Zeinab Badawi
Appearances
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
a better, more rounded, more authentic understanding of African history.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
Well, I mean, the Rosetta Stone, of course, for ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics was very significant, but it wasn't the only code cracker, as it were. There were other sources, but we haven't found something akin to the Rosetta Stone or other information which has allowed us to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. Sudanese, the Kushite, began writing in their own language from the second century.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
Up until then, they used the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. And we can sound them, partly because of the great work of a British academic called Francis Llewellyn Griffiths, who managed to kind of tell us what the sounds of the Meroitic script, as it's known, the Kushites used from the second century onwards. But we don't know what the words mean, unfortunately. And it's a work in progress.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
We hope that all the archaeologists who are working in northern Sudan, of course, sadly, that's had to stop because of the conflict, will somehow find... you know, a stone that's got ancient Greek, ancient Egyptian, and the Kushite language alongside that will help us decipher the hieroglyphics that the Kushites used. But until that happens, it's all a bit of a mystery, sadly.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
But we know a great deal about the Kushites because they did write in, as I said, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. But we know the most about the Kushites from about the 7th and 8th centuries BCE. That's before Common Era, or some people prefer to say BC, before Christ. And that is because that is when the kings of Kush reached the zenith of their power and conquered Egypt.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
and governed it for the best part of a century. And so the ancient Egyptians were busy writing about, you know, these kings, these pharaohs who formed their 25th dynasty, who'd come from further south. And that's why we know about the kings of Kush from that era, you know, with names like Pianki, Taharqo, Shabitku, Shabaka. And there are these marvellous black granite statues of these kings.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And so it's a very evocative period of ancient African history. And they were not only a great African civilization, they were actually a regional superpower because they were protectors of King Hezekiah of Judah who appealed to them to protect him against the marauding Assyrians who were really ferocious warlike people in that period of the ancient world.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
The princes of Byblos and Phoenicia in modern day Lebanon also looked to the kings of Cush to protect them. They were really skilled archers and very skilled equestrians. You know, they'd ride their horses and they'd have their bow and arrow with the tips that were you know, dipped in poison.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And they had a very, you know, amazing way of actually firing their arrow right into the eye of their enemies. So that was obviously a great way of seeing your enemies off. And, you know, the Kushites built a thousand pyramids. About 250 of them today preserve some part of their superstructure. And just by way of reference, there are a hundred pyramids in Egypt.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
So a thousand in Sudan, much smaller than the ones in Egypt, but nevertheless extremely impressive. You know, they built temples. They have exquisite pottery and ceramics. In fact, some people credit the Kushites for being the first people to enamel pottery, fine jewelry, dyed material. You know, they really were great.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
an extraordinary civilization, which in its earliest iteration, about 2500 BCE, far predates ancient Greece and Rome. You know, Rome was just a backwater in southern Europe at the time. So it is extraordinary for me that That's the part of the world from which my ancestors hail from northern Sudan.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And everybody knows about ancient Egypt, yet nobody knows about the ancient northern Sudanese, you know, the kings and queens of Kush. But I think As the great Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet said, there will come a time when pseudonology will be as famous as Egyptology because it's a story that's just been unearthed. But the harsh climate,
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
the instability in the country, the lack of resources, means that we haven't really excavated the exciting history that just lies under the sand dunes and elsewhere in northern Sudan. But it's an amazing history and it's one which really touched me.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
Of all the countries I visited, of course I would say that because it's the land of my ancestors, but I really think that it's a part of world history which should be better known. And, you know, forgive me for going on about this, Dan, but what I also like about the story of the Kingdom of Kush is it shows you how kingdoms rise and fall.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
That today, you know, Sudan may be one of the less developed parts of the world, but In times gone by, it had this, you know, it was a superpower. And also the story of ancient Kut tells you how history is not something that can just be consigned to the past. Of course, history explains our past, but it also explains informs our present and helps shape our future.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And I just give you one very small illustration. The people of ancient northern Sudan, of Kush, considered it an abomination to eat fish. They had all this fish in the River Nile, you know, an amazing source of protein, yet they just wouldn't eat it. And to this day, the consumption of fish in northern Sudan is... far lower than many other places in the world.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
It is on average one kilogram per person per year. Compare it to Egypt, another land of the Nile, where the average consumption is 25 kilograms per person per year. And it just shows you how, you know, History just continues. And I saw that in so many ways when I was exploring the culture of the Kushites.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And I also loved the fact that the queens of Kush also had such a powerful role to play in society. They could govern alongside their husbands and their sons as co-regents. And there were some like Amani Renance, who would actually lead their men into battle. She was known as the one-eyed queen because she lost an eye fighting the Romans. in 30 BCE.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And in fact, they were forced to in the end sign a peace treaty with her in 22 BCE. So it's just, you know, I can understand why you're fascinated by it, because it really is, you know, the stuff of Hollywood where fact is stranger than fiction. And I do wish that somebody would try and popularize this amazing chapter in African history.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
So, I mean, you know, the Kushites emerged from a part of the world which was never part of Egypt. And the word Nubia is not something that came into use until much, much later around the first, second century Common Era. So there is a tendency to try to talk about the Kushites as Nubians. Of course, there were Nubians who you could refer to them as Nubians, but much later in their history.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
But a lot of people refer to them as Nubians because there are Nubians today who live in northern Sudan, but also who live in southern Egypt. And by calling them Nubians, it kind of, in a way, allows people perhaps in Egypt to say, ah, that's when we were governed
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
by our 25th dynasty, who were Nubians, to try to imply perhaps that these were people who territorially came from what is known as Southern Egypt. So it kind of puts Northern Sudan into the shadow. Do you see what I mean?
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
So that's one reason why I don't like them being referred to Nubians, because these are people who territorially only ever came from a part of the world that is part of Sudan and was never part of Egypt proper. They did have similarities with the people of southern Egypt, as they do to this day. We have in my family very strong connections with southern Egypt.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
Ethnically, you can't really tell the difference between the northern Sudanese and the southern Egyptians. You know, very similar kind of accent when it comes to speaking Arabic and so on. And historically speaking, the relationship between the Kushites and the ancient Egyptians was one that ebbed and flowed. Sometimes the ancient Egyptians would clobber the Kushites.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
At other times, they had a fairly good relationship. The two cultures learned from one another. You know, the ancient Sudanese and the ancient Egyptians worshiped the same deities. Amun-Ra was the principal god for both of them. The ancient Sudanese, the Kushites, added another one, Apedimak, the lion god.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
But interestingly enough, Amun-Ra was believed to reside in Jebel Barkal, which is this mountain which is in northern Sudan territorially and always was. And both the ancient Sudanese and ancient Egyptians believed he resided there.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And when you think about the religious heart of ancient Egypt, Karnak, you know, the temple at Karnak, the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, where the pharaohs were buried, you know, from the New Kingdom onwards. This is very far southern Egypt, a thousand miles away from the Mediterranean coast of Egypt. This is much more African Egypt. It is not Cairo.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
It is not Alexandria, you know, on the Mediterranean coast, which makes you realize that actually the heart, the beating heart, the religious center of ancient Egypt is was fairly far south in Upper Egypt, going towards the border with northern Sudan.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
Abu Simbel was practically, you know, where Ramesses the Great had his statue of himself and his wife, was practically on the border with northern Sudan. So when it comes to the ethnicity of the ancient Egyptians, I think it's actually wrong to say ancient Egypt isn't part of Africa. Ancient Egypt is an African civilization, just as the Kushites are an African civilization.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
Depending on which area you look at, depending on which pharaoh you look at in ancient Egypt, their ethnicity, as it were, may vary. The first king of ancient Egypt of the archaic period, the old dynasty, Namaa, you know, would look what you might broadly say is more southern Egyptian, because that's where he came from.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
Later on, you might have pharaohs who perhaps hailed from more of the Mediterranean coast. And right from the start, you know, Egypt had a Mediterranean coast where people would mix with people. with Southern Europe, with Western Asia. And so there was a mixture of people. So the ethnicities of the pharaohs would vary over the centuries.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
So I wouldn't say that people need to look to Sudan only, Northern Sudan, to get an idea of what an African dynasty looked like. I think we need to redefine what we mean by African. What does an African look like? There isn't a standard look. of an African. So we need to redefine that.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
There isn't a kind of, you know, standard identikit, take it off the shelf and this is what an African looks like, like everybody, every other continent in the world. There's a huge variety in appearances. Where it gets difficult with Cleopatra is that the Ptolemies, who were the pharaohs who succeeded Alexander the Great,
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
who was from Macedonia, and the Ptolemies were Macedonian, and the last of the Ptolemies was Cleopatra, who died in 30 BCE when she killed herself, and the Romans conquered Egypt. She was of Macedonian ethnicity. They would have spoken ancient Greek amongst themselves, and that's where it gets a little bit difficult, and that's where people might start getting annoyed when you have
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
a woman of color like Adele James depicted as Cleopatra. And some Egyptians and others get a bit hot under the collar and say, no, Cleopatra was Macedonian. She was not white. But that does not mean that other pharaohs and other queens in ancient Egypt were similarly white. Hatshepsut is depicted, you know, with a terracotta color in all the reliefs we have of her and statues and busts and so on.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
It's just the Cleopatra complicates matters. And also the Afrocentricity of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, African Americans you know, started saying, well, look, we, you know, want to look to our African roots in order to, you know, bolster our identity and so on. And so they look to ancient Egypt to do that. And that, again, is something which annoys some Egyptians.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
as we've seen from the social media kind of exchanges. And that is for the reasons I've explained, but it is also because in 641 Common Era, the Arabs conquered Egypt and settled there, and obviously mixed with the Egyptians, and the Egyptians assumed the Arabic language,
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And they also assumed Arab ideology, which made them feel that perhaps they were a bit separate from the rest of Africa because they became part of the Arabized north of Africa. So that's another reason why that sometimes there's a bit of a distance between Egyptians today and the rest of the continent.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
But I firmly believe that the Arabized north of Africa is as much part of the continent's history and is as much part of Africa as any other part of the continent.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
Absolutely. So, you know, at its closest point, the Arabian Peninsula is only about 17, less than 20 kilometers from the East African Red Sea coast. And that's in modern day Eritrea today. So right from the get go, you had, you know, an exchange of people between the two. And I
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
In around 600 BCE, you had people called the Sabaeans who came from what would be modern day Yemen, and they crossed the Red Sea and they settled in what we would call Ethiopia and Eritrea today. And, you know, there was an exchange of ideas and belief and, you know, between the two peoples in terms of how they farmed, how they, you know, executed their animal husbandry. their religion.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
They worshipped the moon god, Maka. And also the Sabaean language influenced what we would call the Gez language, which is a kind of forerunner, as it were, of the modern-day Amharic and Tigrinya that is spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea. And the alphabet looks quite similar. So, you know, yes, there were traders. Some would come, some would go back. But then there were also these settlers. And so...
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
you see that from the get-go and you see it now in the appearance of the people there. There are some who look quite Arabized in Eritrea and Ethiopia. And those links have just existed throughout the centuries. And to this day, you'll see trade going between the two. You'll see that Arabic is very widely spoken along that Red Sea coast of East Africa in Eritrea. And
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
you know, well, Ethiopia doesn't have a Red Sea coast because Ethiopia is landlocked, but Eritrea and Ethiopia, of course, historically, the Kingdom of Aksum and so on, it was all just one region. But certainly along the Red Sea coast of Eritrea, Djibouti and so on, you know, Arabic is spoken very, very extensively. And that's the point, you know, people always migrated.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
We tend to think of migration as a kind of more modern phenomenon and people, you know, saying, oh, we don't want these irregular migrants, you know, be it people from coming from Mexico into the United States or from the Middle East and Africa into Europe and so on. But migration is as long as history. People have always migrated and it's led to a kind of melange.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
Sometimes known as Piye, P-I-Y-E or Pianky. And he was in the early 700s BCE. And he, because the ancient Egyptians and ancient Sudanese worshipped the same deities.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And so they were aware that the Libyans, who didn't really respect ancient Egyptian religion for the most part, and they saw that, you know, the center of Karnak, Thebes, the religious heart Thebes of ancient Egypt, was kind of going to rack and ruin and that the Libyan pharaohs were not really maintaining the great traditions of ancient Egypt.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And so Pianki, you know, really considered this, you know, an absolutely awful thing that had happened. And he was a real kind of very brave king. He had gone in with his father Kashta,
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
um earlier it was king hashto who first of all went in a foray into ancient egypt but it was pianki who carried his father's um deed a little bit further pianki sort of strikes you as a little bit of a kind of um he was a bit pious but not a megalomaniac but he had a great sense of himself you know we know a lot about him because of the pianki stealer which um records you know how he um
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
you know, there's a touch of the megalomaniac, a bit of the old pattern. You know, he would say, you know, let the chiefs of the Northlands taste the taste of my fingers. And he went into Egypt and his men, you know, would go into the temple and wash themselves and pray and so on on their bellies. And then they'd go in and fight very skilled archers. They had a particular way
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
It was called the Mongolian release of actually firing their bow and arrow with their thumb rather than the Mediterranean release, which was with the index finger. And Pianky made sure that he really finished off the princes, the Egyptian princes of the delta, because there were various sort of princes in local areas who,
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
kind of paid allegiance to the central pharaoh, but they had their own fiefdoms. And there was one particular one called Tefnacht, who was proving a little bit obdurate and was still managing to avoid defeat by Pianki's men. But Pianki finally got the better of him. And, you know, these men threw themselves at Prince Tefnacht on their stomachs and said, you know, okay, we give up.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
We accept that you are the pharaoh and that you are the powerful one. You know, they opened their treasures in their rooms for him. They said to him, take our women, if you like, as your concubines and so on. But Bianchi, because he was quite pious, was like, no, I don't want your women. You know, keep them, let them maintain their modesty. He took the treasure and
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
But then he said, show me the stables. And when he saw that the stable was full of horses that had become so emaciated because of the siege of Hermopolis, because the Kushite soldiers had encircled Hermopolis. And so the people inside, obviously, you know, starving and obviously the horses were practically dying there.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And it's said that on the Stela that Pianki became enraged like a panther and said, nothing that you've done has angered me as much as allowing these horses to practically starve to death because the Kushites adored their horses. And Pianki especially, you know, really just valued his horses to the extent that when he died, he was buried with his four horses.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
the horses would have been buried alive with him. And they were dressed, you know, with their tails all beautifully brushed and wearing, you know, silver plumes and decorated. So, you know, Pianky, I think, is a very, very fascinating character because after he conquered Egypt and so on, he just took all his beauty back with him and went back to Cush and never returned to Egypt. So
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
You know, they are just very, very colourful characters. Teharke was also a very colourful character. He's actually mentioned in the Bible as Teharke of Ethiopia. Ethiopia just means the land of the blacks in ancient Greek. So if ever you see a reference to Ethiopia in the Bible or in ancient Greek writings, it doesn't refer to Ethiopia, the country today.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
it really refers to the Kushites, the kingdom of Kush. That's how they were referred to. And Taharqa was, again, you know, an amazing soldier king. And he fought the Egyptians. He fought the Assyrians and really had a great deal of success in his encounters with them, but was ultimately defeated by them.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
So I just think that they are such colourful characters and they are, you know, my most famous, my most popular figures in ancient African history, although there are many more colourful There are other colorful characters also.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
Sure. And just before I start that, you're absolutely right that, you know, Africa is a place where the three monotheistic religions actually, you know, really, really thrived and from a very early stage. And there are those who actually say Akhenaten, who was the father of Tutankhamen, who is, you know, probably the best known of the pharaohs. The great heretic, right?
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
Yeah, although, yes, exactly. Tutankhamen himself, you know, was very insignificant. Everybody knows about him because of all the fabulous, you know, treasures that were found in his tomb. But Akhenaten was the great heretic because he, you know, he actually rejected the multiple deities of ancient Egyptian culture. religion and worship and said, actually, we ought to have just one.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And so some people credit him as being the first monotheist. When he died, there was much relief at the royal court in Egypt because they thought, now we can go back to how we used to worship. And so they were delighted that Tutankhamen was this boy king, only nine years of age, who didn't know any better. And so let them just go back to their old ways.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And that probably is the only significance of Tutankhamen, who died very young in his late teens. But the religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all have strong roots in Africa. So Christianity in particular, a lot of people think Christianity was brought to Africa with the missionaries operating in the 1800s, mostly from countries like Britain.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
You know, we all know about Dr. David Livingstone and so on. They know about the Portuguese Jesuit priests who also went and tried to convert people. But actually, Christianity has far older roots in Africa. And that's best exemplified by King Ezana of Aksum, who lived in the 300s Common Era.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And by about 330 Common Era, or AD, as some people say, Ezana had made Christianity his kingdom's official religion. He was a pagan before that. And after Armenia... Aksum was the second kingdom in the world to assume Christianity as its official religion. And Aksum, of course, is in northern Ethiopia, also incorporated parts of Eritrea today.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And that was the case, that Christianity was the official religion of Ethiopia and Eritrea until 1975, when the The Ethiopians all believe in their history, beginning with the story of King Solomon and the fact that King Solomon had an affair which gave rise to Menelik with the Queen of Sheba. So I say that again, that King Solomon had an affair with the Queen of Sheba. She had a son.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And the Queen of Sheba, the Ethiopians believe, is from Ethiopia. She had a son, Menelik I, who became the first emperor of the Solomoned dynasty. And that continued with some interruptions right until 1975. And so this is all recorded in the books called the Kebre Nagast, which were written in the 14th century by probably several authors.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And it means the glory of the kings in the Amharic language. And that's the story of how Ethiopia came into being for most Ethiopians today. There's some question as to whether the Queen of Sheba could actually have coincided with Solomon because that would have made her... living around the 10th century BCE, hypothetically speaking.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And if you go to Ethiopia, outside Aksum, in a place called Dongur, there's this amazing, the ruins of an amazing castle with remnants of a huge kitchen and bedrooms and so on. It would have been a very fine palace. And people will say to you locally, that is the home of the Queen of Sheba. Archaeologists would say that it dates to a much, much later era and probably was the home of a nobleman.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
But it just shows you how myths sometimes can, you know, encounter inconvenient truths. But we mustn't detract from the fact that people want some kind of, you know, legends to help build their identities and to, you know, create their own histories. And we must respect that.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
Yeah, that was King Caleb, who was a very devout Christian king. And he went into southern Yemen in order to help his fellow Christians, because it was said at the time that they were being persecuted by peoples who followed the Jewish religion. So he went in, dressed exactly as you just described, And he was a sort of great Christian king. He had support from the Portuguese.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And he went in and he managed to save the Christians of southern Yemen from the Jews. It was the leader of the Jewish people was Nua Iwas. You'd have to just check that one, the spelling, the pronunciation.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And then after he had corrected this injustice to the Christians, he then went back to his capital in what would be modern day Ethiopia. And some accounts say that he just carried on in his reign. He was a very kind of magnanimous man. And other accounts say that actually
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
He retreated and became a monk and just spent the rest of his years, the next 15 years of his life before he died in a monastery. So, you know, that is a very, very interesting story. I have to find you the dates of King Caleb, but it is a bit later, as you say, than Izzanah.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
Yeah, you know, this idea that African women are kind of downtrodden wretches is really not supported either by history or the present day. If you go to any African country, you know, you'll go to the market and you'll see how it's dominated by these African women who grow their own food because most food is produced by small farmers in Africa and most small farmers are the women.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And so any surplus they have, they'll go to the market and they'll sell it and that's going to be you know, good money to bring up their children and for themselves. And actually what their husbands are doing is almost by the way. And that's always been the case that, you know, African women are very strong.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
I mean, in some cases, the line of succession was matrilineal, as you saw with the Asante people. In the case of the Kushites, queens, Kushite women had a very powerful role to play in society. They could rule equally as co-regents with their husbands or their sons. They could be warrior queens. African history is littered with
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
examples of strong female leadership, such as Queen Njinga of the Ndongo Kingdom, which was a vassal state of the Kingdom of Congo. So she was born in 1563 and died in 1663. She was a remarkable woman who fought the Portuguese. I like her story because it shows how once the Europeans started encroaching on African land, they didn't just take it lying down, they resisted. Queen Njinga
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
After her brother died and killed himself, she maneuvered herself into position of becoming the ruling queen. She was always marked out for greatness by her father, the king at the time, who thought she was the most able of his children, and he would take her to councils with him. She was also very effective at wielding the fighting axe.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
When her brother, the king, became king, he asked her to go to meet the governor of Luanda, which is, of course, the modern-day capital of Angola. And their kingdom was about 250 miles away. And he said, go and tell the governor of Luanda, who was Portuguese, to stop taking our people as slaves. And so she went dressed in her finery and went with this huge entourage.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And when she arrived, the governor Luanda, sitting on this beautiful... chair covered in velvet embossed in gold, told her to sit on a rug on the floor to show her subordinate status. She refused and chose her tallest female attendant, told her to go on all fours and sat on her to negotiate with the governor of Luanda. You know, a marvellous story.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
She outwitted the Portuguese, you know, at every turn for the best part of a quarter of a century and died, you know, in her 80s with her crown on her head. She died peacefully. You know, Yaa Asantewaa, who died in 1921, who fought the British in Asanteyland, what would be modern day Ghana.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
You know, there are many examples of strong female leadership, because I think in history, we take that HIS in history a bit too seriously, his story. It's her story. And the queens of Cush, I go back to them because they were known as Candicas. And in fact, the ancient Greeks mistook that name for the name of a woman, Candica. They didn't realize it was the title for the queen.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And that's where we get the modern day women's name Candice from. But the Candicas, the queens of Cush,
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
When the young women of Sudan rose against Omar al-Bashir, you know, who'd ruled the country with an iron fist for 30 years, when he was brought down in 2019 and women were in the vanguard of those protests, they styled themselves as the Kandikas, that's what they called themselves, reaching back into their history with these strong female, you know, role models to assert themselves today on the domestic, you know, political, social, cultural agenda of Sudan.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
So I think it is very, very important. And also ancient Egypt, women had property, enjoyed property rights at a time when women in Europe enjoyed those rights at a much, much later stage. Queen Hatshepsut, who ruled in the 14th 50s in BCE in ancient Egypt, was one of the most effective rulers of the New Kingdom. And, you know, she really swelled the royal coffers.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
She embarked on a really prolific building program. And perhaps in deference to male iconographic traditions, she was often depicted in busts and statues sporting a beard and in a kind of male guise. But, you know, as a woman myself, it's wonderful to know that in history, as well as in the modern era, we do have these strong women leaders to reach back to.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
But I will, if I may, and I don't know if you want to ask me about this, is perhaps to say that, you know, I focused in my book very much on characters because I think history is best understood if it's seared into the imagination. And that is best done by relating these great moments in Africa's history through the personalities.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
It does mean that sometimes the actions of ordinary people can be overlooked. And I do try to include those where I can to tell how society is formed and how ordinary people lived by how they planted their crops, what they ate and so on. But it's just when you rely on oral tradition, it is inevitably the deeds and the actions of the great leaders which become extolled.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
But I wanted to bust myths about Africa with this book, which is why every chapter is prefaced with something to do with the modern era. So if I talk about the transatlantic slave trade, I'll talk about the issue of reparations. If I talk about the Benin Kingdom in southern Nigeria, I'll talk about restitution, whether African artifacts should be returned or not.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
to try and engage the reader to say, look, this is why this matters, you know, and to say, look, you know, this idea that there are those who make history and those who stand on the sidelines of history with the Africans very much being relegated to the sidelines is not supported by the evidence. You have to break down prejudice, not with fairy tales, but with facts. And
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
you know, if you could indulge me by, I just give you one example of that. If you look at King Mansa Musa I, Mansa is the title of the king and Musa was his name, Musa I of the empire of Mali in West Africa, a broad part of, you know, the Sahel, which covers West Africa today. There was this massive empire. Mansa Musa was born in 1218, died in 1332. So he lived a very long time ago. And, um,
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
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You know, he embarked on a pilgrimage in 1324 to Mecca, and he went with a massive entourage because the Mali Empire was such a wealthy empire. You know, at a time when Europe was beginning to enter, a few decades later after his death, the Black Death, when it's, you know, the plague which decimated populations in Europe. Here was this empire flourishing, you know, with gold.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
You know, he had gold literally coming out of his ears. And he embarked on this pilgrimage to Mecca with 60,000 personal servants, 12,000 members of his household, 600 personal attendants, 100 camels bearing between 10 to 15 tons of gold.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
He stopped in Cairo on the way to Mecca and on the way back, and he spent so much gold and gave away so much gold that the global price of gold plunged by 25% and did not recover for more than a decade. And by some accounts, he is the richest individual to have ever lived in the world, worth about 435 billion US dollars.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
What the story of Mansa Musa tells you is that the actions of this medieval African king were such that they had an impact on the international economy, on the price of gold, which of course was the main trading currency as it were then. So the idea that Africa was somehow dislocated from the rest of the world is not borne out by just the illustration of this one story. And a Catalan cartographer
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
In 1375, several decades after the death of Mansa Musa, when he drew four panels of the world, Mansa Musa was there as the third panel. Such was his significance, you know, wearing a golden crown, clad in silk, holding a golden staff and a golden orb in the other hand. And that just shows you that African history
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
It's not something that is just of interest to the connoisseur or somebody who might be interested in Africa. It is part of our global story. And it is something which anybody who wants to say that they're educated should know about. And it's not history that starts with the transatlantic slave trade. There is an extraordinary history that far predates that.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
So I would say that this book is for everyone, as I say. And I wanted to narrate Africa's history. It's revelatory because I'm staggered by the level of ignorance about Africa's history, particularly its pre-colonial history, even on the continent itself. But this is a kind of global phenomenon. I want to combat that ignorance by simply narrating the history.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
But more than that, I also want to give a history of hope because I want it to be a celebration of African history. There's enough about the cannibalism, the human sacrifices. Go somewhere else if you want to read about that. For one book like mine, there are hundreds out there that you can read about that kind of stuff. I want to redress the balance.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
So to the non-African reader, I want to say, yes, Africa is where it all started, where you started. Hey, aren't you interested in how the continent of your birth developed? But to those people of African descent who have a closer connection to the continent, who may live in Africa or of African descent, like the African-Americans, I want to say to them,
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
You have a history that is history, institutions, a culture and tradition and beliefs that are worthy of study, that are worthy of respect. And as the wonderful Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmental activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize said, You cannot enslave a mind that knows itself, that understands itself, that values itself.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And I think that the telling of history by Africans themselves, and I hope in my book, in a relatively accessible way, goes some way to saying to people of African descent, you have got something which, you know, through which you can hold your head up high and let nobody tell you that you have a history that just begins and ends with, you know, enslavement and racism and so on.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
There's so much more to your heritage and I wish you to embrace it. And if this book in any small way can contribute to that mission, I'll be a very happy writer and a very happy person.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
Thank you so much indeed, Dan. I really enjoyed talking to you and thank you for your very thoughtful questions. And thank you for so clearly having read the book and digested it.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
Well, Dan, in a way, the book found me. And that is because having enjoyed a long career in broadcasting and making documentary films, I embarked on a project to make 20, 45-minute documentary films about the history of Africa. And I traveled to more than 30 countries in Africa over a period of about seven years.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And I interviewed dozens and dozens and dozens of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and so on. And I made the films, put them out. They're now available on BBC YouTube, free of charge. And I was very troubled by the fact that so much of what these marvelous African scholars had told me had, metaphorically speaking, hit the cutting room floor.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
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So I thought, you know what, I really want to do justice to what they told me. I want to ventilate their scholarship. And so I thought the only way I could do that was by writing a book, because I wanted to accord them the respect of bringing their vision, their perspectives, their scholarship, their research to the telling of the history of their own continent.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And so that's why I've written the book. And it's a passion, a mission for me. And I see myself as a kind of conduit, a facilitator for these African voices. I thought, let me use my international stage, as it were, to put them center stage and say at last, let us hear Africans telling their own story rather than having it being related by outsiders.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
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Undoubtedly, everybody in Africa knows that there is nobody on Earth today who cannot say that Africa is not their mother continent. The science is settled. It's accepted all over the world. I mean, there are obviously some people who perhaps find it rather unpalatable that all humans originated from Africa. But there we go.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And Africans, I think, do actually derive a great deal of pride from the fact that the story of humankind begins in Africa. If you're not living in Africa today or of African descent, you're an African export. Whether you've got blonde hair, blue eyes, there's no escaping that.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
How far it marries back with oral tradition, that may be a bit of a stretch, Dan, because, I mean, just a quick, you know... snapshot of how we evolved. Modern humans, that's Homo sapiens sapiens, we were fully formed about 100,000 years ago. By about 90,000 years ago, we had populated the whole continent of Africa. Sometime around 60,000 to 70,000 years ago, those first hardy pioneers left the
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
to the Arabian Peninsula and Asia and Europe. And there they encountered other hominins like Denisovans or the Neanderthals, and they bred with them until these other species were bred into extinction. So to say that Africans today remember that history about 60,000 years ago when they migrated from the continent would be a bit of a stretch.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
But what is certainly true is that if you are trying to piece together early African history, and by that I really mean pre-colonial history before the Europeans arrived and started writing about Africa's history, Oral tradition is very, very important, and this is what African historians do and which Western historians often overlook. They look at their own written records.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
They perhaps don't put enough attention on written records which have been given to us by the Arabs, for instance. The Arabs were in Africa much, much earlier than the Europeans from about the seventh century. And they had their chronicles, their travelers and so on. You've got other non-Western languages, Persian, Gujarati. So African scholars tend to look at these other sources.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
but they also rely on oral tradition a great deal to piece together their early history, and that's often supported by archaeological evidence. If you say that, oh, Africans didn't always write and record their history, therefore they had no history, that, in my opinion, is very short-sighted, and that has often been the case.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
And that is why I think Africa's history before the Europeans arrived has been denigrated because they say, oh, you know, they didn't write, they don't have any history. Of course, documentary evidence is important, but it doesn't mean to say that just because Africans didn't always write that they didn't record their history. You just have to get at it in different ways.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
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And that's what I liked about the African historians that I encountered. They... do, you know, that they are aware of how accounts of great deeds and actions and words of great leaders throughout history have been handed down through the generations. Because, you know, knowledge in Africa is held communally. Knowledge in the West is held by an individual.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
But in Africa, you know, knowledge is communal. It's, you know, your great grandmother may be the custodian of certain tables about your people's history. And that's mirrored in countless communities, you know, across regions. And so that's a very important point to make. And what the African historians are saying is we're not supplanting what the Western historians have done.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum
EP31 Kushite Conversations
We're merely supplementing it and saying, if you only look at African history through a Western prism, you will miss something. Because If you just look at Africa through Western values system, you won't understand the African mindset. You will miss something. So in a sense, this diversification of looking at Africa's history, in my opinion, brings you