I've just had a text message from him. He's having problems. He can't join the Zoom meeting. So I've just recent him the information. So hopefully he might be with us shortly. Oh, great. That's wonderful. So when he comes, we will ask him to introduce himself. But for now, I think perhaps we should get started with our discussion. So Sally, and perhaps you and I can sort of kick this off talking about knowledge practices, the social practices that are the foundations of the work that we do. I feel and I don't, I don't want to speak for all of us together. So I will speak for myself and then you all chime in, whether whether you agree or disagree. But I feel that so many of us are our area of expertise is the Nile Valley, whether it's, it's the northern or southern areas of the Nile Valley. But when we do this work, we have in mind, much, much bigger questions questions that are relevant. In our lives today and so Sally and you're you're specifically I think, and have been for a long time been making these connections so can you talk to us a little bit about how you take your area of expertise both of your areas of expertise and and sort of push back against structures whether they be disciplinary structures in in academia or structures that we see in society around us. Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is where obviously my background is is in museums. And I think this is perhaps why I may sort of differ slightly from sort of mainstream academia. I think we have a tendency, and this is always really concerned me. We're obviously specialists in a particular field. I think I certainly recognize that that we're quite restricted in terms of how we view the Nile Valley because we look at it through our lens, look at it, the lens that we've been taught with. And I think it's really about extending that and being more open to accepting, for instance, community interpretations of the cultures that we specialize in. And I think for me also moving from Egyptology or sociology. Sorry, it sounds like somebody's been murdered outside I don't know if you can hear that I don't think they are I think they're just playing enjoying the sunshine. I might have to to leave the chat and go find out what's going on. But I think really, for me, looking from a social sciences perspective, I'm very much aware that we have to recognize our backgrounds our own backgrounds and how that interprets on how we view the subjects that we specialize in as academics. And I don't really see an awful lot of that happening. When we're looking at ancient cultures. And I think the other thing I'd like to sort of point out one I've been sort of working with community members is that it's really a knowledge transfer for me. It's not about me telling those communities who have a relevant link and an association to the cultures that I study. It's not about telling them what or how we should interpret something it's listening to them and learning about their interpretations too. And for me, when I was a museum curator and certainly all my work in prisons that's been really important and I have to say I valued that and it's made me look at things slightly differently too in terms of how I approach the subject. For me, there is a balance in between sort of being a traditional scholar in a particular area and perhaps just broadening those perspectives. I see that Kamani has been able to join us. I'm so glad you made it. Kamani, we've all gone around and introduced ourselves real quickly. Could you do that for us? You have to unmute yourself though. Thank you very much, Vanessa greetings to everybody on the panel and greetings to all the who are looking and listening. My name is Kimani Nehruze. I studied Caribbean history at the University College London. Then I studied Egyptology University of London. And I've done quite a lot of work in reading the background of Africa from the novels to the history books and so on. I think that will be sufficient for now. Thank you. Go ahead. No, I must apologize. I didn't have the joining instructions for some reason or the other, and I was trying to get in through another window. I do apologize for being late to you and to the audience. And I've been listening to the discussion. I missed only a tiny bit when this was kicking in. Excellent. So maybe you can jump in as well because this is I know something we've talked about together are the ways that we use our work to address larger issues that are maybe outside of the Nile Valley even though our work may focus in that area. Yes, I would say that the larger issues include how we study the Nile Valley and how we tend or many people tend to study the Nile Valley. So what we're looking here is the question of Eurocentrism and the way in which European imperialism colonialism enslavement and other forms of oppression needed a system of values and attitudes and behaviors to justify. And it's important for us to apprehend that the physical, the military violence with which Europe conquered other parts of the world was accompanied by other forms of violence like cultural violence, for example, especially among African people. And then there's intellectual violence, which is our direct concern here. And it is a fact that the dominant tendency is to view the world through the eyes of Europe, and that anything that doesn't match the standards, the behaviors of Europe is deemed to be inferior, negative or something at the start distorted. What emerges from that is at the started view of the world, the Nile Valley fits into that tendency of Eurocentric view of the world. There's one other thing that I need to see here, and that is the view of the world that is dominant does not tolerate African excellence. So anything that is excellent in Africa is deemed not to be African. I mean, this is not always an outright refutation. But when we look at the tendencies, this is what we see, for example, there are some texts that say that they're aliens who are responsible for the building of the Nile Valley Civilization. And we have extreme statements of the problem like that. And I think that that's the large problem that we're dealing with because it doesn't matter which part of Africa you're dealing with, which part of the colonized world you're dealing with. This is the tendency we have to apprehend. And from, oh, sorry, go ahead then. I wanted to add on to that to what both Sally and Kimani have just said. We have to also look at the whole issue of knowledge production. So the colonization period also correlated with the rise of the disciplines so the disciplines are emerging during this time. And I think one of the reasons why we have this kind of disjointed look at the Nile Valley is because the disciplines revolved around certain segments, you know, colonizing basically the African continent colonizing knowledge. Egypt, I mean, Egyptology emerged and claimed dominance over Egypt and then Nubia. And then you have African studies that deals with the other parts of Africa. And then you have Africanist archaeology that sometimes does and does not overlap with African studies, but all of these different views of the continent they don't even interact. So it's like Egyptology feels that African studies has nothing to contribute to the conversation about Egypt and Nubia. And, you know, Egypt and Nubia and Nile Valley has nothing to contribute to conversations about the rest of the continent and that's ridiculous. So we also have to look at these these false boundaries that have been erected around different parts of the continent where people are studying these these areas isolated from each other. I believe it's critical to follow what Deborah just said and identify a couple ways in which that articulates itself in the study of Africa. And one of them is the separation of Egypt from the rest of Africa. I mean, it's ridiculous that you could read many, many books on the study of Egypt and Nubia. And there is no relationship to Africa at all. There are attempts to join them with Mesopotamia and so on. And I'm not saying that that kind of comparison is null and void. But the fact is that Egypt is geographically, culturally and otherwise a part of Africa. And Egypt has always been in sustained and meaningful contact with other parts of Africa. And to disjoint Egypt from Africa is fatal for a complete or proper understanding of either Egypt or the larger Africa to which it belongs. So this is one of the things that we must, I think, begin to react against if we're going to produce a proper study of Egypt. And this means for me relocating the study of Africa in its entire history and culture. This is what Africanology emphasizes because if you do not relocate Egypt in its history and its culture, well, then you're not really studying Egypt in a way that's viable. And to circle back to Nubia as well, we see those kind of colonial structures of classification reproduced with Egypt as the civilizing force because it's not African. So that's why Egypt had to be sort of pulled away from Africa because it confronted and contradicted the kind of racial classifications and the colonial classifications of sort of European civilizing effect. But they map that on to Egypt's relationship with Nubia or ancient Kush. And so all good things in Kush came about because of Egyptian influence, not from internal developments within Kush, but also not part of a kind of long history of interaction and entanglement between the two cultures and civilizations, the two states that emerged in the Nile Valley. So people are always looking for that. It came from Egypt to Nubia and Nubia always appears as this kind of subordinate to Egypt. And that's something that Nubiology has been pushing back against for some time now. But it's still very much embedded within Egyptology. Recently, you know, seen presentations and had conversations with people where they still have that very Egyptocentric perspective towards Nubia as the receiver of these sort of Nubian civilization and not acknowledging the fact that Nubia itself influenced Egyptian civilization as well. So let's, I want to just briefly recap to what I think we have been saying before I say something else. And that's this. Egypt has been set up as this wonderful place that is not African, but its relationship with Nubia is one of a dominant civilization, you know, giving things to these Nubians who perhaps we can't escape. You know, saying that they're really African or there's something African about them, but Egypt definitely not. This view is contradicted by how the Egyptians themselves regarded Nubia. And ancient Egyptians oriented themselves by looking towards Nubia. And they call Nubia the land of our ancestors, Taiyaku land of the ancestral spirits, the place where our placentas were buried. And if we know African culture, we know that this means that that's the homeland, the geographical and psychological homeland. The dark land of the ancient Egyptians. And I think that using the language in this way pours quite a lot of light on how the Egyptians, the ancient Egyptians really view themselves. Yeah, to continue with that, that thought to I think one of the reasons why you often see that is the Egyptian ideology of sort of otherness which is something I've looked at the kind of different dynamics of ethnicity between Egyptians Nubians and the people who surrounded them. But we see this ethnic topos this ethnic stereotype as a legitimating tool of the king, the Egyptian king is the preserver of order for all the enemies that surround them and and that applied to people from western Asia from northern Africa, or Libya, and then from Nubia as well. But Egyptologists have taken that literally and tried to map it on to Egyptian all Egyptian attitudes, not just this very specific ideological context, where it appears. And I think that's partly because of either conscious or subconscious biases, where they see in that a reflection of kind of modern colonial structures. And, and Egypt and admittedly Egyptian ideology is very persuasive I mean they were really good at that with all these different depictions and tropes and other things. We have to realize in the day to day interactions with people, you know, a Nubian coming to Egypt, or a Kushite coming to Egypt would not be necessarily seen as a stranger even. These were people who had a long history of interaction, and, and a lot of that interaction that was was positive it didn't inevitably have to be hostile. And, as Kamani said, there are many features in Egyptian mythology and other things where the action takes place in the south. And so, so Nubia you know that that region was all a part of Egyptian mythology and, and origin stories and so on, in a kind of larger African context and after all, the most intimate relationship that Egypt had with another, another group was southwards in Nubia and Kush. And so, you know, reemphasizing Egypt's embeddedness within Africa but also the importance of Nubia as kind of its its own thing in interaction with Egypt. I think I'd just like to come back and just agree completely with, you know, Kamani and Stuart because this is the issue we're looking at a past culture we can't ask them questions directly in the same way that I can ask questions of living people. We're looking at them through all of these kind of layers through our own personal lens through the layers of how we know where we studied how we studied whether we're focusing on Egypt and then sort of dipping into Nubia. And yet we're not really acknowledging this. Well, and that's true kind of presentations of Nubia and Egypt and museums, but it's also in terms of it seems to me how many courses operates and programs operate in terms of not getting their students to actually understand it. How much do we really know how much of this is a position how much is based on the evidence you know is the evidence as you say Stuart is it sort of one sided is it. We don't really know how people felt or believe what they believed at the time every individual person we have evidence but it's it's limited it's restricted as you say, and I don't think that we're recognizing all of these layers that we sort of try and sort of delve into to try and understand either Nubia or or or Egypt and the Nile Valley and how to work together where we're sort of working from a disadvantage I suppose I personally would really like to see that acknowledged more as you as you know both Kimani and Stuart saying here. I think that one of the other things that we also have to recognize is that we have to examine this within historical context, because it depends on where you start looking at the history. Again, that's where these disciplinary divides come in, because if you start looking at Egypt, you know, at the pre dynastic period, when you have these large centers that are moving towards statehood. Well, okay, but what happened before then, who were the people that moved into the Nile Valley to form these societies. So there is this emphasis on looking at the large civilization. But you lose a lot and I talked to people about you have to look at the societies. So we need to stop looking at quote unquote civilizations. Chris Eric talks about redefining what a civilization is, but we have to start looking at societies. So if you start, you know, decolonizing how we even think about the Nile Valley. You know, looking at the people as societies so you have groups that are migrating. So before there is an Egypt and before there is a new via there are just people moving across the landscape. There is no Egypt there is no new via there is there are no political boundaries. So who are these people these are people that are moving up and down the Nile, they're moving back and forth across the desert region, because it wasn't always a desert. So if you look at it that way then you get you begin to see that the people that become what we consider the Egyptians were migrating groups of people moving across the African landscape, as were the people that we call the new beings. But were they just one group of people, they didn't all in mass move to Egypt and say oh we're Egyptians and all these people like oh, we're going to all move into the this part of the Nile Valley and we're going to be new beings. And that's not how it happened. So you have to look at it in that that historical context. That early history that paleolithic Mesolithic Neolithic history, and then you begin to contextualize it in a different manner. So yeah so so looking at the relationships between quote unquote Egyptians and new beings. They would not have recognized those designations in an earlier period of time they're just people moving back and forth across the landscape, even that that border that we, we impose or got imposed between Egypt and new be a didn't exist. You know, in the earlier period so people are moving back and forth across that border. They didn't recognize themselves as being Egyptian new being they were just people moving across the landscape. So if we start looking at it that way I think we can start kind of interrogating this Egyptian versus new being, you know connection and looking at how those those national identities evolved over time. Yeah, and that that complicates this notion of, you know, Kushite civilization originates somehow from Egypt. When we think about that period of the green Sahara so thousands of years when the Sahara was a vast grassland and another member of the collective David Wengro has discussed this in terms of a kind of primary pastoral complex that existed at that time but the just shared set of symbolic resources. I've actually found evidence of this in my own small way and in my work in Sudan, looking at very early pottery from this period of time would roughly correspond to the pre dynastic and a bit before, but techniques like ripple which is very distinctive kind of decorative technique, other kinds of special forums like the kind of elaborate beaker shape, all of which are distributed widely throughout Northeast Africa out in, in what is today the desert but which then would have been seasonal grasslands and imagine a vast interaction zone and that's not to say it was homogenous, but with the shared cultural features that we see in a shared foundation, especially focused around cattle pastoralism. We see this very strongly in ancient Egyptian civilization see a lot of similarities leading up to the emergence of dynastic civilization I'll just use civilization and critically for the moment but you know what I mean I'm not not sort of ranking it particularly as the emergence of that constellation of cultural features and political structures and similarly with similarly with ancient Nubia or Kush at that time so rather than looking for what an origin of one place or another I think we can see a common origin and connections and this is one way that ancient Egypt ancient Nubia and other even modern cultures today kind of connect to this foundation of this pastoral widespread pastoral complex that existed thousands of years ago, and you can see that you know continuity is and overlaps between all of these different cultures. And it's one of the ways we can embed Egypt within it. It's proper African context. And this is something that Egyptologists have really not quite picked up on I mean there's some who have but I think it's underappreciated. I think there's a man named Rudolph Cooper who was one of the pioneering figures in this in the past, you know, two or three decades, doing these deep desert surveys in the Sahara, presenting at a Nubian conference and I've chatted with him and said wow this is amazing stuff. And he said yeah Egyptologists just seem to be ignoring it and it's interesting. That's the problem with fixating too much on the Nile Valley itself and not recognizing that it's part of a much larger landscape both cultural and physical. And I want to just jump in to add. Since we're, we're doing this body museum lecture series. You can go back and look at Sheila Monroe's lecture where she talked about the that primary cattle pastoral group, and so putting it into a context that we can actually see and understand, but yeah. Part of the way in which we could learn about this perhaps is establishing a chronology. You know, especially what in relation to well things in relation to each other these different developments, and also recognize that we're looking at is dynamism. We just didn't say well, you know, this is the boundary and we remain here as Deborah has been pointing out people were moving, going different places. It's at this orderly for us reality but that's the reality. And it's complicated short pointed this out. Yes, it's complicated but that's the reality. And every time we try to put down boundaries and we make them to shall we say secure on bending, you know, we do damage to what really happened and this is one of the things I believe it's important for us to come away with, but establishing a chronology that says what was for us, what was second what was third or something like that things in relation to each other will help us out greatly. I think maybe here we want to also think about terminology which is something I know we've all discussed in various ways. But the thing that that jumps to my mind immediately is the way that often modern nation states are mapped on to these ancient spaces, in a way that I think those of us here on this call want to move away from that that those should not be conflated into one thing. And that's confusing. I think, especially with regard to Egypt, because we use the word Egypt to refer to both the modern nation state and the ancient culture. And that's the fact that there is a perfectly good word. There are many perfectly good words in the ancient language that one could use but there is one that is used in some modern communities today. And so Sally and I don't know if maybe you want to speak to this. Absolutely. I mean, when I was working on our galleries at the museum I actually did. We had our sort of galleries that were there that you could visit but I worked on a project with prisons to create a virtual gallery and we wanted to do this, although it shouldn't be necessary from an African centered perspective. And I think one sort of simple easy way that we were able to almost decolonize the sort of the idea that this is a European culture in terms of the Egyptian galleries was to actually just call it virtual chemets rather than virtual Egypt. And I think that works really well because we all have these, thanks to Hollywood and other media and how people have learned about Egypt. We have this kind of picture in our minds that Egypt is somehow out of Africa. And I think for me just calling it something different actually kind of destabilizes people slightly and makes people think oh hold on a minute well I'm used to calling this Egypt what is this chemets as we kind of chose for the term to use. And I think also obviously in sort of communities, black communities, the diaspora, African communities, chemets has become synonymous with that African centered approach and I think we need to accept that and also celebrate that too. For me as an academic it's wonderful that people are interested in the subject that I sort of, you know, I research. And I think, you know, it we can use whatever terms we choose but for me it's really important to define what those terms are as well and to explain what they are. As you know Deborah was just kind of saying just think you know, where are we situating this wherever you know we impose these boundaries and yeah okay that's that's hard to escape we all work as parts of now by the collective to to avoid that but I think we need to actually when we're using these terms to start by defining what we mean by them, why we're using one term over another term just so everybody understands because what I define as new beer or new bien perhaps isn't what somebody else sees as new beer or new bien. I think the other issue around using the term kind of Egypt and and you know I've seen sort of the term new bien and this reference to ancient new beer almost used as a weapon to to remove Egypt from Africa, you know I've seen this in museums. I've seen this in the media on social media and an example of it would be, you know referring to and this is a sort of a panel in a museum, you know the new beer was the sort of the conduit between Egypt and the rest of Africa they're all parts of Africa. And I know that you know I'm sure my my colleagues will have something to say about the term of the use of the term sub Saharan as well. I don't know if Deborah wants to come in and I know this is something that we've discussed before. Yeah, so there's just a need to problematize all of these these terms have been used by anthropologists archaeologists historians and Egyptologists for looking at the African continent, and that that sub Saharan is one of the big ones, you know, because that the addition of that sub is not just that it's beneath the Sahara, but it was used sub to bring to mind also subhuman. So there was this this way of kind of conflating this this way of diminishing the people that lived quote unquote, you know below the Sahara, because they're supposed to be quote unquote black, and then the people that live above the Sahara you know they're supposed to be white a part of the white race that's way. Reisner, not Reisner, but James Henry breasted in a textbook he basically made all of that part of the great white race. So, if we're decolonizing we have to decolonize that terminology that would conflate or or map racial categories on to the geography. And also that that that that sub Saharan, if we're talking about people that live in South, you know South Africa, then then say South Africa if you're talking about people that live west, say West, because we say North Africa. So if you're going to designate north, then you can designate southeast and west. So, so we have to be consistent that that that terminology but we also have to be very critical of the terminology that we're using. One of the other concepts is specifically dealing with Nubia is the black pharaohs that one and that's that's my particular time period so that one annoys me to know and it's like okay so what you're suggesting is that the all the rest of the pharaohs are white, because that that's that's the implication, you know, so if you're saying that these, and again I Chris Eric his book on the civilizations of Africa, it's a textbook, but he starts out by problematizing terms that are used in science to looking at African history. And so that's a good way to think about approaching is like we started from the very beginning by problematizing terms. So when you talk about the 25th dynasty, if you want to talk about the fact that that whole dynasty was Kushite, then you should say the 25th dynasty from Kush or the Kushite dynasty. The black pharaohs is not that doesn't work, because you're implying that there were no other pharaohs that were of Nubian blood, and you're also implying that the Egyptian pharaohs were all white. So, again, we have to problematize and look at the terms that we're using. And if they don't work then we need to stop using them. And this, this thing that both of you are talking about this separate, you know, as mechanisms to separate Egypt from Africa. And I you see this embedded in Egypt logical literature even way too recent things where they talk about Egypt as being, you know, in but not of Africa. And reacting to that I decided, well, let's just see. And so I mapped out all the connections in Egypt and Africa and all the connections Egypt had in the Mediterranean world. And guess what, there are more extensive connections within Africa than there are between Egypt and Western Asia, or the broader, you know, East, East Mediterranean literals. You know, this notion that Egypt is somehow not interconnected is based on this sort of hyper focus of denial. But we know that the people were crossing the deserts they were interacting they were going as far as the Horn of Africa to Eritrea, perhaps Somalia, both by land and by the Red Sea, sea ocean trips. And we're penetrating deep probably into Chad, and certainly into Darfur and certainly had a robust relationship with, with a Nubian or Kushite civilization in the south. And so when you look at that it just completely, you know, contradicts those old fashioned models that separate Egypt from Africa. And so I absolutely agree with Debra and Salianio that it's just infuriating when you see these this terminology like black pharaohs, which immediately posits this kind of fundamental divide, but also things like Egypt's interactions with Africa. You often see this kind of thing. And it just reflects this attitude that Egypt is interacting with Africa. No, it's not it's part of Africa. It's embedded within an African context. And until people come to that idea and the Nubia is a fundamental part of that. Until we, you know, we really absorb that idea. We're not going to get anything like a true picture of both civilizations. I'm wondering aloud, whether the fact that North Africa, including Egypt became colonized by Arab people in a relatively late stage of what we're talking about doesn't contribute to this notion of difference. Yeah, I'll take that up to you. It's, I think, I think it does and it, but it also, it also helps to explain the kind of disciplinary boundaries that we see, because, because Egypt was ultimately conquered by Arab armies, although it's important to recognize that although of course, you know, some peoples from Western Asia came and settled in Egypt that didn't start with the Arab conquest that started long before. And there's always been gene flow going that direction. It wasn't this massive replacement of peoples and that applies all across North Africa. The fact that it was absorbed into, for lack of a better term, the Arab world with conversion of not most, not all of the people to Islam has sort of helped reinforce that connection between Western Asia across North Africa. And so when disciplinary boundaries were created as a part of the colonial ventures we've been discussing, that helped reify that divide between North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. And much, much to my annoyance, African studies and Africanists kind of abandoned North Africa as a legitimate form of study and bought into that colonial reification of the North Africa and Sub-Saharan African divide. And then I've had discussions with the Egyptologists. You can see an interesting exchange in my, the talk I gave at Harvard, if you go to the Q&A part, where I had to push back and say, you know, I think Egyptology should be in African studies. It doesn't, you know, there are connections, as Kamani said. I mean, we can recognize that there are interactions and connections with Western Asia, but Egypt is fundamentally African and we need to redress that balance by going that direction, doubling down on Egyptology is embedded within Middle or Near Eastern studies, which is typically where it has lodged. And I think that has created its own kind of dynamic and trajectory that, again, we can trace back to those ties. And some of that's, you know, just the structures of those disciplines continuing on that necessarily, you know, overt but certainly subconscious. And I actually was going to make another point, but now that he's, you brought that up that brought another stream of thought to mind. And that is looking at the history of the way that black scholars in the US and basically in the Western hemisphere because it wasn't just in the US, but there were a few scholars in the Caribbean, specifically Antonia Furman who was in Haiti. But if you look at the late 19th, early 20th century, black scholars and writers were looking at Africa holistically, the history of Africa holistically. And so specifically, if you look at William Leo Hansberry, who basically created the very first program of African studies in the US, it was not Melville Herskovitz, it was William Leo Hansberry. His idea of African history, which also flowed from the writings of Du Bois was that, you know, you have to look at Africa in its entirety. So that's looking when he created his program starting in 1922 at Howard University. You know, he looked at, he started with the tool users. So this is before the Leakeys had actually found, you know, the earliest hominids. He was just looking at tool users, but he was saying that this is where we have to start when we start to talk about African history. We look at the tool users. We look at Egypt. We look at, at the time, you know, it was still Ethiopia. So Ethiopia next zoom and then you look at the kingdoms to the west and you also look to the south, but it was this really holistic view of African history. So the fact that we have this segmented, divided look at the African continent is because of those scholars were disregarded. So their contributions were just totally ignored by mainstream academia. So you have to think if, if, if African studies had developed along the line that Hansberry laid out as opposed to what we get from her scovitz and all the people that came that we're getting all of this government funding to start African studies programs. If we had started along that other trajectory, we would not be having this discussion, because Egypt would be a part of talking about African history, and Nubia would be part of talking about African history we be talking about all of these connections. So again, part of decolonizing is even decolonizing our historical approaches to how we produce knowledge, and that's recognizing. Hey, at some point we kind of we kind of missed the boat. So we need to start breaking down some of these boundaries and having discussions across disciplines and start looking at what are these relationships between the now valley and the West, what are the relationships between the now valley and those societies further south, what are the relationships to the East, whether you know so we have to start making those those kinds of connections, but we're not going to do it if we still stay stuck within these disciplines. We have to start being cross interdisciplinary as they say, but interdisciplinary in a way to start breaking down the disciplines. So thanks for that Deborah, I just want to jump in and say one thing. I was looking at the historiography of Diana, recently, Diana in South America, and what you just said is fairly well articulated by scholars who are and all were writing about Diana and Norman E. Cameron in his book the evolution of the Negro in two volumes 1920s late 1920s and early 1930s talks about African people he used the N word then which is quite acceptable, not acceptable now of course. And he's talking about ancient Egypt. As a part of Africa. George GM James, who is from Guyana we know his famous book stolen legacy. I'm not saying that his view was influenced by Guyana or only by Guyana and we certainly know that he was part of the African centered movement, or what has become the African centered movement in the United States, but he's another example of a guy and he's auto who's done that kind of thing. And of course there's Dennis Williams in this book icon and image. This guy is an archaeologist is an artist, and he's talking about archaeology in Sudan and other parts of Africa, and it's based in the ancient Egypt. And of course, we could just announce Ivan Lancer to me and leave it at that. But I wanted to get back to the point that I was going to make earlier. Oh, sorry. No, no, no, I was. I had said I was going to make another point then but that came up. But going back to we were talking about the relationships between between Egypt and and how those connections are made, you know, they're I think that if you start when we look at the religious rituals. I don't think that we've actually looked at those from an African context. Why does the, where, why does the king or the priest, where the big leopard scan. You know, because that comes from the south like they're no lepers there. That's part of the imports that are bringing in. Why do you have these kind of ritual things. Where do they come from. If, if, if Egypt is not a part of Africa, then why do you have these African things that are part of their rituals. These rituals can, you know they they connect the mortal to the immortal, the natural to the supernatural, but you're using African symbols and African artifacts to do that. So if you're if it's if your culture is not a part of Africa, then that makes no sense. So I think we have to start even looking at what are those those connections because because Egypt has been looked at as not a part of Africa we have not really interrogated those things. I think if we start making, you know, if we say that that's what we're doing, then we have to start interrogating the origins of these things that get used and in order to do that you have to look within the African continent. Well, africanology demands that we view Africa through the perspectives of Africa. And this means the culture of Africa. And my study of libation, I think helps to detail what you're saying Deborah, you know, and libation is something that's a life throughout Africa from as long as we could apprehend Africa. And I think that libation has been part of African culture. I mean, that's it. And there are many other things just not only the leopard skin, but they fly with that many potentates in Africa use today you see that in ancient Egypt. There are many other things and I think this is a fertile way of proceeding in our attempts to understand the Nile Valley and Africa as a generality, because there's so many continuities that we could apprehend once we begin by looking at things as they really were. And one, you know, one way to do this is from a kind of ethnoarcheological perspective, and a fundamental underpinning of ethnoarcheology is you look at cultures that are as closely related to the one that you're trying to study and to gain insights into. And if we compare ancient Egypt to your Middle Eastern or West Asian civilization. We see a lack of similarities between kingship is distinctive Egyptian religion is distinctive. And when we compare that to modern nylotic groups or historic nylotic groups. We also, we see a lot of similarities exactly what Kimani and Deborah have been talking about in all of us I think in one way or another. And, you know, things like, but Kimani listed also something like it's straightforward as the practice of using a headrest. And this is something that runs right across the continent of Africa and certainly is very strongly featured in Northeast African cultures. This is something we see very strongly embedded in both Egypt and Nubia. Do we see it in Western Asia? Not that I know, you don't. So it, it, it shows it. And again, I Henry Frankfurt it was the kind of early proponent of seeing a kind of what he called an African substratum that the origins of ancient Egypt were to be sought now within Northeast Africa. And, you know, there's some flaws it was in 19 late 1940s. So, you know, there are a few flaws and interpretation but actually I think he was he was surprisingly open to that idea in a way that Egyptologists at the time were definitely not. But I think, you know, that in the work of earlier scholars as well as as Deborah's mentioned, kind of points the way to where Egyptology and Nubiology should be looking. And that goes back to this, this, you know, foundation in this, this in cattle pastoralism, and a lot of these practices. And there are lots of examples of these things where we see strong parallels the wasseptile scepter and its connection with with male, you know, the power of a bull and so on. The king is strong bull and all this kind of symbolism surrounding cattle and royal power. And just the nature of Egyptian kingship masking in Egyptian religion and something else we find quite widespread in Africa, not so much in, say, Mesopotamia. And so, so, so again, it's, you know, we've been kind of misdirected to look towards Western Asia for parallels to understanding ancient Egypt but in fact what we should be doing is looking in Northeast Africa and other parts of the continent. I had just like to come I'm really happy that you mentioned headrest because several years ago museum we had an exhibition on East African headrests where we had once remained in Egypt and and sort of more contemporary. And of course, if you say Stuart they worked perfectly because you know they're connected. And some of them were so difficult to tell is we had to get some radio carbon data we weren't sure whether they were modern whether they were ancient and you know the same with hair combs but I think you know here again museums to me are quite problematic because we you know for both that exhibition and the Afro combs exhibition looking at the history of African hair combs. We borrowed from institutions you know who who very generously let us use their their collections for the exhibitions. As soon as the exhibition ends, all of those objects go back to separate departments in their own museum, for instance, and they're now physically separated they're not displayed together they're not even stored together. So even if you want to go and look at these objects, you know, in material culture as a scholar you end up having to make two or three appointments with different departments trying to negotiate access. And it's almost as if, you know, people don't want us to make those connections. And I think that really needs to change. Yeah, again, that's part of that that disciplinary structure that pulled Egypt out of Africa so they're not part of the African galleries. They're part of the, you know, Near Eastern or Middle Eastern galleries, instead and that creates that reifies those distinctions and divides. And the classic example of this too is, is the famous head of Augustus from Maroway that was found under the threshold. You know, after a Kushite queen defeated the Roman army and brought it back in and as a kind of, you know, destruction of Augustus beheading him and then trotting upon him symbolically. Do you find that in the Nubian Gallery, the British Museum? No, it's in the classical gallery. So again, it just shows how things get pigeonholed in ways that remove them from their proper context. That's something as an archaeologist for archaeology context is everything. And it really should be for, you know, be for everything, whether you're dealing with historical or archaeological evidence or ideally integrating the two and combining that with the, at the graphic studies and so on to gain a better understanding of the past. I want to take this moment since Sally Anne brought up museums to make a pitch, and I've been remiss in my last couple of lectures. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has the second largest Nubian collection in the world. The first one is in cartoon, which is where you'd expect it to be. The second largest one is in Boston, but it's not on display. Now, it's not always been that way. So back, I actually interned at the MFA in 2004. There was a Nubian Gallery. So the Nubian material was taken off exhibit to remodel the gallery. And while in the process of remodeling, other things got moved into the gallery. So the Nubian Gallery lost out to these other objects. So now we have the second largest collection in the basement. And it's been there. My plug is for the Carter family Nubian Egyptian wing, I used to say gallery and I say wing of the MFA. We have to keep pressuring the MFA to make space for the Nubian collection. So this is my plug for the Carter family. Jay-Z and Beyonce Nubian Egyptian wing of the Museum of Fine Arts. Deb, you're amazing. And I know you're going to make that happen. So we have a little over 10 minutes, I think before we're going to start the Q&A. And before we sort of move on to our last area of discussion, which was different initiatives that we're all working on. Before we move there, I want to circle back to you Deb, because I know there's something you really, you had mentioned to me, you really want to be sure that we talk about today. And this relates again to this question of accurate terminology that we've been discussing, and that is the word Nehesi. So do you want to take a few minutes to talk about that? I put an arrow next to it, like, we have to get to that. Yeah, so, I mean, I have heard even recently, someone say that Pah Nehesi meant the black. Okay, so let's clear that up. Nehesi does not mean Negro because that's what the Egyptologists, you know, in the 50s and 60s interpreting, they would say the Nehesi meant Negro. It does not mean the black because there is no, you know, black racial designation being used by the Egyptians in writing. Nehesi means it is designation for these people that live in that area that we call Nubia, but it implies that they are different. And I'll use the word tribe, even though Chris Erick said we should not use that, but tribe meaning a different small groupings of people living in Nubia. So when you see Nehesi sometimes and there are inscriptions in some of the Nubian, the temples in Nubia by Egyptians that list the different Nehesi you. And again, going back to another body lecture, Salim Paraji's lecture, which was the first one. He talks about the different groups of Nehesi that came together to fight the Egyptians. So Nehesi is not a racial designation. It is not talking about the blacks is not talking about the Negroes. It is talking about these groups of people that live in Nubia. And so you could think of them as ethnic groups or tribes of Nubians. So sometimes the word Nehesi gets used to talk about them collectively. But the fact that they are used to talk about specific Nehesi signifies that they're talking about different groupings of people. So yeah, so definitely we that's one of the terms that we should not we should stop misdefining, you know, to say that it's a racial designation is incorrect. I think it might be important also to recognize the unvoiced comparison with, you know, Egypt, the supposed the white Egypt. So you have these darkies from down south. Yeah, it builds on that notion. And, you know, it's misplaced, as you said, and the cultural significance of that, again, is what I think we should be more into it when we try to understand this particular groupings. Yeah, exactly. I think it's a product just like Kamani was pointing out of that reification of, you know, sort of white Egypt black Nubia. And for me, I've looked at it through the lens of ethnicity, not in the sense of, you know, the sort of theoretical idea of ethnicity as opposed to race. And that's as a situationally contingent fluid concept. In this case, it would be an other description by Egyptians defining, like Deborah was saying, a group, sort of disparate group groups of people. And it seems to be a more generic term, ethnic term that the Egyptians use to contrast between themselves and the southern, but also, as Deborah was saying, it's not always north south. In this case, it's also east west, because groups like the Medjay were included in this definition of the Nehesi and they were ranging throughout the eastern desert, including opposite the Nile Valley where Egyptian civilization was flourishing at the time. So it seems to be a more generic reference and then and then you can dial down into these specific ethnic groups and that's a common feature of ethnicity cross culturally, is that it's multi scalar. And so it goes from larger groupings to smaller groupings. It's also not only self defined but other ascripted. And it's a part of it, you know, defining itself and other and in oppositional categories, but it shouldn't be mapped onto modern racial categories. Like we often, you know, to often see it still today and quite recently, and there, you know, people create these false etymologies, trying to create derivation of the word and there are a couple of good explanations that one can use for the origin of the term I like the idea of, it has an association with the word to sting. And so I like that as millions were feigned as archers so it's stinging from archery, but also there's a possibility it could have to do with magical incantations is another word that's related. So we don't need to come up with these kind of gymnastics to create, you know, this sort of blackness, which didn't as Deborah pointed out didn't exist conceptually in ancient Egypt. So in the last few minutes before the Q&A, I thought it would be a good idea to quickly discuss some of the initiatives that were focused on and I sort of mentioned these in the in the beginning. But briefly, maybe, you know, Sally Ann could talk about restorative justice maybe Deb could talk about breaking down barriers between disciplines in the Academy. Kamani, we've discussed making connections with other cultures within Africa in, you know, your book on libation is a great example of that and we mentioned Selim Faraji's work as well, which is a great example of that. So, so yeah and like the last five minutes or so would, would any of you like to jump in and talk about these and these initiatives that the collective as a whole is is very much in support of and perhaps one or two of us might join together in some of these to support one another. Shall I begin. Yes. Yeah, so as I was saying at the start. I worked in the criminal justice system, mainly in England for the past kind of 20 years, working predominantly but not exclusively with African black British and Caribbean cultural groups within our criminal justice system. And I've found that actually using ancient cultures, both from the Nile Valley are a really good way of people exploring their identity, their contemporary identities, exploring history, exploring how history can be distorted how our identities and how we view ourselves can be distorted by Eurocentric interpretations of African histories. And that's something that now with my second PhD I really want to take forward and explore ways in which we can use the history of the Nile Valley and those cultures within the both the juvenile which is where I specialize now but also wider criminal justice systems. So I'm going to be exploring that and hopefully working with some of my colleagues and friends from Nile Valley Collective on on sort of developing that further in the next year or so. Like other members of this collective. My work is directly concerned with what's happening on the streets, so to speak, and my research on libation came out of activity in London, where people were demanding, you know, what, what's this all about we want to know more about this. We want to recapture our culture and live our culture I mean you have all kinds of statements about pursuing and living African identity. And I think this is an important part of validating what we're doing, I'm not claiming that this is the way of making meaning from the study of the Nile Valley, but it is a desperately important one, because people have been robbed of so much of their identity, which has been distorted and raised and so on. I think it's important for us to be able to connect to what's happening with large numbers of people in society, and this is definitely one way and it's not only libation. I think that the exhibition on Afro comms has had tremendous impact upon people and this is one of those things that will always be lively and alive. I don't care where you you you located people are going to be interested in that. And these are ways of showing how meaningful the work that we're doing really really is. I want to say, in the past almost a year now. I've been working with the group, and we formed an organization the William Leo handsberry society, and we're dedicated to increasing the number of African descended people that actually go into the fields of the Nile Valley studies would be Egyptology Nubian studies also looking at ancient Ethiopia. And we hope to extend to other parts of Africa where we're concentrating on on the eastern end right now. But our hope is that in bringing in those marginalized voices those voices that don't normally enter into those spaces that we can have to have some of these conversations but we can also reach out and try to connect to people that are doing work in other parts of the continent to help help them to understand that we all need to be in conversation with each other. So the lectures that I've been doing recently. I've made sure that I talk about the connections between African studies and Egyptology, because I hope that people would get to understand that we need to be in conversation with each other. So that's that's where I am with, you know, breaking down those those boundaries. I tell people that I situate myself at the crossroads of anthropology archaeology Egyptology Nubian studies African studies and so people like that's a bit interdisciplinary. Yes, intentionally, it's interdisciplinary, because I want to break down those boundaries so that's what I think that we should start moving towards is being interdisciplinary in order to start breaking down the boundaries between disciplines. That's a wonderful statement of the African concept of Holism, where you're everything that you are simultaneously, and you really don't stop being that you don't stop. You don't become one thing for the sake of study that we academics usually try to do we isolate the part of reality, because we want to see it and that's useful. But I think sometimes we forget that that's only one aspect of a greater reality that's always there. Let me just mention very quickly that at Temple University. We're building an anti racist Institute, and that part of our job as we see it is restoring the correct or viable understanding of history restoring people's history and the culture to them. And this is one aspect of what we're hoping to do and maybe we could have some conversations of this collective interacting with people there and I'm looking forward to all of us contributing to the programming of the anti racist Institute. Thank you everybody for your thoughts and your wisdom and your direction. This has been a wonderful conversation. If you're ready, I'm going to give you a few questions from the audience. And some of these are directed at the entire panel so whoever feels moved, you have to answer feel free to do so. They're directed a specific person I will let you know. And so I want to start off with more of a general question from the audience that says, the series has addressed connections between Nubia and Egypt. Were there significant agent connections between Nubia and coastal Western Africa, specifically areas of the forced African diaspora to the Americas. This is open to anyone. So this is one of those areas that needs further research. And again, so Western Africa, especially coastal areas that has been relegated to African studies and Africanist archaeology, which is not in conversation with Egyptology. So, that is where we're moving towards to have those conversations begin to try to connect that research that's going on in different parts of the continent to try to see if to make those connections. And so we do have a student. There's a graduate student at the University of Toronto, and this of my voice and she is looking at the relationship between the region of Meraway, and some of the kingdoms to the west those developing kingdoms to the west. That is the direction that we're moving in. We haven't gotten there because they're there's been that that disconnect, but we're trying to break down that disconnect so that yeah so those those types of questions those types of research questions. That's where we're moving towards in the future. Those connections exist. And I think one place that we could start is with the stories of the people in West Africa, many of whom say we come from the East we come from the Northeast. And when you drill down in many of the creation stories, you find the Nile Valley confronting you. And I agree with Deborah. This is one of the directions in which the study of Africa will benefit, because we have to take up the existing connections and find out more about them and some things may surprise us. And here's one of them that I play around with the name Sankara. This is an ancient Egyptian name we hear about Thomas Sankara yes he's not exactly on the coast of West Africa. But here's a guy with a perfect ancient Egyptian name. And when you go to Ghana, and so on and you hear some other names like set and Ankara. So you begin to see those connections and these names don't exist in isolation from other continuities with the culture of the ancient Nile Valley of course there are changes. But I think that the kind of study you're talking about Deborah will not only outline these connections but explain them and show how people moved from one place to another place, and did something that human beings always do, which is take their culture with them, although they may have to transform that culture in a new and different environment. And add add another one on to that so we know that the supreme God in Egypt was a moon. And so in the mirror wittic it's spelled, even with an eye so Emani so we have, you know, Emani, whatever. The mirror wittic language has not been deciphered. You know so we don't have a Rosetta stone so we don't know we know how to to transliterate, you know to spell out the words but what does what does they what do they mean what's a grammatical structure. And so archaeologists I mean a linguist have been you know this has been a thing for like over 80 years. So actually going on 100 years now, trying to decipher, looking at different parts of, you know, different languages. It's not related to eat Egyptian. But one thing that I found it was really fascinating I was reading this book about the Rwanda genocide. And they were talking about this person who had escaped and he had been captured and brought back and they were trying him for war crimes. And the name was Emani something his last name, and they translated, God is something and I was like, what. Here Rwanda, Emani means God. Have we looked at this connection, because the people from the who to and the two to both say that they're not from there. And who to say that they migrated from somewhere further north I was like, has anybody tried to see if there's connection like further south because that is along the Nile is along the upper this is the this is where the now starts. So have we investigated, you know all the areas up, going upstream from the Nile. Again, so these are some of the connections that, if you start looking inland, you might be able to make. Yeah, that actually leads really well into the next question we've been talking about contextualizing Egypt and Africa but there is a larger conversation about how modern Egyptians identify themselves. Another question from our audience is, how are we as modern Egyptologists or, you know, everyone else all of the other. It just that we have mentioned. How do we deal with modern Egyptian stating that they are not African. The first thing to point out is to take a step back and to say, in the same way we've been talking about these ancient cultures aren't monolithic entities, the, to talk about Egyptians as a monolithic identity today is is also, it's over simplifying the situation. So I think first we have to acknowledge that there's a variety of perspectives among Egyptians today and actually I could point to a page on the Nile Valley collective website that was authored by Professor Hassan. And there you can read his statement about his view of Egypt in its African context and, and I mean it's an amazing essay that he wrote because it touches on ancient material it touches on modern material. I mean everything from like, I'm skeletal and ceramic evidence from antiquity to, you know what Nasser was doing in terms of like formation of an Arab identity but also forming an African identity and so that is one person's perspective. That's quite well developed in this essay that he wrote. But in terms of of how modern a modern person a modern Egyptian might identify I mean I think we respect. I respect someone's self identification, and I acknowledge there are multiple self identifications that exist in a in a modern group of people I don't know if anyone wants to add anything to that. I would say that the formation of identity has to do with choices, and it's important for people to make their own choices, but those choices ought to be based upon fairly accurate information. And a modern Egyptian is somebody who, for the most part, would have had a different ancestry from the great majority of people we talk about when we talk about ancient Egypt, because you're talking about people who are Arabs are at least substantially Arabs and people who are not Arabs and there are kinds of permutations here. And I think it's important for us to acknowledge that it's in it's very, very important for people to know their identity and this knowledge is what should be accurate and it's important that people should be making their choices. So, for me, there is a distinction between the ancient Egyptians and the modern Egyptians, usually, but not only. And again, having regard to some of the things we said before, many of these boundaries are porous. So you find communities of people who are for all intents and purposes related to our continuities of ancient Egyptians living in modern Egypt today, but that's not the case in the majority of cases. And here's why I would have to disagree. So we've been very agreeable so far. And I, although I respect your position, I have to go on story from the point of view of archaeology and particularly bioarchaeology, all of the evidence points towards continuity of population. Now, the thing about population genetics and population gene flow and that kind of thing is, again, you can't draw a circle around a group of people and and identify a distinct group that doesn't have a relationship with people outside. And it all flows together people move around people get together and have children. And so, so what we see is graduated change over, you know, over distances sometimes those those distinctions are cliental. So these are adaptations evolutionary adaptations to things like sunlight which is why in northern Egypt you see people who are a bit lighter. People are quite dark and in new be a darker still. And this is, you know, what one would expect from a Northeast African population. There was certainly gene flow coming in from from Western Asia. There were some Arabs who came in, but it didn't ultimately affect the population at least from the point of biological anthropology that profoundly so I don't think we need to say that the ancient modern Egyptians I mean in specific cases as you say it's it's complicated. So there certainly are some people who would trace lineages back to Western Asia in a stronger way from the Arab conquest. But there wasn't a massive replacement of population which one does some sometimes see as an argument. There's no reason to say it state that the ancient Egyptians are modern Egyptians by and large aren't the descendants of ancient Egyptians. You can certainly see it in a place like Luxor, for example, where, you know, the people look like Africans to me, but that also doesn't mean that that we can't, you know, acknowledge the African nature of ancient civilization, while still acknowledging the the cultural heritage of modern Egyptians. Now identity is I think some we've mentioned to is fluid, it's situationally contingent. And so we have to respect that some Egyptians might not identify as African. But as the case with factory Hassan who's one of those distinguished scholars within Egyptology, and broadly speaking archaeology is, you know, he obviously has a different view. So and there are, you know, the the viewpoints of modern Egyptians are quite diverse, similar in Nubia, and more broadly, Sagan as well. And that's kind of a different question. Again, we have to respect it but in terms of looking at origins. What we see is gene flow people moving around but also largely a continuity of population. Personally, I would characterize the modern Egyptians as African as well. And, you know, descendants of their ancestors in the same way of Nubians, there's another idea that Nubians came into a certain point to the Nile Valley, and replace the population and again this, this all goes back to these older migrationist theories about change in a way that that I find somewhat troubling. You know, Petri's idea of not only the dynastic rates but he saw all the long history of Egypt as a product of different peoples moving in. And we see this even in modern new biology with the idea of Nubians coming in at a point in replacing Merawites, which I don't think is necessary at all. So anyway, that's my two cents. Okay, and actually with that we are out of time. Unfortunately, we weren't able to get to all the questions, but I think we've had a wonderful discussion regardless. So I want to thank you all for your time. This not only concludes the discussion but concludes the entire lecture series new perspectives on ancient Nubia, which was hosted by the Bade Museum of biblical archeology and the archeological research facility at UC Berkeley. Thank you to all of our contributors of the Nile Valley Collective for sharing your time and your expertise with ourselves and the wider audience. Thank you also to our viewers for your interest in scholarship and history and your efforts in engaging in reconceptualizing our past. And please make sure to check on our social media both on the ARV and the Bade for upcoming exciting public programming and with that.