David Mattingly
speaker
188 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 11 Jun
David Mattingly’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
that are designed to demonstrate the primitiveness and otherness of these outlined peoples.
So just to give you an example, peoples that lived close to the Mediterranean, both in North Africa and in Europe, they're generally recognised as being agricultural, urban living, state-level organisation of society, societies with complex rules and conducts of behaviour that mark out their civility.
But if you move out of that Mediterranean zone, they're pastoral or nomadic.
They're living in huts and tents.
Even further out than that, then you find people whose lifestyle is essentially a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
They speak unintelligible languages.
They're living and sleeping in the open or in caves.
And then even beyond that...
we get into an imagined world.
A sort of mythical.
A mythical world where there are people with no heads and eyes on their chests.
And interestingly, those are still appearing on early modern maps of Africa, echoing this sort of schematic view.
Herodotus mentions ancestor worship in relation to Saharan peoples.
And, you know, I think when Pharisees are describing these burials with these offering structures outside them, it does emphasize how important the dead are to the living.
There is an element of daily interaction or regular interaction between living connections and the ancestors.
The ancestors are sort of there in the guise of minor gods, really.
So our best evidence for this comes from the botanical analyses that we've done on samples from our various excavations.
And we can...
say pretty conclusively that agriculture arrives with our first sense of Garamantean settlements around about 1000 BCE and there's an established package which is the date palm, its wheat and barley, the grapevine and the fig tree.
That's what they start growing and it's clearly come from somewhere probably from originating from the oases that first emerged in the western Egyptian desert and that package of crops
Showing 21–40 of 188 · page 2 of 10
← Previous
Next →