Black African Origins of Ancient Egypt | The Debate is Over

We don't have Egyptians of European descent in Egypt. We have a population which is basically a mixture of ancient Egyptian blacks who intermarried with Arabs right after the Arab conquest. The ancient Egyptian population was brown and black before the Arab conquest. But before the Arab conquest came the Greeks. The ancient Egyptian population was in Egypt for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptian population was brown and black and the Greeks came in 300 BC and they started to intermarry with the local population. And then the Romans came and ruled from 70 BC until they were conquered by the Arabs and kicked out by the Arabs in the 7th century. And these people intermarried with the Egyptian Copts and they made the pigmentation of the Egyptians, the Copts, much lighter because of this intermarriage with Europeans. Egyptians are black. The real Egyptians are black because the real Egyptians they are real Africans. So those people in lower Egypt you see in Cairo, Alexandria and Fallahans area, they were mixed between the Turkish, Mamluks, French, English, Romans. So those people who came to attack Egypt at that time couldn't come to Upper Egypt, to the south which still had the same color, our dark color, our black color. So they couldn't mix with us. The Nubians and Egyptians were not white. They are black Africans. I like to follow the evidence and to me I didn't care about which race of humans it was at the time. But you did point out that Egyptian guidebooks that were popular had some very racist descriptions about the attitude of Egyptians toward different racial groups. Yes, you'll see even in current guidebooks probably a kind of a hierarchical description of the views of the races, yes. So many Egyptians today who probably think of themselves primarily as Mediterranean people, even though they're on the African continent, look down at the idea that they're a very powerful ancient culture might have emerged out of black Africa. Yeah, and it's clearly obviously a modern ethnic view or ethnic mindset that leads to that kind of thinking, not any evidence from ancient history. History was written by the victor and the victorious will often attempt to wipe out every trace of their enemy's existence. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of lost civilizations that have succumbed to collapse, invasion or amalgamation and a plethora of lost languages. Miseducation and indoctrination has long been a tool of conquerors to influence the hearts and minds of a population. Under our current system of capitalism, this strategy was instrumental in the Western world's rise to glory. A new tactic was employed for the first time in recorded history, which was chattel slavery. Slavery has existed since the beginning of time and indentured servitude has been employed widely. But this new iteration of slavery was extremely cruel and barbaric by comparison. During the 15th and 16th centuries, European royalty was vastly outnumbered by commoners and slaves. In order to maintain power, they created a caste system to keep people divided. It is in this space where European elites conceptualized the contemporary concepts of class and race. Northern Italians didn't even think that Southern Italians were Italians. The Germans hated everybody and everybody hated their ass right back, right? There was no team called white, no race called white, but all of a sudden, in the middle of the 1600s, there was. Why? Why was it suddenly necessary to create this thing called the white race? Well, because rich people can count. That's why. And so rich folks looked around, the ones that owned all the land, you know, in the colonies, the colonial elite looked around and they realized something, that they were heavily outnumbered by African enslaved folks, by European indentured servants who were just one level above a slave, or other Europeans who weren't technically indentured servants, but they were still peasants, didn't have any money, didn't have any land, and they could do the math. They added it up and they were like, damn, we got to figure out a way to split these folks apart from one another or they're going to rise up and take our stuff, right? Because after a while, these black folks who were enslaved Africans and these quote-unquote white folks who were poor Europeans are going to figure out they're all getting played by these rich people, right? So ultimately, the rich figure out they got to come up with some way to get somebody in that group on their team. The easiest thing is to get the poor Europeans. In order for this new form of slavery to operate smoothly, they had to completely dehumanize Africans, so they were seen as nothing more than animals. They had to convince the world that they were savages and had no culture or civilization. They did this by creating the myth of the dark continent to justify colonialism and legitimize the enslavement of Africans. They created the term sub-Saharan to suggest black Africans were only present below the Sahara. But if you look closely at the historical record, you will see that they are in fact indigenous to the entire continent and prevalent within the Mediterranean as well. When referring to black Africans, the term sub-Saharan is also slightly inappropriate for the period, which is why I'm not using it, as black people weren't only present south of the Sahara Desert, and there is a lot of evidence for that. In the classical period instead, the Mediterranean is seen as a unifying sea, used and exploited by Greeks and Phoenicians, just to mention a few, to colonize, but also to trade. The Mediterranean Sea is a connection to Africa, not a barrier. Now because of this, the Cretan world had a documented presence of black people, which we find in the Minoic civilization, and the same can be said also about the Mycenaean world of mainland Greece. We see black individuals in Minoan representations of the Bronze Age, and because of the extreme diversity of representations, musicians, warriors, traders, etc., we can understand that they had entered fully into the Minoan social fabric. And as we said, we have a very similar situation with the Mycenaean world, starting from the 14th century BC, and by the 9th century, this would be commonplace. Modern concepts of race and ethnicity can be tricky, because the ancients did not consider skin color the source of identity. The term black, as it is regarded today, denotes race, and was created to sow division. In the old world, your tribal ties or nation state was the dominant factor of how one viewed himself and others. Skin color was but a superficial trivia. Darwin essentially suggested that in order to say that a species was subdivided into subspecies, which would be the equivalent of races, that the populations involved would have to be almost incipient species. So, a high degree of substructuring. I can tell you that you cannot use the idea of any difference or being able to tell a difference, either at the molecular level or physical level, as indicative of or requiring the use of the term race. So, I say there are populations, but no races, and I'm not the first person to say that. All of these people are connected to each other, and dividing them in a way that implies a level of discreteness that the term race implies is inappropriate. Were there people with darker skin, lighter skin, curlier hair, less curly hair? Yes, there were. There's no evidence that they had a theory of human variation that would be commensurate or similar to notions of race as they were developed in Europe. When Narmer came from the South, he conquered the Delta region, uniting Lower and Upper Kemet. Upper Kemet would serve as the political, spiritual, and power center of the nation. Lower Kemet in these times were inhospitable, and the Delta was but a wet marshland. But in the seasonally dry channels of the Second Cataract, early African farmers learned to manage parts of the river's annual flood. This knowledge would be transferred into Kemet's wide floodplain, giving rise to the early Nakata civilization in Upper Kemet. They used the thousands of years of accumulated knowledge to accurately predict the flood season and transfer the wet marshlands of the Delta into the world's most fertile farmland. They would also use this knowledge to build the Great Pyramids. Their mastery of sacred geometry allowed them to align the Great Pyramids nearly perfectly along the cardinal points, north, east, south, and west, within one-fifteenth of a degree of true north. Although each was their own nation with its own identity, Temeri, Tanetser, and Teseti were connected culturally, commercially, and spiritually. The cultural exchange between these three Nile Valley civilizations was fluid. The emergence of Kemet was an evolution of African science, philosophy, and agriculture which seeded the very foundations of civilization. So the Greeks traveled to Egypt and said that the Egyptians were the faultless people. They said they were the greatest people on earth, the most beautiful people on earth. They went to Egypt, the Greek mathematicians went to Egypt to study mathematics. Pythagoras spent 23 years studying math in Egypt. The Pythagorean theorem, A squared plus B squared equals C squared, was used in Kemet to build the pyramid at least 2,000 years before Pythagoras was born. Hippocrates, the Greek father of medicine, acknowledges Mhotep as the father of medicine. Mhotep was the designer of the step pyramid at Saqqara. The columns that are referred to as Greek columns, you can find them at Saqqara. So the elements of Greek design, Roman design, Greek philosophy, all had their beginnings in ancient Kemet or Egypt. Around 1919, Breasted wrote an incredible book that documented his travels in Egypt and described the ancient Egyptians as dark-skinned people with wooly hair who were not unlike the Nubians who live in Egypt now. Well, this book was called Ancient Times and it was a favorite book of John D. Rockefeller. He read it to his children all the time. And then Rockefeller decided to fund Breasted, gave him 1.5 million dollars to establish the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. But he also had caveats with that contribution in that in the second edition of Ancient Times, which was published around 1935, Breasted removed all references to the ancient Egyptians as being dark-skinned people and he added a new chapter where he said that they were members of the great white race. Most of what we know about Egypt is viewed through Greek and Roman eyes. Egypt is a Greek word. Sphinx is a Greek word. Pyramid is a Greek word. So until we can begin to interpret this indigenous African culture and civilization through an African lens then we will always view them from a disadvantage. But there's Reisner, George Reisner who excavated in Sudan and so many others who saw the historical truth, saw that black people who have been marginalized in this country and around the world, who have been enslaved because Pope Eugenius the fourth said So people did not look upon us as people who created anything of value. So I can understand how racists would say, oh no, these buildings could not have been built by black people, they don't have intelligence. These black people could not have written these great scripts. So they were operating under a false system of white superiority. So when they were confronted with the historical reality, they suffered what's referred to in psychology as an identity quake, cognitive dissonance. You know, they couldn't connect the dots. So they fabricated historical lies. And so the work that we're currently engaged in right now is to tell the truth. We are literally digging up the truth and the truth speaks for itself. Reisner's writings about the Kushites are a window into his warped racial beliefs. Its very race appears to be a product of its poverty and its isolation. A Negroid Egyptian mixture fused together on a desert riverbank too far away and too poor to attract a stronger and better race. Even as he was awed by the pyramids he excavated, he refused to believe they could have been built by the ancestors of the black Africans he saw all around him. His prejudices even seem to have clouded his eyesight. In 1916, when he discovered beautiful black granite statues of the great Kushite kings, he argued they were not real likenesses. Instead, he proposed that the kings and the builders of all the Kushite monuments have actually been light-skinned foreigners. The discipline of Egyptology has its origins with the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon Bonaparte in the late 18th century. Napoleon's army would defeat the Ottoman Empire at a time when European colonism was nearing its zenith. The Ottoman Empire, also known as the Turkish Empire, rose to prominence in the 12th century with the help of the Mamluks. The Mamluks, which translates to one who is owned, were an Eastern European population of slave soldiers who overthrew their rulers and came into power. In 1798, Napoleon led the French army into Egypt, swiftly conquering Alexandria and Cairo. The Battle of the Pyramids marked the beginning of the end. Seven centuries of Ottoman and Mamluk rule in Egypt. When Napoleon invaded Egypt, he brought along an army of scholars whose studies during French occupation became the foundation of Egyptology. This field of study was employed to promote the idea of European imperialism. Jean-Léon Jerome's painting, Bonaparte Before the Sphinx, captures Napoleon's instinct that the glory of ancient Egypt could be harnessed to exalt French colonial power. Many of the early archaeologists came to the study of ancient Egypt and ancient Nubia from the perspective of Semitic languages or the study of the Hebrew Bible, and it was very important to them to bring Egypt specifically into the sphere of biblical studies. And so they had to carve Egypt away from Africa to bring it into that sphere, and the way that they did that was they used race. So these early archaeologists effectively made ancient Egypt white in the sense that they made it part of a dominant Western culture, and ancient Nubia was separated from that. It was black, and this was how they took Egypt out of Africa and put it into this Semitic sphere, this biblical sphere. And so it's imperative that we go back and continually reassess the things that we take as facts. Western academia's anti-African sentiment has contaminated the fields of Egyptology and anthropology. From their very inception, these institutions have been rooted in racism. In 1912, German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt discovered the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti in a region of Egypt called Tell el-Armarna. It would later be unveiled to the general public in 1923 at the Egyptian Museum of Berlin in Germany and became the standard of beauty and a cultural symbol for Berlin and Egypt alike. However, the sculpture has been the subject of heated debates, and many scholars have gone on record to question its authenticity. After 20 years of research, Henry Sterin, a Swiss historian, made the shocking revelation that the bust of Nefertiti is actually a fraud. And in the documentary, The Mysteries of the Nefertiti Bust, he lays out the compelling evidence. What first made the academics suspicious was the exceptional state of conservation of Nefertiti's bust when it was discovered. The object was incongruous. It bore no resemblance to any other 3,300-year-old busts from Egypt. To historian Henry Sterlin, the bust of Nefertiti is simply too well-preserved or, as he puts it, too new to be true. Numerous archaeologists, Americans, Italians, French, have expressed their doubts about whether the bust is genuine, but none of them have made their doubts official. So we've decided to stage our own inquiry. Borchardt is very precise in his notes from the dig. He states he found large quantities of pigment, adding they were all still quite usable. But if this was an experimental copy, how is it Borchardt never spoke of it to his team, nor in his meticulous notes? According to the historian, on the 5th of December 1912, the archaeologist was in Cairo. He learns that one of Germany's princely families is passing through and wants to visit his archaeological digs. Caught unprepared, Borchardt rushes back to tell al-Amana. He arrives on the 6th of December 1912, which was meant to be a day off for his workers. He immediately sets them back to work. Later, he proudly shows their highnesses the fruits of his labor. In an excess of zeal, one of the dig foremen, an Egyptian called Senussi, disappears briefly during the visit, then returns with a bust of Nefertiti. The royals are delighted with such a masterpiece and a photograph immortalizes the moment, leaving Borchardt apparently no time to explain it was a copy and not the real thing. Henri Sterlin claims the photo is what trapped the archaeologist. You couldn't just tell the royal visitors who are infusing over the object, listen, you're mistaken. It's ridiculous. It would make a mockery of the royals. It was simply not possible to tell the truth, or the royals might have been covered in ridicule. And that would have been les majestés or treason, which at the time was very serious indeed, and could have ruined Borchardt's career and life for good. I have no doubt in my mind that this is a fake, a copy, a phony. During the second Reich, the Germans were coming about with a philosophy to justify further expansion, colonialism and imperialism. And in an attempt to do that, they claimed to be the discoverers of many sets of different artifacts, one of them being this head. But in fact, what it was, was something created at the time, or just afterwards, to justify their ideas of colonialism and imperialism. But this was far from an isolated incident. In 2018, paleo artist Elizabeth Days unveiled a facial reconstruction based on the fraudulent Nefertiti bust, which further Europeanized her features. And in 2005, Dr. Zahai Hawass, Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, announced the results of a digital reconstruction of the face of Queen Nefertiti's son, King Tutankhamen. However, the relief on the back of his royal throne of him and his wife, Queen Ankhe Sinamun, shows a dark brown skin tone and features that resemble populations found in modern-day Sudan and the Horn of Africa. With discrepancies so glaringly obvious, one has to wonder what other liberties have been taken behind closed doors. A concerted effort has also been made in Hollywood to whitewash ancient Khmer. Television and film have promoted the idea of a European Egypt for decades. But when we look at the temple walls, we see a melanated population with a variety of skin tones and hairstyles, such as afros, waves, braids, and locks. Indeed, the discovery of Rosetta Stone and translation of the ancient hieroglyphs, originally known as Meru Neture, made Western scholars rethink their narrative. The newly transcribed inscriptions revealed an advanced culture that had attained an exceptionally high level of development. They coined the term Sub-Saharan Africa as a way to separate the genius of Egypt from the rest of the continent. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. As always, I am your host, Nick Barksdale, and today we are joined once again by Dr. Rebecca Futo-Kennedy, who's going to take us through a thought-provoking episode on the term Sub-Saharan and the whitewashing of ancient North Africa. This idea, this sort of continually trying to find this idea of separating out North Africa from Sub-Saharan as if the Sahara was the impermeable boundary that nobody could get through, is really a continually problematic type of argument, particularly since we have early texts that tell us that, right, Herodotus tells us that he says the Ethiopians and the Garamantes are indigenous to North Africa and that, of course, the Phoenicians and the Greeks are not. But he makes it very clear that people he called Ethiopians are indigenous to North Africa and Northwest Africa in particular, right, but they are not Sub-Saharan. So I just think, I just, I constantly, what is the obsession that people have with this idea of Sub-Saharan, that whenever they ask any question, what they're trying to do is prove that Sub-Saharan Africans aren't part of the ancient Mediterranean world, which we know is false. Not only do we know, of course, that people that we would call, quote unquote, Sub-Saharan Africans ruled Egypt before the Persians got there, among others, but that they have this continual culture that runs up and down the Nile. And we know from our ancient sources that they believed very firmly and they interacted in the areas they called Libya, right. Sheikh Anta Diop was a Senegalese historian and anthropologist. He was a firm believer that the ancient Egyptians were, in fact, black. According to his research, the skulls of ancient Egyptians had physical features resembling the peoples of the upper Nile region, East Africans and Nubians, all visibly black populations. But his theories aren't shared by all experts on the matter. We spoke to Dr Zahi Hawass, an award-winning, world-renowned archaeologist. His life's work has been dedicated to the discovery and research of ancient Egyptian antiquities. Not surprisingly, his office is full of books on the topic, some of which depict dark-skinned ancient Egyptians. But he says there's an explanation. During an interview on BBC News Africa, Dr Zahi Hawass illustrates Egyptology's reluctance to acknowledge black African presence in ancient Egypt. When asked about the ethnicity of the ancient Egyptians, he describes them as being uniquely Egyptian. So, how African the ancient Egyptians were still remains a matter of debate for some, even if UNESCO scholars now say the matter is settled. The pharaohs and their people must be placed firmly within the black African context. The civilization of Kemet was not homogeneous. The delta was a transcontinental highway connecting three continents. Kemet was a multicultural society with many different populations of indigenous Africans, transporting their cultures and traditions into the Nile Valley, as well as populations of non-Africans migrating back to Africa and settling in the regions and along the coastlines of North Africa. The Mediterranean coast of Egypt, where the mighty River Nile ends its long journey through Africa and mixes with the waters behind me. When you come here to Alexandria, it's easy to see why Egypt became such a melting pot. You can get here through the Nile Valley and also across the Mediterranean Sea from Europe and the Levant, what we call the Middle East today. This facilitated trade, but it also led to an exchange of ideas and cultures. Egypt's strategic position clearly made it attractive and hence vulnerable to attack throughout the centuries. The evidence of outsiders coming to Egypt from Europe, Asia and Arabia and mixing with the locals is apparent in the physical appearance of some of the population today. But when you reach further back into time to the monuments of the ancient Egyptian civilization, a thousand kilometers from the Mediterranean Sea, you're reminded of ancient Egypt status as that of a great African civilization. The history of pre-dynastic Egypt and the movement of African tribes drawn to the Nile dates back to the end of the last ice age. Around the same time, the ice sheets began to melt. The lush tropical jungle that covered northern Africa began to dry up. We went there to visit a beautifully painted prehistoric cave that was discovered in that region just discovered in 2007. It has on the ceiling very beautiful prehistoric rock art depicting the people who lived there and their raising of cattle and various domestic scenes and that sort of thing. We're talking about black Africans. Yes. Over thousands of years, it became the Sahara Desert. There were migrations east and many tribes settled on the banks of the Nile along with tribes from the south. The White Nile begins in Tanzania and flows northward until it reaches Sudan where it converges with the Blue Nile. The Blue Nile begins near Lake Tanna in Ethiopia. Like the Nile, these ancient African tribes have been migrating from the south following the flow of the river northward since the Neolithic period. The Naptaplier Find was announced by CNN as the Stonehenge of the Sahara. It's a fascinating site. It does have megaliths. However, the calendar circle that got a lot of attention is composed of smaller stones that come up to about your knee. That forms a very interesting calendar circle which has astronomical meaning. That calendar circle is in the complex of megalithic large stone structures and alignments as well. Do we know anything at all about the people who created these structures? Yes. We know they were black African people. Their remains are studied anthropologically and they were the people inhabiting the region of the time. Ancient Nubia and ancient Egypt share common cultural roots in northeast Africa in the Sahara and along the Nile Valley. The ancient Egyptians and the ancient Nubians can both be described, especially in the earlier periods, as being descendants of northeast African indigenous populations. As one writer said, all of these people are Africans. I define Africans as people whose biological histories have emerged and their identities have emerged in Africa and where any mixing that took place took place on African soil. The Egyptians did not come from any place else other than the Nile Valley. Their identities and any other ancestry that they may have had were all forged together in that space. In those ancient times, Egyptians called themselves Remech and Kermit, which means the people of the black land. Inscriptions refer to their origins being the land of Punt, which is present-day Somalia in northern Kenya. They point to these southeastern regions as being their ancestral homeland. Seseti was the earliest Great Nile Valley civilization and stretched from Nubia to Yeah, that area became hyper-arid extreme desert around 3400 BC. But before that, the climate was different. Yes, yes, it was more moderate. There were seasonal rains and at the site that I studied, the ancient site that I studied, Naptaplaya, even that would fill up seasonally as a seasonal lake called Naptaplaya. The cattle cult and the Sirius and the cattle iconography was very important to them as well as in ancient Egypt, which came later. So there are many elements clearly of the culture that was operating at Naptaplaya in the earlier time that moved to the Nile Valley and became the ancient Egyptian dynastic civilization. The Naptaplaya Stone Circle is the world's oldest astronomical site located in modern-day Sudan. Naptaplaya emerged in the Nubian desert as a regional ceremonial center during the Middle Neolithic period. Archaeological studies have identified hundreds of the hearths, cultural debris, and numerous mummified cattle, which represented wealth and power amongst the people of the time. The cattle iconography was very important to them as well as in ancient Egypt, which came later. And one of the important correlations is the, which you as an astrophysicist studying archaeoastronomy pay attention to is similar alignments found in the Giza Plateau, where the great pyramids are. So in ancient Egypt, the heliacal rising of Sirius heralded the timing of the floods. The Nile flooded every year at about the same time, just after the heliacal rising of Sirius. Ancient Africans studied the procession of the equinox from as early as 9,000 BC to around 3,400 BC at the site of the Naptaplaya. This is where geometry and the concept of pie was developed, as well as the world's earliest evidence of pastoral life. Archaeological evidence reveals these populations were black Africans who were indigenous to the entire continent of Africa, not just below the Sahara. At about 3,500 BC, the monsoon rains pattern moved further south. So Naptaplaya region became extreme desert and had to be abandoned. And that's when the culture, the ancient Egyptian dynastic culture that shows many of the same elements, pops up in the Nile Valley. So you're suggesting maybe these people migrated north? Yes. Extreme weather conditions forced both populations of the Green Sahara and the Naptaplaya to migrate to the Nile Valley. And with them, they brought the traditions of cattle worship, mummification, geometry, and the study of the stars. When the Naptaplaya region dried up due to the rapid climate change, these populations migrated following the flow of the Nile River, bringing with them their knowledge and high science. Yes. So there's this very clear link from the astronomy at Naptaplaya at around the time 4,000 BC. We know from the anthropological evidence that the people just predating the dynastic civilization in the Naptaplaya region were black African people. There were monuments, temples in Old Kingdom Egypt that were rebuilt to track the rising of Sirius as it moved with their alignment of the temples was rebuilt to track the rising of Sirius as it moved through precession motion. And we found the same thing at Naptaplaya. These megalithic stone alignments, they tracked the rising of Sirius and other stars as they moved through precession. These Africans from the south would move into what would later become Upper Kemet and establish the early pharaonic dynasties. I like to follow the evidence, and to me, I didn't care about which race of humans it was at the time. The 5,600-year-old Tajwanat mummy, known as the Black Mummy of the Green Sahara, is the earliest evidence of advanced mummification in the world and was discovered in 1958 by Professor Fabrizio Mori. It predates the earliest Kemetic mummy by nearly 1,000 years and was found in modern-day Libya. This two-and-a-half-year-old boy's organs were removed as evidenced by incisions in his stomach and thorax, and an organic preservative was inserted to stop his body from decomposing. He was embalmed and wrapped in cowhide. An ostrich eggshell necklace was placed around his neck, and the boy was given a royal burial. Because of this very sophisticated form of evisceration, what we have is essentially the earliest form of complete mummification yet found in Africa. And it's interesting that everybody always goes to Egypt as the home of mummification. And yet, in fact, from the dates of the Black Mummy, there's certainly nothing like that going on in Egypt at that time. Anthropological evidence has revealed the populations of the Green Sahara during the early to mid-Holocene era were black Africans. Due to the extreme climate change and the desertification of the Sahara, these populations were forced to migrate. And with them, they transported the science of mummification and the tradition of cattle worship to the Nile Valley. These traditions had deep African roots and would continue in the Nile Valley. We found the bones and charcoal of cattle. So this was really the very first hard evidence, archaeological evidence, of some kind of ritual connected to the cattle cult. I find it very interesting that these animal-headed human figures exist outside of Egypt at such an incredibly early date. And then later in pharaonic culture, you find exactly the same motifs repeated in the very sophisticated Egyptian art form. The Nile Valley was populated by various tribes and populations from the source of the Nile, the Green Sahara, Naphtha, Pleia, and the Horn of Africa. Early pharaonic culture was between the regions of Kusto in the city of Nekhet. It was this fusion of early African ingenuity which planted the seed of civilization and birthed the nation of Kemet. We have just here Tripoli. We have here Cairo and the Nile. And just in the center, we have the Alkakos Mountains. And we have Algeria, Libya, Egypt, and Sudan, and Chad, and Niger, and Mali. So this area is bigger than Europe. So it means that all this very, very large extent was inhabited during ancient times by the same ancient African Sahara culture. I find it quite extraordinary that this central Saharan civilization shows all the features we generally associate with later Egyptian pharaonic culture. And mummification is a prime example. There are definite links between the two cultures. Traditional Egyptologists have relegated the black presence in Egypt to the 25th dynasty, which they refer to as the Kushite period. It's a period of time in the 8th century B.C. when indigenous Africans from Kush came into Kemet, which had fallen on hard times. It was invaded by Libyans and Assyrians and others. They came into Kemet to restore the land of their ancestors. Those were their specific words, to restore the land of their ancestors. And for approximately 100 years, five African rulers, Kushite rulers, came into Kemet, drove out the foreigners, and then rebuilt Kemetic culture and civilization. The Libyans, who'd fought for the Egyptians as mercenary generals, gradually infiltrated Egypt's power structure and eventually took power as the 22nd dynasty. Egypt's Libyan rulers understood that looking and acting Egyptian would help to keep the country under their control. Yet in some ways, these images are simply window dressing, lip service to ancient Egyptian traditions in order to claim a greater prize. For the Libyans had organized nothing less than the state-sponsored plundering of Egypt's royal tombs. They were so transfixed by the wealth, by the gold, by the bling of ancient Egypt, they wanted it for themselves. And over their several centuries' rule, while they appeared to look like pharaohs and to rule as pharaohs, Egypt never feels to have been a cohesive, united kingdom. They weren't Egyptians at heart, and that's really what mattered. Egypt needed a regime that could reconnect with its most powerful asset, its history. And by 747 BC, that's what happened when the Kushite rulers of Nubia made a direct spiritual connection with Egypt's glorious past. The religious and cultural ties of Kemet and Nubia run deep. So in 747 BC, when the Libyans occupied Kemet, Nubians from the kingdom of Kush marched north to restore law and order. Kemet was weak from being invaded repeatedly by the nomads. But when the Kushites arrived, it wasn't to ravage or destroy. They saw this as an opportunity to seize power and restore Kemet to its former glory. The Kushites spent a considerable amount of time rebuilding the great monuments and temples. This differs greatly from the Libyans and other Asiatic invaders who came to pillage and plunder. The Kushite pharaohs built columned temples with pylon gateways and added to the great Amun temple complex of Karnak. They also took the old kingdom's religious text and transferred them into stone for better preservation. An example of this is the Shebaka stone, named after the Nubian king who had it inscribed. On the stone, Shebaka added, I found the writings of the ancients damaged, and I restored it better than it was. They were fervent believers in Egypt's traditional gods, in some ways making them more Egyptian than the Egyptians. Beliefs that centered on this great sandstone mountain, Jebel Barkal, for centuries it had been regarded as the mythical mound of creation. The mound from which Egypt's great creator god Amun was born. Here is the holy mountain, this is where the god lived in his primeval form. Dr Tim Kendall has spent almost 30 years working at the site. Being at the southern limit of the empire, it was where where the Nile began, where fertility began, and so it had to be the place where creation began. So they imagined this as the birthplace of the god Amun. As the Kushite kings gained increasing military power, they also claimed Egypt for themselves. So when King Pile led a Kushite invasion of Egypt in 747 BC, he didn't plunder or destroy, but restored and rebuilt and founded Egypt's 25th dynasty. The irony is that he's conquering Egypt to put everything right, I suppose. So it's all such a cycle of rebirth, regrowth, redevelopment, and the Kushite kings are really kind of tapping into that ancient power source and just sort of giving it back to the Egyptians. Starting time all over again and doing it right. So they had that same sense of history and continuity as the Egyptians. They are the natural successors of the 18th dynasty kings. And as such, the Kushites left a legacy of renewal and resurrection. I am here today to make a plea for history, to say that history is not something about the past. No, history from the African point of view is something which allows you to have self-respect. It helps you to have a reclaimed identity. It helps you to assert yourself on the social, political and cultural agenda today. So it's a very, very important thing. And in my view, it's been overlooked wrongly. It's very fashionable to talk about education. Education is important. It's the most empowering thing you can give a young child in Africa. And it's true. But what kind of education, quality education, is the thing that's very important. And history is an integral part of that. And not just for people living in Africa, but also the established African diaspora, be it in the Caribbean, be it in Brazil, be it in the United States, whether it's also the more recently arrived diaspora Africans living in the West, all part and parcel of the same history. It's a shared history. It doesn't matter where you live in the world, you are of African descent, be you, you know, in Brazil, where by the way, a lot of people don't realize that around 100 million Brazilians, that's about more than 50% of the population, either have African heritage or mixed African heritage. You know, they are the second largest African population after Nigeria, or the African American diaspora, the most powerful and influential diaspora of Africans in the world. Our history is about identity. It's about self respect. It's about claiming our own narrative. So it's that oneness of the disparate community is bringing everybody together under, you know, one banner. Only when lions have historians, will the hunters cease to be heroes.