Original subtitles

Africa, where the human race began.

Nearly a billion people live here.

And it's a continent

with an incredible diversity of communities and cultures.

Yet we know less of its history than almost anywhere else on earth.

But that's beginning to change.

In the last few decades, researchers and archaeologists

have begun to uncover a range of histories

as impressive and extraordinary as anywhere else on earth.

It's a history which has been neglected for years,

and it's largely without written records.

But it is preserved for us in the gold and statues, in the culture,

art and legends of the people.

My name is Gus Casely-Hayford.

Over many years I've studied the history and culture of Africa.

As an art historian, I'm used to drawing stories

from mute objects from the past.

I'm going to discover the history and find out what really happened

to the Lost Kingdoms of Africa.

I'm beginning my search in the far north of the continent,

in what is now known as the Sudan.

I'm looking for the legendary kingdom of Nubia.

Nubia is the traditional name for the northern part of Sudan,

near the Egyptian border.

For thousands of years, a civilisation

dominated the area there in what's now the eastern Sahara.

It's first mentioned by the ancient Egyptians as a primitive outpost,

a source of slaves and treasure, dancing girls and wrestlers.

To the Romans, too, it was a barbarian wasteland.

Yet these people were conquerors in their own right,

ultimately defeated not by their rivals but by their environment.

Nubia has left us some of the most spectacular monuments

not only in Africa, but in the whole world.

There are more pyramids here than there are in Egypt.

This was a major civilisation, but its history is barely remembered.

So what was Nubia actually like?

How powerful was it and what happened to it in the end?

To begin my search, I'm leaving the Sudanese capital, Khartoum,

and flying north into Nubia.

This is every schoolboy's dream.

This ancient old helicopter is going to take us up to see some

of the ancient Nubian sites.

And I've got this fantastic guide here. This is Mahmoud,

who's going to tell me what some of the sites mean.

Mahmoud Bashir is one of Sudan's most respected archaeologists.

He's taking me on a journey not just through space, but time, going back

nearly 10,000 years, to the time when humans first began to plant

crops, and to keep domestic animals.

We're going northwards along the Nile.

If it weren't for the Nile

and its irrigation this whole scene would be desert.

And from the air it's easy to see how narrow

the cultivation strip really is.

But Mahmoud tells me we're going to

leave the green corridor of the Nile and head out into the desert proper.

Out here is one of the toughest places on earth.

The temperature here is more than 120 degrees Fahrenheit,

and yet there are still people working here.

This is where I'm going to start my journey,

right in the back of beyond.

We've flown more than 250 miles north from Khartoum

into the middle of the Nubian desert.

15,000 square miles of arid sandstone,

with scarcely a single oasis.

From here, we're going to drive across the scorching sands.

Mahmoud tells me we're going to start

with the very beginnings of Nubian culture...

..more than 7,000 years ago.

Oh, it's hot.

It's baking.

What are you doing to me? I can't believe we've come out here.

It feels like the middle of nowhere.

It's one of the driest, most remote places I've ever been, but Mahmoud

says that here there's something that makes all the suffering

we've gone through really worthwhile.

So let's have a look.

But why did you bring me out here?

Something interesting.

Oh, it's a bell.

So how old is this, Mahmoud?

5,000 years. Wow!

So I'm playing a 5000 BC instrument. Yes.

The actual sound is the natural result of the consistency of the

rock, but it's been worn smooth by the actions of people playing it

more than 7,000 years ago,

long before the Romans, long before the Pharaohs.

This is a sign of human civilisation.

So would they sing along to this?

More dancing.

In the last few years, archaeologists have

found hundreds of rock gongs like this in the Nubian desert,

possible evidence of a sizable population.

I imagine you'd be able to hear it from a long distance.

Archaeologists think the people here

may have used the rock gongs to communicate across the valleys.

And that this is the beginning of the Nubian culture.

But why here? This is the middle of one of the

harshest deserts in the world.

Mahmoud has something to show me.

It's been a secret until recently.

Oh, wow!

That's amazing. It's cattle.

Yeah. How old is that?

BC? 5000-6000!

It's just astounding.

When were these discovered?

Last March? We are in August. Five months ago.

So not many people have seen them?

Really? Really.

Rock art is the oldest form of pictorial representation known.

Research has shown that the pictures are unlikely to be

just a depiction of everyday life.

Instead, they concentrate on subjects

that are of great significance to the people who made them.

So I'm amazed to discover that out here,

deep in the Nubian desert, they should be making images of cattle.

But this is desert though.

Mahmoud tells me it's a story of catastrophic climate change.

Recent research has shown that some 7,000 years ago

most of the Sahara was in fact green.

You can see the outlines of dry valleys, or wadis.

They were once big rivers which flowed into the Nile.

And between them stretched grassland savannahs of the kind that you have

to go much further south to see today.

So this area here,

once upon a time, would have had grass and it would have been lush,

it would have supported cattle and probably complex communities?

What kind of animals?

So the wildlife and the ecology of

sub-Saharan Africa once existed here?

Yes. That's amazing.

And this is the proof of that.

So you can imagine, sort of, the cattle - well, with a stretch of

the imagination - the cattle in this valley, the river just down there.

Yes. And people, someone, at some point,

coming up here, and with one of these stones just making this mark.

It took thousands of years for the desert to dry out completely.

So the cattle herding or pastoralist society which created the rock art

was able to develop into a much more complex community.

And I'm told that they produced something quite spectacular,

and that's where I'm headed for now.

We're pushing northwards along the Nile, some 700 miles from Khartoum,

and less than 200 from the Egyptian border.

Our destination is the small town of Kerma, which sits by the Nile.

This was once the capital of the kingdom which the Egyptians knew

as Kush.

This was the heart of the Kingdom of Nubia.

Over the last few decades, archaeologists have uncovered

the remains of an impressive city here, dating from around 2000 BC.

This extraordinary structure looms like a man-made mountain

over the ruins.

At the heart of this great city is a huge mud brick structure

known as the Deffufa.

It's the oldest known mud brick building in Africa

and one of the largest.

But it has no rooms.

It's a solid block of masonry.

They've actually built a piece of geography, because it's absolutely

solid mud. And what is it, and what might it have been used for?

We don't know who the god or gods were that these people worshipped,

but according to Mahmoud it was the

temple on the top of the Deffufa which was the main focus here.

It was surrounded by palaces for royalty or priests.

So these are raised foundations?

Judging by the buildings that the archaeologists have uncovered in the

last 10 years, Kerma was not so much a residential city as a place of

pilgrimage, where people would come from miles around for ceremonies.

Then, of course, it would have looked very different.

It's easy to forget that all of this

was really green.

So it could have been a fairly wealthy area?

There's a small museum here with some of the finds from

the excavations, which give a flavour of the Nubian culture.

And even when it's laid out like this, with the artefacts numbered

off and catalogued, you can see quite how distinctive it is.

Take the pottery.

Archaeologists now know that people were making pottery here even before

they began to plant crops, and long before ancient Egypt.

The polished surfaces and black rims imitate the forms of

polished drinking gourds I've seen and used elsewhere in Africa.

It's extremely finely made, but it's done entirely by hand.

They weren't using a potter's wheel for this.

And the extraordinary thing is that this technique can still be

found today, 4,000 years on.

Everywhere you go around here, you see these characteristic water jugs.

They aren't mass-produced in a factory.

Instead, they're made by women in a local village.

Just gathering some goat poo,

I think it is, which apparently is used in the mixture with the clay.

This is a village across the Nile

from where we've been staying, where they create these amazing clay pots.

And we're being shown by one of the local women

how they do that from the point

of kneading the clay to the finished product.

I've done some pottery myself, but I know from hard experience

that this technique is actually extremely difficult.

It's as sophisticated as the mud-brick architecture

of the Deffufa.

This technique may be ancient, but it's perfectly adapted

to the conditions here.

The red slip is designed to get the surface of the pot

just right, porous enough for slow evaporation,

to keep the contents cool.

These continuities of tradition and practice are an even more important

insight into the culture of ancient Nubia, because the Nubians of Kerma

never developed writing.

But archaeology has revealed some more astonishing insights

into this ancient city.

This is where the Nubians of Kerma buried their dead.

The cemetery was first excavated by an American-led team in 1913.

What they uncovered told an astonishing story.

We're standing on the edge of

what was once an enormous funeral mound, nearly 100 metres across.

The centre is marked by a mysterious white rock,

and there's a kind of smooth avenue which crosses the space.

It's a huge area that seems to be the burial mound of a king.

But he wasn't buried alone.

How many people were sacrificed?

Gosh.

The archaeologists think that the victims - men, women and

children, too - were sacrificed to provide servants and retainers

for their master in the life beyond.

The vast cemetery itself was used for over 1,000 years.

It contains over 30,000 graves.

It must have been quite an eerie and melancholy place.

If anything is going to

really make you think about life and death, it's a place like this.

Archaeologists have also found something which ties Kerma

directly to the people of the rock art - cattle.

So this would be a king or something. 5,000 cattle...

Were these cattle that were slaughtered especially for...?

Wealth is measured in cattle?

But if that many cattle, that many people, are being sacrificed for one

person, one, it suggests they were incredibly powerful and, two, that

there must have been an enormous cattle culture here and probably

a big population that that supported.

That really does get me thinking in a different way about Kerma.

This was an enormous civilisation.

The scale and relative sophistication of the

Nubian civilisation here in Kerma

led Western archaeologists in colonial Sudan to assume

that this culture must have been brought in from Egypt or elsewhere.

But now it's believed that this was an indigenous development,

a civilisation created by the descendants

of the people who created the rock art.

4,000 years after it was built, the people of Kerma still gather

like ghosts around the temple at the Deffufa.

Although the Nubian kingdom is long gone, it still exerts a pull.

And these ruins have really affected me.

In a sense, Kerma is the lost kingdom

that I'd always dreamt of seeing.

It's every bit as spectacular as anything that I've seen in Egypt.

4,000 years ago, the Nubians of Kerma were apparently thriving,

with their great mud-brick monument,

their herds of cattle and a sizable population.

So why did they disappear and where did they go?

Water was the key to this Nubian kingdom.

It provided the lush, fertile land on which their cattle-herding

society was based.

It was a different story for Nubia's northern neighbours, the Egyptians.

Their lack of pastoral land had led to the development

of irrigation technology, drawing as much water as they could

from the Nile to transform their parched, desert soil.

But even with this technology,

it was a lot harder for them to create the rich greenery that Nubia

had at this time in abundance, thanks to the rivers

which ran through it.

Nubia was a tempting target for the ambitious Pharaohs.

There were frequent raids and retaliations.

Then, around 1500 BC, the records show us that the Egyptians invaded.

Their target wasn't just Kerma.

They continued another 180 miles along the Nile

to a place called Jebel Barkal.

Mahmoud and I are following the Egyptians'

invasion route up the River Nile.

Our objective is the same as the ancient Pharaohs - the apparently

symbolic mountain of Jebel Barkal.

I'm not seeing a cobra, I must admit!

So we're looking at something which is sitting like that and

you can imagine a sort of dancing cobra and on its head

there is a crown. Wearing a crown.

I see it.

To the ancient Egyptians,

the rearing cobra was a symbol of kingship.

And here was a natural sculpture which signalled to them, it seems,

that within the mountain dwelt Amun, King of the Egyptian gods.

They felt that justified their conquest of Nubia,

and so they built an enormous temple to Amun at the foot of the mountain.

How did the Nubians feel about the Egyptians actually being here?

It does seem a little bit like colonialism.

Egyptian images at the time of theconquest

are explicit about the subjugation of the Nubian people.

They clearly regarded them as inferior.

Miserable Nubia?

The images also make it clear that the Egyptians made the most

of Nubia's natural resources and demanded riches as well as respect.

Here, the Nubians are bringing tribute - gold, ivory,

along with wild animals, monkeys and leopard skins.

And of course cattle are prominent.

They even seem to have imported Nubian wrestlers

to entertain them like gladiators.

The people who built Kerma's magnificent buildings

had, it seemed, been reduced to slaves,

or certainly that's what the Egyptians wanted everyone to think.

There's a suggestion that even the name by which we know them

is pejorative.

The word "nuba" originally meant "slave".

THEY SING AND PLAY DRUMS

It's clear that, whatever their justification, the Egyptians claimed

Jebel Barkal as a holy place.

What's amazing is that, more than 3,000 years later, it still is.

HE CHANTS

This evening, Mahmoud and I have come here to share the devotions

of a local Sufi Muslim sect.

They honour the memory of a local sheikh

who is buried in a shrine at the foot of the holy mountain.

Sufi mystics were instrumental in the conversion of Sudan

to Islam in the Middle Ages.

In the process, they adapted and made use of local cultural customs.

So, although this ceremony is clearly Islamic, it's likely

that it contains glimpses of

far more ancient religious observances from this area.

And in the clearer light of dawn, seeing the Egyptian temple

and the Sufi shrine from the top of the mountain,

I'm struck by the continuities which seem to persist.

History piled upon history here.

You can just feel it's one of those special places...

..and it sets me thinking back about those gongs.

Hearing those Sufis, those repeated rhythms, it gives you a sense of the

way in which those repetitions of prayers, of incantations,

of thoughts, reflect back over generations, over millennia, but

in some way are still very special to the people of this land today.

The Egyptians had painted the Nubians as mere slaves.

What Mahmoud wants to show me is that the story isn't so simple.

It's just astoundingly hot today.

Apparently it's above 50 degrees

and I've never experienced it before, but it gets above 50

in this environment and it's no longer just hot from the sun.

It just feels like it's coming at you from every direction.

The Egyptians only ruled Nubia for just a few centuries.

And there's hard evidence that the Nubians were able to get

their own back on their conquerors.

But surrounded by all these massive Egyptian remains,

I find that hard to believe.

Mahmoud says that if I had any lingering doubt

that the Nubians turned the tables on the Egyptians, that that would

be completely extinguished by having a look at what's in here.

This is absolutely stunning.

Stunning.

So what is this?

It's a temple, apparently built by a Nubian ruler called Taharka

in around 700 BC.

So that is where we actually sat.

Actually inside? Inside the mountain.

In here? Yes.

So Taharka

representing the people here? Yes.

But what these images show

is that Taharka wasn't just a ruler of Nubia.

He was also a Pharaoh of Egypt.

The conquered had become the conquerors.

He is one of a whole dynasty of Nubian Pharaohs

which ruled over the entire Nile Valley under the auspices of Amun.

Wow! Cos usually these things are so ambiguous and you have to

make a bit of a leap of faith with history or archaeology,

but this is absolutely categorical.

And suddenly I'm seeing that snake again.

These are black Pharaohs, Nubians,

part of that lost kingdom of Nubia.

But they didn't just rule over Nubia.

They also ruled over Egypt, as one continuous kingdom.

These hieroglyphs show how Taharka celebrated his joint Nubian-Egyptian

kingdom in the sanctuary of this temple.

On one side, he depicted the Nubian gods.

And there is a wall here.

..with the Egyptian deities on the other.

This black African civilisation held sway from the Upper Nile all the way

to the Lebanon for over a century.

These statues, discovered only few years ago, give us

a portrait of the Nubian Pharaohs in all of their self-confidence.

These people ruled the whole area from here

down in the Nubian territory, right the way up into Egypt.

And you can tell that by looking at their headdress, with two snakes,

one for Nubia, one for Egypt.

And you can tell how threatening they were to the Egyptians

because they've all at some point had their heads knocked off.

Just look at them.

And though they were unable to keep their hold on Egypt,

the Nubian kingdom survived for centuries afterwards.

But now they had acquired some Egyptian habits.

From this time onward, Nubian rulers

would be buried in pyramids like the Pharaohs of old.

There are more pyramids in Sudan than in Egypt.

But this wasn't simple imitation.

It had been centuries since Egyptian rulers used pyramids,

and these pyramids are of a very different shape.

This was the Nubians celebrating their own glory.

But the Nubians had another greater enemy than the Egyptians -

the environment.

At the time of Taharka,

around 700 BC, the archaeological records show that the desert was

approaching ever-closer and Kerma itself had lost its grazing land.

The pressure of the desert meant that the heartland of the Nubian

kingdom now moved further south, another 350 miles along the Nile,

around a place called Meroe.

Today, the desert here is littered

with the remains of pyramids and temples.

The society that built them flourished

between 700 BC and 400 AD.

The rebirth of the Nubian kingdom at Meroe, still green and lush

back then, is marked by countless palaces and temples.

And although the Egyptians had left their mark on the Nubian culture,

there's evidence here also of more ancient Nubian beliefs.

I can see the Egyptian influence in the shape of this temple.

But the relief sculpture on the walls expressed

a decidedly un-Egyptian world view.

By 200 BC, the Egyptian god Horus

has been demoted to the back of the line.

So this is in the line of seniority? Exactly.

Even the great Amun of Jebel Barkal is playing second fiddle

to the completely non-Egyptian war god Apedemak. He is more senior,

shown presenting the sign of kingship to the Nubian ruler.

And there's another way

the Nubians held on to their traditions from before.

Mahmoud has brought me to one of the most spectacular sites in Sudan,

the royal cemetery itself...

..where the Nubian kings of this period were buried

in their distinctive pyramids.

There's evidence of a return to their traditional way of life,

where one thing was of the utmost importance.

So there's a whole row of cattle, just going from right to left?

So the thing that they value is obviously cattle? Exactly.

And the whole of their social world

can be translated into value through cattle?

Wow. Amazing.

So, in a sense, there does seem to be a link between kingship and

cattle, something quite fundamental.

700 years after they were subjected to Egyptian domination,

the Nubians of Meroe were still a distinct and African culture,

a heritage that still connects them to African cultures today.

It's time to leave the ruins and had to be inhabited part of Meroe.

We're off to the royal city of Meroe.

They've supplied some fantastic transport for us.

Modern Meroe is where Mahmoud carries out his main research.

His speciality is the history of the iron trade,

and many of the old techniques survive unchanged.

So, for thousands of years, people have been...

The Nubians are thought to have developed the earliest

iron industry in Africa.

The first iron technology appeared here during the first millennium BC,

around the same time as our own Iron Age.

The archaeology shows us that Meroe became a

relatively large industrial centre, producing vast amounts of iron.

For 1,000 years after the loss of the Egyptian kingdom,

the Nubians of Meroe flourished.

By the second century BC, they'd even developed writing.

But whilst archaeologists long ago decoded the sounds of the alphabet,

no-one has yet cracked the language itself.

This was a confident, independent civilisation, far from the barbarian

wilderness described by the ancient writers, a place that was justly

famed for its ironwork, its wrestlers and its cattle.

It's possible that the encroaching desert was their friend as well as

their enemy, protecting them from another invasion from the north.

But the desert continued its relentless incursion.

It had long ago destroyed their civilisation at Kerma.

Now, too, the Nubians of Meroe saw their grazing lands disappearing.

This land is just dry and desiccated. Nothing could grow here.

But can you imagine actually having invested your livelihood

in living here as a farmer just to see it all turn to dust?

You can imagine the people thinking

this was something which might have been seasonal, perhaps a few dry

summers or winters, and then it just lasted for ever.

It changed the culture, changed the landscape and eventually the people

would have had to have given up.

With the desert came one of thefew animals to thrive

in its conditions - the camel.

They were first domesticated in Arabia about 1000 BC and took some

time to reach Nubia. When they did, they eventually brought a nomadic

way of life to the eastern Sahara and everything changed.

Mahmoud believes it was the loss of its trade routes to camel-riding

nomads which destroyed the Nubian kingdom at Meroe.

Others debate this.

But, by 400 AD, archaeologists agree

the ancient kingdom of Nubia was in terminal decline.

The Nubian way of life had become impossible.

But what became of the Nubian people?

We're on our way south and we're suddenly confronted

by the new kings of the desert.

It's an enormous camel train

on its way, it seems, to the great camel markets of southern Egypt.

Some of the guys who are on these trains

have fairly sort of dicey reputations.

We're going to be OK, are we?

Yes, hopefully we should be OK.

We will be very careful when we approach.

As you said, there have been some problems.

There's someone under the tree there.

When we meet up with the camel herders,

we're given a friendly greeting.

These men have travelled all the way from Darfur,

near the border with Chad.

They've covered more than 700 miles and have hundreds more to go.

This is the way of life that

now dominates the desert, where once the Nubians ruled.

Their days are spent guiding their camels from well to well,

from oasis to oasis.

But they don't seem to think it's any hardship.

These men will travel 40 days at a time,

ten kilometres a day and rest when the sun is highest in the sky.

But there are still small communities here,

people who eke out a living off this harsh land.

They, too, are dependent on the camel.

Are we are close now?

I wonder if these people are among the descendants

of the original Nubians?

But where once their ancestors lived lives defined by lush grazing land,

these people must cluster around small wells.

I can do the pulling. There is something quite sophisticated

going on with the wrists,

which I think is probably avoiding it being tangled.

What is that, actually?

It is a sharp contrast to

the pastoral way of life which once thrived here.

And getting thirsty animals watered is laborious work.

Wow, I imagine it is going to take about ten of these

to make any real decent sort of attempt on this.

I imagine we have probably got our work cut-out

for the evening with this.

This is a culture perfectly honed to the desert.

But it isn't Nubian.

To see if there are any traces of the old Nubian civilisation,

I am going to have to head out of these desert zones further south.

Central Sudan, and here is the landscape of ancient Nubia.

It is just great to see

this green environment and it is so reminiscent of what

Kerma must have been like.

Not just the housing, the farming technology, but just

the landscape, this green landscape is just what it must have been like.

700 miles south of Kerma, the land that still enjoys regular

rainfall is sought-after by pastoral communities.

And the frontier between desert and green continues

to be a source of conflict,

just as it was for Egyptians and Nubians 3,500 years ago.

These are UN vehicles going off to Darfur.

It is fascinating that the same sorts of issues of food, resources,

of power, are still, in a way, the dynamic thing that infuses

this landscape, even today.

A key component of the recent fighting in Darfur in western Sudan

was a dispute over lush well-watered pastures.

The same issues were a factor in the deadly civil war that engulfed

southern Sudan for over 20 years.

These lush green hills were recently a battleground.

It is so glorious, so idyllic here, it is hard to believe that

only a decade ago, this place was the site of a civil war.

I was wandering around, a few minutes ago and found a spent

bullet case and there are dozens of them scattered across here.

And it is not just the recent thing,

over centuries, people have fought over this landscape.

And in a sense, there is history, the story we are telling

is of that being replayed over centuries and centuries.

The name of these hills reflects that history.

These are the Nuba hills and the Nuba people believe

they are descended from the ancient kingdom of Nubia.

THE PEOPLE SING

WHISTLE BLOWS

I have come here with Shaza Rahal, educated in Britain,

but a member of a traditional ruling family here.

Her uncle, the leader of the village community,

remembers the family traditions well.

HE SPEAKS IN DIALECT

He comes from a royal family.

He arrived many years ago.

Many years ago, how many years might that be?

This is roughly around 300 years ago.

Their tradition says that they originally

came from an area near Meroe.

That ancient Nubian City more than 500 miles away.

I'm really keen to find out if there is a connection between

the people of this region, the Nuba and ancient Nubian,

I'm just really keen if this very much living place

has a connection with that old mythology.

They all the same people, they just separated, so there are some

that stayed in Egypt, some came to Sudan and...

THEY SPEAKS IN DIALECT

..The rest stayed in Meroe.

The only difference between here and there, you'll see is the colour

of the skin, but in terms of the language,

it is the same, the traditions are the same.

Can there really be a connection between the people in this region

and the ancient civilisation of Nubia,

born more than 7000 years ago to the sound of a rock gong?

The extraordinary thing is, that although we are miles from ancient

Nubian lands, there do seem to be some echoes of those far-off times.

Today, the young men still compete

in what has become their most famous sport - wrestling.

The wrestling is in just the same style

as in the pictures from 1500 BC that Mahmoud showed me at Jebel Barkal.

The same stance, the same grips even.

Can I finally get to grips with this

ancient civilisation I have been searching for? I have to have a go.

Wait, wait, wait.

LAUGHTER

That is just amazing.

But suddenly, I begin to realise, this is just like

those ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs of wrestlers,

it is just like it.

SHE ULULATES

Of course, the similarities in style of their wrestling may be

a coincidence. If there really is an inheritance from old Nubia, it

should show up in more fundamental features of the Nuba way of life.

Abdu, a cattle drover, certainly believes that the way

of doing things hasn't changed in a long time.

HE SPEAKS IN DIALECT

It has gone through tradition through history, through family...

..and from an early age,

everyone is allocated a certain number of cows.

Oh, really? Yes.

So that they can raise them and they feed from them, like they use the

milk from them to grow their children and then they build on those and

obviously, the more cows you have, the more wealth you have.

So, cattle are absolutely integral to politics, to culture,

to weaving the whole of this community together?

Yes.

There are cattle cultures like this one, right across Africa, from here

in the hills of Sudan down to KwaZulu in South Africa

and so many of them are connected to kingship.

It is possible, that many of these stories may have begun in

ancient Nubia, right the way back to the rock art people and Kerma.

SINGING

The Kambala, is the Nuba's most important dance.

Its origins are in ceremonies which initiate young men

as full members of Nuba society.

These head-dresses are made out of cattle skulls.

And I am struck by something.

At Kerma, the great burial mound was surrounded by

5,000 cattle skulls just like these.

Perhaps they were once the head dresses worn by dancers

at the king's funeral.

Who could fail to be convinced by this?

Those ancient Kerma cultures just brought to life. I mean, the cattle.

I mean, you can just feel it. This is women singing about the cattle,

this is men reliving those ancient traditions,

this is absolutely everything I have seen along the journey but

made alive in this incredible dance.

Are these people the descendants of people of that ancient kingdom?

There seems to be an inheritance expressed in traditions about

cattle, about wrestling and in legends about an ancient homeland.

Beyond that, it is difficult to be certain of the links between

the people of Nuba and those of ancient Nubia.

But such a connection, would only be icing on the cake.

The most important thing is the weight of evidence we now have

for the existence of Nubia as a remarkable, long-lasting

and indigenous Kingdom.

Nubia wasn't a barbarian wasteland on the fringes of civilisation

as the Egyptians and Romans would have us believe.

It was a real power which developed independently

and rivalled the Pharaohs, a place with a distinctive way of life.

In the end, it became the victim of climate change,

but I think Nubian ideas of power,

wealth and kingship continue to resonate in modern Africa.

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