Nubia

Its architecture and mountain setting also attracted great interest, and during the twentieth century, Machu Picchu became an icon of the Inca civilization.

For our second visit tonight, let's head to Africa, more precisely to the region of Nubia in what is now Sudan, and to the ruins of Meroë, the capital of the Kingdom of Kush.

For several centuries, the Kingdom of Kush was a powerful state that developed an advanced civilization.

It traded with other parts of the ancient world and became powerful enough to invade Egypt during the first millennium BC.

Egypt was ruled by Nubian pharaohs for several generations.

Meroë became the capital of Kush in the sixth century BC, and its ruins give us an idea of the wealth and influence of its kings.

The site contains more than two hundred pyramids.

They look familiar because they recall Egyptian architecture while also displaying distinct Nubian characteristics.

There was upright things already in the making.

in the Levant and Nubia that she'd been attempting to handle peacefully, but it hadn't been really working out.

So the Levant is the region to the northeast of Egypt.

So it's pretty fertile.

This was part of what historians call the Canaanite region.

So you probably heard that before.

And then Nubia is the region below Egypt.

that is now part of Sudan.

Seti's reign got underway, and at first, things were good.

In the opening months, the king sailed upriver, visiting Nubia.

Seti shows up at sites like Abu Simbel, where he may have repaired damage caused by an earthquake.

He also visited his grandfather, the deified Ramesses II.

A modest beginning, but a peaceful one.

Unfortunately, when he returned to Piramises, Pharaoh received some troubling news.

Despite his tour of Nubia, Seti's authority in the south was not secure.

In fact, someone had declared a rebellion.

The expedition to Punt commissioned by Hatshepsut around 1470 BCE was recorded in detailed relief carvings at Deir el-Bari that show the ships, the goods, the foreign landscape, and even the Queen of Punt herself, depicted as an extremely heavy woman, which some scholars have interpreted as a clinical illustration of a specific medical condition, and others have read as a straightforward, if undiplomatic, portrait.

Overland, Egyptian trade routes extended south into Nubia, which supplied gold in such quantities that the Egyptians considered it more common than dirt.

The word for Nubia in Egyptian may derive from the word for gold, and west into the Libyan oases, which provided dates, wine, and a gateway to trans-Saharan networks that are still poorly understood.

Egypt was not isolated.

it was a node in a web of exchange routes that stretched from central africa to the aegean and the goods that flowed through it cedar lapis lazuli tin copper obsidian ivory shaped its material culture as much as the Nile shaped its agriculture.

The export of textiles was one of the sources of wealth for Meroe.

Ancient Nubia had a culture of cotton of sorts, evidenced by physical evidence of cotton processing tools and the presence of cattle in certain areas.

Some researchers propose that cotton was important to the Nubian economy for its use in contact with the neighboring Egyptians.

Aksumite king Ezana boasted in his inscription that he destroyed large cotton plantations in Meroe during his conquest of the region.

During the Han dynasty, 207 BC to 220 AD, cotton was grown by Chinese peoples in the southern Chinese province of Yunnan.

There's a book by Thomas Brophy called The Origin Map where he was analyzing Nabta Playa, the stone circle way south in Egypt, almost Sudan.

in Nubia, and he was finding that that stone circle was actually pinpointing Orion and not only pinpointing its location, but also pinpointing the two extreme tilts of the sky using Orion.

So it was showing us this end of the processional cycle and this end.

13,000 years apart, half these stones align.

Yes.

Then Nubia was into African spirituality and Islam.

Mm-hmm.

Because Islam had already started coming into-

Okay

... yeah, penetrating.

And these people were practicing their African spirituality, Abosom Semwona, the Nubians.

So then Ezana decided, "Let me go and conquer these people." Ezana went and conquered Nubia.