Pod Insights The Ancients The Kingdom of Kush About this episode Beyond the ancient Nile’s fertile banks lay a civilisation that rivalled Egypt in power and prestige—the Kingdom of Kush. This ancient empire, centred in modern Sudan, once ruled Egypt, defied Rome, and it's formidable warrior queens left a lasting mark on African history.
In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes visits the British Museum to explore the story of the Kushites with Dr. Loretta Kilroe, curator of a new exhibition on Ancient Sudan. From royal pyramids to one-eyed battlefield leaders and even Kushite porridge, uncover the hidden legacy of this extraordinary civilization.
Loretta's exhibition, Ancient Sudan: Enduring Heritage is touring the UK this year. It opens in Portsmouth on 1st February and in Stirling on 9th August.
Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight.
The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
The Ancients is a History Hit podcast.
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0:00 Tristan Hughes? Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe. This episode is sponsored by Smart Travel, a new podcast from NerdWallet. Now, you know that one friend who always finds the best travel deals, picks the right cards, and somehow ends up in first class for the price of coach?
0:44 Tristan Hughes? Smart Travel is like that friend, but in podcast form. They cover all the things travel finance, so you can stop stressing and actually start enjoying your trips. I'm lucky enough to travel a fair bit. You might have heard me talking about being on tour with the Ancients in Australia and New Zealand quite recently. Well, Smart Travel podcast from NerdWallet was a great help. They dig into which airport lounges are really worth it, and which are just an airport gate with better snacks and worse lighting, and what actually happens when an airline loses your luggage for 12 days, and how to get real money back instead of a free drink and an apology.
1:24 Tristan Hughes? Plus, the tip I really needed: how to book flights without it turning into a part-time job. Travel smarter and spend less with help from NerdWallet. Follow Smart Travel wherever you get your podcasts.
1:49 Tristan Hughes? The sun rises over the Nile Valley. Stretched out ahead is an avenue of conical-shaped pyramids, each with steeply slanting sides. They mark the entrance to a sprawling ancient city overlooking the fertile Nile in the eastern Sahara. But these pyramids, seemingly emerging from the desert sands, well, they're not in Egypt. They're in Sudan, in the ancient kingdom of Kush.
2:18 Tristan Hughes? It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. In today's episode, we are exploring another of those ancient civilizations, all too often overshadowed by more famous names like Egypt, Greece and Rome. We're shining a light on the Kingdom of Kush, its people known as the Kushites. Centred in present day Sudan, the Kingdom of Kush has an extraordinary story. From ruling ancient Egypt to defying the powerful Roman Emperor Augustus, its people have left an indelible mark on Sudanese and African history that endures to this day. Now, to learn more about this kingdom, I headed to the British Museum to interview Dr. Loretta Kilroy,
3:02 Tristan Hughes? curator for Sudan and Tunisia at the museum. Loretta has recently curated a brand new exhibition about ancient Sudan, full of stunning Kushite artefacts. The exhibition will be touring the UK in 2025 and is called Ancient Sudan: Enduring Heritage. We have a brand new documentary showcasing its artefacts out now on the History Hit YouTube channel, so please do check that out after listening to today's episode. This chat has everything from ancient Kushite porridge to their striking pyramids. Loretta was fantastic and I hope you enjoy it.
3:42 Tristan Hughes? Loretta, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast.
3:45 Speaker 01 Thank you for having me, Tristan.
3:46 Tristan Hughes? We've done this, well, we've done it for TV already, for YouTube, talking about ancient Sudan and those extraordinary artefacts. Great to have you on the podcast as well to talk about the Kingdom of Kush. And it's a story of an, I guess you could say, sometimes overlooked kingdom, but it had strong connections with Rome, Greece and Egypt. It's got an amazing story.
4:03 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And the more you look into the Kingdom of Kush and ancient Sudan more broadly, the more fascinating it is. And I think a lot of people end up getting really drawn into these amazing stories.
4:15 Tristan Hughes? And what time period are we talking about with the Kingdom of Kush?
4:18 Speaker 01 So we're looking at about 790 B.C. to about the 4th century A.D. But obviously throughout that, there are a lot of... Changes in political rule, rises and falls, extensions of empire. This isn't a static kingdom that we're looking at.
4:36 Tristan Hughes? Seven ninety B C. That's quite a specific date in the eighth century. Do we know why you put the beginnings around the beginning of the eighth century B C?
4:44 Speaker 01 So a lot of archaeologists have studied the rise of Kush. There's been a great interest in the early cemetery. So in particular, we have a cemetery known as El Kuru. This is in central Sudan, so around between the third and the fourth cataract.
5:01 Tristan Hughes? Of the Nile, yeah.
5:03 Speaker 01 The River Nile. We found a couple of hundred years ago, a large cemetery that had what looked like the remains of pyramids. Massive superstructures, smaller accompanying burials that were perhaps for consorts. And this really intrigued early archaeologists who at that time didn't know much about ancient Sudan. We know based on Egyptian and biblical, actually, textual sources of the Twenty Fifth Dynasty, who are particularly famous for invading Egypt.
5:42 Speaker 01 So the Twenty Fifth Dynasty are Sudanese kings who suddenly turn up in Egyptian and later biblical sources as ruling Egypt. And this is when we start to get dates in. Once we start to get these rulers with inscriptions written in hieroglyphics and in the biblical stories.
6:00 Tristan Hughes? But that's interesting. So that Twenty Fifth Dynasty, is that some of the earliest evidence we have for the Kingdom of Kush? Do we have any idea what came before in that area of what is now Sudan?
6:10 Speaker 01 Yes. So when we look at El Kuru, we can see evolutions in burial chambers, funerary, superstructures. The Kushites themselves, once they start writing, they start using Egyptian hieroglyphs at first. And so we do start to get history in their own words for the first time. They talk about early ancestors, particularly a king called Alara. We're not sure if Alara is is real, is perhaps semi mythical, but they all seem to date their reign and their rule back to him. We think that the early ancestors of the 25th dynasty are rulers, chiefs in this
6:52 Speaker 01 part of the Nile Valley. They ruled a small part of the Nile Valley after the Egyptians withdrew from colonial control of Sudan at the end of the Egyptian New Kingdom.
7:02 Tristan Hughes? Right, so Egyptian New Kingdom, so before the first millennium BC, and that's the time of famous names like Ramses II and Tutankhamun, when Egypt is very much at its zenith. At that time, before the Kingdom of Kush, Sudan was very much part of that, of that great empire further north, I guess down the river Nile.
7:19 Speaker 01 Absolutely. So for the first time, Sudan is absorbed into Egypt proper. So obviously, Egypt has had a fractious relationship with ancient Sudan for thousands of years. We know there have been a lot of wars, a lot of skirmishes, different kingdoms taking control of different parts of land. There's a huge amount of trade as well. There's obviously a lot of friendly relations, people moving, bringing with them goods and ideas.
7:49 Tristan Hughes? And moving would it generally be in that time? Should we not be thinking roads? Should we be thinking river travel?
7:54 Speaker 01 So there's an awful lot of river travel, but you have to bear in mind that the Nile in Sudan is not as smooth as the Nile is in Egypt. There are six cataracts, which are very large areas of rocky rapids in the river that make sailing a bit more difficult than in Egypt. And people would have to take their boats out and drag them through the desert, thus making them vulnerable to attack from different polities or nomads perhaps. Also, actually quite a lot of roads that people would have travelled on.
8:26 Tristan Hughes? I didn't read.
8:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, we've started to do a lot more archaeological investigation into some of these, and we're finding some absolutely incredible things. People would probably use... Donkeys and also human power to carry goods between Egypt and Sudan.
8:42 Tristan Hughes? So it sounds like right away, and indeed before the time of the Kingdom of Kush, there is this strong connection between Egypt and Kush and ancient Sudan. And is this a connection, a link, that we will see almost continually through the whole story of the Kingdom of Kush?
8:55 Speaker 01 Absolutely. I mean, one of the most famous earlier relations that we see is in the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. The Egyptians built large fortresses on the Nile to control.
9:06 Tristan Hughes? Middle Kingdom, how far back are we going with that?
9:07 Speaker 01 Yes, very far. The Egyptians at this period are trying to control access from the Kingdom of Kerma.
9:15 Tristan Hughes? So 4,000 years do we think?
9:16 Speaker 01 So this is around 2,500 to 1,500 B.C.
9:19 Tristan Hughes? Oh, right, okay, yeah.
9:20 Speaker 01 The Kingdom of Kerma. The Egyptians build these huge fortresses to control Kerma, to control access to the river, to control trade, because they're a little bit frightened, who are extremely powerful. And in the second intermediate period after Egypt had formed into smaller independent polities, Kerma raid Egypt. We have Egyptian statues being dragged back to Kerma and buried in local burials. So this is all something that you have to take into context when we look at later periods like the Kingdom of Kush. So once we get to the New Kingdom, the Egyptians have decided, no, the fortresses aren't enough anymore. We have to control Sudan proper. So they come in, they colonize Sudan, they destroy Kerma,
10:05 Speaker 01 and they build colonial towns, and they settle Egyptians in these. And for the first time, Sudan is part of Egypt. And this is really important when we're looking at Kush, because people look at Kushite culture, Kushite iconography, Kushite objects, and superstructures and temples, and they think, oh, they're Egyptian, they're copying the Egyptians. But they're not. The Egyptians were in Sudan for 500 years. And by this point, the culture that has developed in Sudan is something completely new, that uses both indigenous and Egyptian iconography to make what eventually becomes the Kushite culture.
10:42 Tristan Hughes? And we'll explore more and more of that. And I also love what you mentioned there also about them cutting off statues and bringing them back, because I think we'll explore a famous example of that later on. But if we then go to that 25th dynasty that you highlighted right at the start, this is almost feel like role reversed in a way that, you know, once conquered Sudan, then the Egyptians go back after the new kingdom and then this dynasty rise up from Kush and take over Egypt. So instead of Egypt being the heart of the dynasty's power at that time, in actual fact, at that time, it was Sudan, it was Kush.
11:16 Speaker 01 So what we start to see when we look at Kushite textual sources, once they start writing things down, is that the Kushites very clearly think that they are naturally the rulers of Egypt. They are taking control over something that is rightfully theirs. This is partly linked to when you look at religious centres in Egypt and Sudan. So the very famous religious centre in Egypt is Karnak, a very large complex of temples, added to by every, every king in every reign.
11:47 Tristan Hughes? Luxor today, Amun.
11:48 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly. Although we obviously get a lot of reference to different gods on these, on these temples. Beautiful, a tall, apostle halls, smaller sanctuaries, often still with paint on the walls. But when the Egyptians went into Sudan, they found this, this large mountain, more of like a mountainous plateau called Jabal Barkum, and they gave it the same name as Karnak. And they actually thought it was the precursor to Karnak, the Egyptians themselves. So when you're looking at this kind of environment, you can see very easily how the Kushites thought they were taking back their rightful heritage by going into Egypt and also restoring a lot of the temples and monuments. So they're prolific builders in Sudan.
12:33 Tristan Hughes? So do we know much? You mentioned all those monuments. So do we have quite a lot of archaeological evidence? Alongside you say there's, there's mentions in the Bible, which is really interesting. Do we have much evidence to create a really detailed story about the 25th dynasty?
12:45 Speaker 01 Yes, and it's more than what we do get in later periods of Kush. So it's often a period that archaeologists focus on, even though it is generally a way of also focusing on Egypt. Unfortunately, there's a, a lack of, of people studying this in Sudan as, as much as there is in Egypt. We have a huge amount of buildings in Sudan and Egypt with the same names of rulers. They often restore temples as well from the New Kingdom. They show themselves in very Egyptian and Egyptianized styles. So things that we'd be familiar with from Egyptian temple reliefs, people shown on a side profile, specific Egyptian crowns such as with the Eureas on, they snake.
13:29 Tristan Hughes? That's a snake thing, yes.
13:31 Speaker 01 Shown, obviously very thin, very tall. They start using hieroglyphs to write inscriptions, which is when we start to get their voices. And then, as I said before, we have some reference to some of these later kings in the Bible and also in Assyrian texts as well, because the 25th Dynasty come up against the Assyrian Empire as well.
13:50 Tristan Hughes? So is that the biblical context, it's fighting the Assyrians?
13:52 Speaker 01 Yes.
13:53 Tristan Hughes? Who are more right, interesting. And so going on from that, I must also, if we keep on the 25th Dynasty a little longer, because shall we talk about pyramids? Because there is a very interesting, a very cool fact about pyramids in Sudan. And I'm guessing a few of them date to this period. What is this obsession, shall I say, between the 25th Dynasty and periods? And the great magnitude and number of pyramids in Sudan?
14:16 Speaker 01 So yes, you're right, there are actually more pyramids in Sudan than there are in Egypt.
14:20 Tristan Hughes? What a fact.
14:21 Speaker 01 So there are 118 pyramids in Egypt at last count. There are currently estimated to be 200 in Sudan, but it seems likely there's a lot more. I've been to sites that are currently unexcavated or in the process of being excavated and you can see the remains of superstructures on the top of the graves that were clearly small pyramids. So there were a lot more than we think there were.
14:48 Tristan Hughes? And do we think they all date to the time of the Kushites of the Kingdom of Kush? Is that when that fascination with pyramids really takes hold?
14:54 Speaker 01 So we start to get pyramids to some extent in the New Kingdom. So rather than thinking of the very grand pyramids that you see, like at the Pyramids of Giza, which are obviously much, much older, they date the Egyptian Old Kingdom. But the New Kingdom pyramids are quite small, they're tall and narrow, and they're generally linked to a small tomb chapel at the front, so that you could go in and you could give offerings to your ancestors and pray for your ancestors. This is what we see in Sudan. We know that in some cases, this is Egyptians moving south and constructing their traditional burial practices from home. So at the site of Tombos, for example, in Sudan, we know an official known as Si Amun
15:39 Speaker 01 was sent to run the city of Tombos. He brought his mother with him, suggesting that the city is quite safe, and also really interesting elements of obviously familial love and how important it is to bring your family with you into Sudan at this point, which is again new. This is a new New Kingdom thing, a New Kingdom phenomenon. In the Middle Kingdom, it wasn't safe, so people didn't do that. Si Amun builds what we think is a small pyramid superstructure, and he also constructs his tomb chapel in a very Theban way, so we can tell he's from Thebes and he's bringing his traditions with him. But once we get to the Kushite period, this is when you see some of the more famous pyramids,
16:24 Speaker 01 probably. This is when you see the royal pyramids. So at sites such as Merwe, which was the capital of the later period of Kush. As you enter Merwe today, you enter the pyramid fields, as they're known. There are all these quite dark, tall pyramids that just seem to rise up out of the sand as you cross the hill.
16:45 Tristan Hughes? Yes, you type in Merwe today and that first image you get is that pyramid field, and they're quite thin but tall pyramids, quite conical.
16:52 Speaker 01 Exactly, and this is something that is clearly inspired by the New Kingdom pyramids, which we did see then as well. They are unfortunately generally broken, so that the tops have often been smashed off. For example, there is a pyramid belonging to a ruling queen, Amanas Shikato, whose pyramid top was smashed off by an explorer and it's Fellini looking for treasure. That's why most of them have been damaged by treasure hunters. Unfortunately, Fellini found huge amounts of beautiful gold and precious stone jewellery. So then he thought that he should keep going because he'd been rewarded.
17:31 Tristan Hughes? And I've also got in my notes that site of El Kuru, it's another royal burial site of the 25th dynasty, if I remember correctly.
17:37 Speaker 01 Yes, so El Kuru, there's nothing remaining of the superstructures, but we can attempt to replicate and understand how the superstructures once looked, based on the foundations, based on remains of stone that are scattered around the site. It can be difficult, but what we think happens at El Kuru is early superstructures are what we call mastabas. So these are more, if you want to think of more like a little table made of stone, so a flat rectangle, and then after a couple of generations, we think they move back to pyramids. But again, it can be very difficult to be sure.
18:19 Speaker 01 What we do know is that by the 25th dynasty, when it's in its full swing, we're seeing pyramids. And then everybody does it throughout the Kushite period. So they occur at Jabal Barkal, they occur at Merawi, they occur at Nouri, which is where the famous 25th dynasty king Tahaka was buried. So he's particularly famous for fighting the Assyrians and losing unfortunately.
18:40 Tristan Hughes? And at Karnak, there's that famous pillar, the Tahaka kiosk, isn't there, that you can go and see? I mean, I could talk about pyramids all day and their link to Merawi. I mean, one other thing is so interesting, isn't it? So we're talking first millennium B.C., but the pyramids you think of with the Egyptians are more than a thousand years earlier. They've moved on to Valley of the Kings and so on. So it's really interesting how that pyramid revival, it actually occurs in Kush. But moving on, we'll keep going thematically because chronologically, there's quite a lot we could talk about. But thematically, keeping on that link to Egypt, when talking about religion in the Kingdom of Kush.
19:15 Tristan Hughes? The gods that they worshipped, do a lot of them have a close link to Egypt once again?
19:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, so particularly in the early periods of Kush, we're seeing huge focus on gods such as Amun, the ram-headed god who seems to appear in Sudan in the New Kingdom again. So we're still seeing all this inspiration left over from the New Kingdom. And Amun was the focus of a lot of the temples that were constructed by the Egyptians at Jabal Barkal, which the 25th Dynasty and later Kushite kings restored. There's a large interest in Isis, the goddess Isis, who is important in temples but also seems to be important to more ordinary people. And a lot of ordinary people are not welcome in temples. It's more of a space of priests and royalty.
20:03 Speaker 01 So ordinary people are leaving these small offerings such as an ear made of fions, which is like a bright blue or green false stone, or sometimes things in clay. Sometimes you'll see a small woman made in clay. Sometimes you'll see pieces of female genitalia, or you'll see beads sometimes, or small heads. We'll see Hathor, who's venerated in this way. And this seems to be perhaps some kind of link with indigenous women looking for somebody to pray to when they need help more informally.
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21:30 Tristan Hughes? And Isis and Hathor, they're largely associated with healing, childbirth, magic?
21:34 Speaker 01 Exactly. And that's why we think we get things like the ear, the female genitalia. It's people asking for help with injuries or with perhaps struggling to have a child, fertility problems, often perhaps praying for their own children as well. And we have these very, very small semi temples that we see in settlements that have hundreds, thousands of these tiny little pieces. They're cheap, they're disposable, but they're clearly very, very important. And they give us a glimpse into a part of Kush that is outside this elite wealth and this elite power. And it's a little bit different. So yes, we are seeing a lot of these Egyptian and Egyptianized deities, particularly at
22:16 Speaker 01 the early period, but they're not just Egyptian at this point. They have become absorbed and hybridized in local Kush pantheons.
22:26 Tristan Hughes? That hybridization between Egyptian and Kushite, which is so interesting. I will draw you back into that elite area for a bit longer, I'm afraid, because one of the objects we looked at recently was that figurehead of Isis, wasn't it? Now, would you mind explaining what this object is? Because it is so extraordinary and it tells a great story about Isis, but also, I guess, larger religious practices associated with Isis in Kush.
22:50 Speaker 01 So the figurehead of Isis, quite small actually, about, I don't know, the size of a pineapple. You can see this beautiful bronze face, missing eyes and missing a headdress, suggesting that it would have originally had more elements to it that have since been lost.
23:07 Tristan Hughes? Yes, those eyes, without those eyes, it looks like it's basically staring into your soul.
23:10 Speaker 01 Exactly, she does. She's got a beautiful pectoral collar and a really finely detailed wig. The eyes probably would have been a semi precious or precious stone. And then there's obviously a hole in the top of the head as well that would, I would assume, have held a wooden and perhaps golden headdress.
23:29 Tristan Hughes? Wow.
23:30 Speaker 01 This may have been removed every time it came back to the temple. And then perhaps reused, lost, perhaps it was melted down, or the these stones were reused for something else. So this quite small figurehead would have been added to the front and the back, so there would have been a pair originally, of a ceremonial bark, so a small boat.
23:51 Tristan Hughes? A small boat, okay.
23:52 Speaker 01 That would have had inside a small, think of it like a small room, within which a statue of a deity could be carried from temple to temple. So temples are particularly sanctified spaces. As I said before, these are not like modern churches. They're not for everyday people to go into and pray and connect with deities. Temples are restricted to priests, to members of royalty. Ordinary people would really have only seen deities when they were travelling on procession.
24:25 Tristan Hughes? It's a procession, right.
24:26 Speaker 01 Exactly. So when a deity had to move to a different temple, perhaps because the time of year changed and there was a special festival, or they needed to replicate the the the movement of the flood of the Nile or something like that. The deity would be placed within this sanctified, mini sanctified space in the boat and carried by priests to the next spot. Sometimes the bark would be put on an actual boat as well. So you've got a boat within a boat like Russian dolls.
24:55 Tristan Hughes? But it's really interesting. You have to type it in as well. Sometimes, you know, the sacred bark to get your your mind over this image. You say it's, sometimes you say it is, but usually not in the water. It's like, in fact, being carried. And it's like this portable house of the god from temple to temple. And that artifact of Isis in her regular portrayal as this beautiful woman, you know, that beautiful bronze bust would have been decorating that sacred object. And it must have been such a sight, as you say, for the everyday Kushite to see that processing through the street from temple to temple.
25:26 Speaker 01 Exactly. If you think about the the strength of the sun in Sudan. This, these rays bouncing off this, this polished bronze.
25:34 Tristan Hughes? Oh, the bronze, yes.
25:35 Speaker 01 It would have shone out, it would have been really striking for a lot of people.
25:40 Tristan Hughes? Moving on from that, I mean, we've talked about that, that hybridisation between Kushite and Egyptian deities in Kushite religion. Are there any strictly Kushite deities that we know of?
25:50 Speaker 01 Yes, so particularly in later periods of Kush, we start to see some of these Kushite deities rise to more of a prominence. Particularly a pedamak, who is a lion-headed god of war and fertility. There's always.
26:05 Tristan Hughes? War and fertility, wow.
26:07 Speaker 01 Very interesting in a lot of religions around the world, war and death and fertility and life, almost pair. It's fascinating, actually. So a pedamak becomes very popular in what we, what we call the Merewitics of the later period of the Kushite kingdom. And a pedamak occurs on temples across, particularly further south in Sudan. So we're seeing these around the Merewee area. These are known as lion temples and we're still getting inscriptions at this point, which is brilliant. So, once we get to the Kushite period, we finally are starting to get inscriptions. We can see the ancient Sudanese through, hear them through their own words, which is amazing.
26:48 Speaker 01 A pedamak is very, very popular. We also have other deities. Isis does continue to be very, very popular. Right up until the Christian period, which is very, very interesting.
27:00 Tristan Hughes? So they're all enduring side by side and that lets me go on to a bit of a tangent because you mentioned language there. So do we know much about the Merewitic or the Kushite language?
27:08 Speaker 01 The Kushite language is very indigenous, but the actual alphabet originally comes from Egyptian hieroglyphs. So it's used, it's using Egyptian hieroglyphs to write a local language.
27:19 Tristan Hughes? So it's using that script for their local language?
27:22 Speaker 01 Exactly. Later, shortly after, it also is written in cursive. So you think of cursive more like shorthand. It looks almost a little bit like Arabic, less joined together. And we actually do see cursive Merewitic written in inscriptions in later periods. So there's an amazing stele actually in the British Museum that is just fully in cursive Merewitic. And I think a lot of people walk past it because unlike hieroglyphs, which look like pictures, it can be quite hard to see and it can be quite hard to engage with. But these tell the Kushite story in their own words and they're absolutely fascinating.
27:57 Tristan Hughes? They absolutely are. And hopefully we can explore one or two before we finish. But it's almost like another comparison to, maybe this is oversimplifying it all. Tell me if I'm completely wrong, but is it kind of like English and French today? And that they're two different languages, let's say Egyptian and Merewitic. But they're using the same script, is in that they're using the same letters?
28:16 Speaker 01 So yes, to some extent, yes, they are using the same letters. But we actually think Merewitic comes from a completely different route from Egyptian.
28:24 Tristan Hughes? Understood.
28:24 Speaker 01 And now I will start by saying I'm not a linguist. So I would not trust my detailed linguistic analysis of this. But we are starting to understand Merewitic a lot better than we used to. It's semi-translated. There's unfortunately no Rosetta Stone of Merewitic. So we're still missing a lot of vocabulary. A lot of particularly non-royal inscriptions are quite formulaic. So they don't have a huge amount of information. But we are starting to understand spells. We have names. They're all very, very different from Egyptian names, obviously. But it's nice to see it kind of confirmed. We're starting to see the importance of different elements in religion.
29:09 Speaker 01 So if they're thinking of water, there's a lot of emphasis on water. There's some particularly interesting stele that talk about the importance of horses. Because Kush seems to be famous for breeding horses. And they are actually really popular around the entire Mediterranean.
29:26 Tristan Hughes? I didn't realise that horses, because I would think of ancient Persia or somewhere like that or the steppe. But I didn't realise Kush was also very well known for his horses.
29:33 Speaker 01 To be in demand massively. As far as Assyria, you've got the Assyrians trying to get Kushite horses.
29:39 Tristan Hughes? All right, well, there you go. I didn't know that at all. But your mention there about magic, that leads me nicely on to the next part of this talk, which will be dramatically. Death and burial. Now, I know in ancient Egypt, there's quite a heavy focus on death and burial from the surviving archaeology. Is that a similar case with the Kushites? Do we know a lot about their their burial customs and how they treated death?
30:02 Speaker 01 So you're right, it's it's almost similar with Egypt in that because a lot of burial remains have been found by archaeologists, they're preserved and protected. We often think the Egyptians are obsessed with death. And you get that in in Kush as well to a certain extent. We have a lot of pyramids, we have a lot of temples, we have a lot of graves that have been excavated. But we have to remember this is such a bias of archaeology, these are the things that survive. And they're the things that archaeologists were interested in excavating. Nobody for hundreds of years wanted to excavate a poor settlement. Now we do. But it's obviously a little bit more difficult to excavate places at the moment.
30:43 Speaker 01 But they're the things that tell you, the diet that people were having, the the way ordinary people saw the world, the way that certain vessels meant things to people, certain pots meant things to people instead of just being a jar. We just tend to ignore them and we look at the the inscriptions of gods and the the pictures of kings and queens and the the grand pyramids. But there's a whole undercurrent of Kush that we we just sometimes struggle to appreciate.
31:12 Tristan Hughes? Okay, then, let's appreciate it now. How did the everyday Kushites, how did they view the world?
31:17 Speaker 01 Well, I think, and I will I will say I'm coming at this from a very biased point of view because I'm a pot specialist. But I think that pottery can really give you an insight into how ordinary people were viewing the world because it's unconscious. People are not making pots to promote some kind of a political agenda or make themselves look better to certain gods or promote that.
31:43 Speaker 01 Ancestry, if they've if they've stole the throne from somebody, they don't then pretend that they haven't, as as people tend to on on temple reliefs. Pots will show how people are eating and drinking, and that's such a huge part of culture that.
31:57 Tristan Hughes? Well, they will show by the lipid residue, by in analysis of the insides of the pots.
32:02 Speaker 01 Yes, to some extent, but also the shape of the pots. So particularly in in Sudan, there is very much a trend to eating more porridge-like foods, whereas in Egypt, there is, like in the further north in in the Near East, there is a focus on eating breads. The very different cooking trend, the very different eating trend. And the fact that these things get passed down from from parent to child, often from mother to daughter, gives us an insight into ordinary people and the things that concerned them. We also have pottery decoration. Particularly handmade pottery, I think is very, very interesting into telling us about indigenous ways of understanding the world around them. We call it a symbolic worldview.
32:48 Speaker 01 We don't really understand some of it, but they mean something. And that's that's what my research is on at the moment, trying to understand cushy worldviews based on this this indigenous pottery.
32:58 Tristan Hughes? And handmade pottery, so that's not industrialized in these great workshops, that's done in like by someone in the household who is creating the pot for you to use.
33:06 Speaker 01 So, yeah, to some extent, and we do actually tend to think of handmade pottery as very domestic and made by women. And then you often get archaeologists thinking, well, it's domestic and made by women, it's cheap and it doesn't mean anything, which is obviously a massive bias. We're actually thinking a lot of these, these women are are highly skilled and some of these handmade pots get imported huge lengths of of the Nile and Sudan. So there's clearly a market for them, they're clearly wanted.
33:34 Tristan Hughes? Well, let's keep on pottery a bit longer and we'll focus on an example or two in a second. But what have they also revealed about the diet? You hinted at that porridge substance earlier, but if I'm presuming the River Nile is incredibly important to the ancient Kushites and farming along the Nile, surely is it largely those kind of cereal crops and is it water as well? What do we know about like the food and drink of an everyday Kushite?
33:59 Speaker 01 So what we know about the food of an everyday Kushite is slightly different from what we know about the food of an elite Kushite.
34:06 Tristan Hughes? Unsurprising, yeah.
34:07 Speaker 01 So if we look at wealthy burials, royal burials, we'll often find particularly things like wine, amphora, we'll find imports from Egypt and the Near East and the Mediterranean.
34:20 Tristan Hughes? And wine imported from Greece, do we think, the Mediterranean area?
34:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, sometimes from Egypt. There seems to be an attempt to grow grapes in Sudan occasionally as well, but the weather's not ideal for it, so it doesn't seem to have taken off massively. So we're still getting grain coming in from Egypt sometimes, we're getting oil, special oils, perhaps flavoured oils coming in from further north. And this is what you see, particularly when we start to get to later periods and there's a strong relationship with Rome, we're starting to get Roman fashions coming in. And this is what always happens, this is what always happens in diet, people adopt fashions, people adopt high trends. It's like how nowadays, when there's a real trend for people eating sushi, so often people will have a couple of pairs of chopsticks in their home and like a sushi mat, even if
35:07 Speaker 01 they have no Japanese ancestry. Whereas when we look at what ordinary people are eating, there's a lot of sorghum and millet in the south, it's a different kind of grain.
35:18 Tristan Hughes? Okay.
35:19 Speaker 01 Instead of, so wheat is very popular and common in Egypt and the Near East, but sorghum and millet grow much better in the different climate in Sudan. And we're seeing flatbreads being made, flatbreads and porridges being made out of sorghum and millet. And we still see that in Sudan today. So you can get kisra, which is made of this sorghum flour that is almost like a springy bread, like injera in Ethiopia, that what people are more familiar with.
35:46 Tristan Hughes? And also like with drinking wise, I mean, would there be milk? Would there be pastoral animals like cows and sheep and goats? And I guess also beer, would there be beer too?
35:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, so there's always beer. There's millet, millet beer is very popular, but. Beer is popular, I mean, in the ancient world, everywhere, partly as well because water's not always safe to drink. And partly because beer is quite easy to make. If you're growing sorghum or millet or wheat, you can make beer. You often make beer out of old bread, and it's very, very nutritious.
36:16 Tristan Hughes? Very true indeed. Well, one last thing on the pottery, because you hinted at also the decorations. And we have looked at one particular really striking pot, so kind of to introduce that. What types of decorations were usually shown on Kushai pottery?
36:32 Speaker 01 Like we've talked about the wheel-made and the handmade pottery, you're getting two completely different symbolic repertoires on these. So the crocodile pot that we have in the exhibition is part of the wheel-made.
36:44 Tristan Hughes? This is what we looked at, the crocodile pot, yeah.
36:45 Speaker 01 So this is quite a bulbous jar with a small neck and slightly flared rim. And around the top, there is a painted register showing two quite large crocodiles. Looking quite happy in red and black, no teeth shown, which I would guess is done on purpose to neutralise them. But a little turned up snout, these really big eyes. And then, just so you don't forget how dangerous they are, these very, very large claws. It's quite interesting in this part that the top is the only bit that's decorated. Usually wheel-made pots are decorated around the body. So I would suggest that this is probably meant to be put in a pot stand, maybe even half buried in the ground.
37:27 Speaker 01 So that you could see the top. But the fact that it's decorated means it's meant to be seen. This is not a kitchen object. You are supposed to see this. And it will add to an individual's reputation. So it shows how wealthy somebody is and how much power they have.
37:45 Tristan Hughes? And depicting animals or things that they would have seen, or just plants and stuff, was that quite a common motif? In the industrialised level on those wheel-made pots?
37:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, so we think the wheel-made pots are made in centralised workshops, fully controlled by the state. Because we see some of the same motifs across Sudan. We get a lot of animals. We get crocodiles, giraffes. We get a lot of plants, we get wine, vines and grapes in particular, that's very popular. Sometimes we get people and they're showing quite different from the standard we're perhaps used to in Egypt. And that's again, a really nice example of how Qash is doing their own thing. They're showing people in the way that they want to. The wheel made material also often shows a lot of symbols that we're familiar with from ancient Egypt. We get Ankh signs, the sign for life.
38:37 Speaker 01 We get the Sa sign, the sign for endurance. Sometimes these are stamped as well. They're so thin, I mean, they would have been very, very difficult to make. And they're made on the wheel, which is the first wheel made industry we ever see in Sudan.
38:50 Tristan Hughes? So interesting.
38:51 Speaker 01 The handmade material's completely different and we think this inside shows a very different worldview and is more like indigenous symbolism.
38:59 Tristan Hughes? She's spoken like a true pottery expert right there. And alongside pottery, what could they put in the burials to remember their fallen one?
39:09 Speaker 01 So you'd put objects from daily life. You'd obviously put like textiles, you'd put jewellery, you'd put clothing. People were generally placed on a bed, a wooden bed. And then outside the burial itself, you would often have what we call an offering table. So this was placed outside the tomb chapel. So this is more open to your relatives who would come and make offerings to you to try and make sure that you receive nourishment in the afterlife. So we have one of these offering tables in the exhibition. This is a square piece of sandstone, grey, inscribed on the top, about a metre in diameter. You can see on the top, it's really beautifully inscribed.
39:54 Speaker 01 Inside the centre of the offering table is this beautiful cartouche basin depressed into the stone itself.
40:02 Tristan Hughes? And a cartouche, that's basically the shape of a, that was like a royal hieroglyphic name of a king would be in a cartouche. It's an oval shape, yeah.
40:10 Speaker 01 Exactly, which is why it's very interesting that it's on this offering table, which is not a royal offering table. This belonged to a member of the elite at the site of Which is now a rich necropolis flooded under Lake Nasser, Lake Nubia in lower Nubia, northern Sudan. The offering table also shows the deities Neftis and Anubis.
40:31 Tristan Hughes? Egyptian gods once again.
40:32 Speaker 01 Exactly, but we're again seeing this hybridisation. Anubis and Neftis look similar to what we're perhaps familiar with from ancient Egypt. Anubis has his jackal head. Neftis has a very well-known headdress, which is like a series of interlocking squares. But they look distinctly cushite. Anubis has quite a fringe dress. Neftis is where is holding a curved staff. Above them, we have bread cones. So bread, while, as I mentioned before, bread is not as common in Sudan as it is in Egypt. But once we start to get this influx of Egyptian traditions, this hybridisation shows that bread becomes important in elite contexts.
41:15 Speaker 01 So you would pour your libation into the basin. It would overflow over the inscription of the deities and the the bread, nourishing the deceased. And it would go out into this little channel round the outside. And outside the channel, almost like a border around the offering table itself, you can see an inscription. So this is in cursive Meroitic, as I said, that looks almost like Arabic. There are no recognisable images, like pictures like you see in hieroglyphs. So it's been quite difficult to translate, but we now thankfully can translate a good chunk of the language. So this one tells us that it belongs to an individual known as Kenabilile. So what's interesting about Meroitic is we're not sure of the gender. There's no gender.
42:00 Speaker 01 So Kenabilile could be a man or a woman. And it mentions praying that he he receives bread and water. So it's not a huge inscription, quite formulaic, but it was clearly quite important to the people who placed this here. And we can picture Kenabilile's children, grandchildren, maybe even great-grandchildren. They would come on special festival days and they would pour a libation of water, beer, maybe wine, maybe even milk. Milk's very important. In Kusho culture, into the basin, it would overflow and go down through, there's a spout at the front, it would go out and symbolically nourish the ancestor that you're trying to remember.
42:38 Tristan Hughes? And coming back, you know, time and time again, it almost feels like a comparison, although without the practical purpose, it's like laying flowers on the grave of a loved one that you can go back time and time again, doesn't it? It's really interesting. And that it's in sandstone and to have survived, that feels quite rare.
42:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, so sandstone is very common in Sudan. It's a very common rock that people can access. This does often mean that a lot of monuments are eroded, particularly, I mean, there's a lot of sandstorms in Sudan, it's very, very windy. And if objects or temples are uncovered, particularly by tourists, and not recovered by sand, the sandstorms can absolutely strip detail. So we always, when we're excavating, try and cover things back up to make sure they're protected for the future. The offering table, we're very, very lucky. This was excavated in the early 1900s by Francis Llewellyn Griffith, found in Situ,
43:32 Speaker 01 in front of the tomb chapel, which is amazing, so where somebody thousands of years ago laid their last levation. It must have just got covered by the sand and then protected that way. So sometimes we're just lucky.
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44:50 Tristan Hughes? I want to ask one more about crocodiles, because I have to ask about crocodiles. So naturally, they are, they live in the river Nile. So do we know what Kush is? Particularly those, let's say, the farmers or those everyday people who would be living along the Nile. Do we know how they viewed crocodiles?
45:06 Speaker 01 I think it would be remiss not to say, I'm pretty sure they would have been terrified of them. I mean, crocodiles kill huge amounts of people and they would very much have in pre-industrialised setting, where if there's just a couple of, of homes by the river, there's nothing to stop a crocodile coming over and eating one of you while you're doing your laundry or collecting water. But there's obviously a recognition that we see on the pottery that crocodiles are linked with water. And in a, in a desert environment, water is life, water is everything. And I mean, we obviously, we see that in Egypt and even more so in Sudan, where a lot of the Nile Valley is very, very narrow with large cliffs coming up either side of the water.
45:50 Speaker 01 So there's not as much arable land. That's why when we get places that have floodplains, like Kerma, you get huge amounts of people congregating.
46:00 Tristan Hughes? I think we're going to move on now to our last big theme of today, which is of course Kush and Rome. So Loretta, set the scene for us. In the first century B.C., what does the kingdom of Kush look like? Is it powerful? Is it, is there lots of urbanism going about? What do we know about the kingdom of Kush as the Romans are about to enter this arena?
46:20 Speaker 01 So by this period of the 25th dynasty is long gone, but Kush itself is still massively strong. It still controls a huge amount of the Middle Nile region. We think it controls as far south as Khartoum. It seems to have influence further south, but we're not entirely sure what exactly that means. There's obviously people pushing back and forth between what we now know as Egypt and Sudan.
46:46 Tristan Hughes? So that's when the Greeks ruled Egypt as well, the Ptolemies, yeah?
46:48 Speaker 01 That there is a relationship with Egypt. People are still importing and exporting goods between the two kingdoms.
46:56 Speaker 01 After the 25th dynasty, we we're we know the names of many of the rulers, but we don't always know everything about them. And when Rome enters the scene, that's when we start to get a little bit more of an idea of some of the rulers. And this is when, particularly with when when Rome comes on the scene, we start to get the these famous warrior queens who rule in their own right.
47:18 Tristan Hughes? Let's do the story because this story I think epitomizes it, isn't it? So what is the story about when Rome meets Kush? But it's also a hostile one.
47:26 Speaker 01 So Rome takes control of Egypt in thirty B C.
47:30 Tristan Hughes? So Antony and Cleopatra defeated.
47:32 Speaker 01 Exactly. And then Rome becomes a Egypt becomes a province of Rome. The grain basket of the ancient world. Obviously, it was a massive, it was a massive prize. But once you get into Rome, you realise there's this other kingdom further south. And Sudan has always been pushing Egypt's borders. Kush is very powerful and it's a threat. So we think between so between twenty five and twenty two B C. Rome decides to encroach on Kush. So there is a the prefect called Petronius. He brings a huge army down and begins to sack Kush. Unfortunately, for the Romans, Kush wasn't as much of an easy prize as they were thinking.
48:16 Speaker 01 They seem to certainly sack several cities, but they are pushed back by what the historian Strabo calls a one eyed queen called Candace. So they're pushed back by this one eyed queen called Candace. They then managed to push back again, sack Napata, the capital of Kush. And then they get pushed back again.
48:39 Tristan Hughes? Is that the present capital? Was that the the former capital?
48:42 Speaker 01 That was the former capital. So in the earlier period of Kush, Napata is the capital. Later, it moves to Merwee further south and modern Sudan, the capital is Khartoum. We're not entirely sure what happens at this point. Strabo talks about how the Romans are winning. And then yet somehow the Kushites decide to sue for peace and they send ambassadors to Rome. And the Romans agree with no terms, no tribute that has to be sent every year. Kush is just allowed to be on its own and it doesn't have to be a province. Now, to me, that sounds like Kush was was winning and in a good position. And so they come to this uneasy alliance and the treaty actually lasts until the end of the Kushite period.
49:26 Tristan Hughes? So it has a hostile beginning, but then after that, relations between Kush and Rome are actually very good.
49:31 Speaker 01 So I mean, throughout this war, Kush is raiding Egypt. Rome is attempting to raid Kush. It's obviously going back and forth.
49:38 Tristan Hughes? Very fluid, yes.
49:39 Speaker 01 Now, as we've studied ancient Sudan and Meroitic more closely, we now know that Kandake is not a name, it's a title.
49:47 Tristan Hughes? Or for the one-eyed, this one-eyed queen that they talk about.
49:49 Speaker 01 Well, it's not just her, it's any queen. Kandake means queen in Meroitic. And so we actually think Strabo is getting a bit confused here. The one-eyed queen, whether she was one-eyed, we're not sure. We think is Amani Renas, who ruled around, we think, the first century B.C., first century A.D. The problem is with a lot of these dates, we're not certain of them because we don't have a huge amount of inscriptions then. But we know that Amani Renas is one of a number of women who rule in their own right at this period.
50:22 Tristan Hughes? Archaeologically, shall we go to this amazing story that is linked to that you've just told?
50:26 Speaker 01 So in the 1900s, an archaeologist called John Garstang was excavating at the site of Merwe, capital of ancient Kush. And while he was excavating, a temple, in front of the temple, underneath the stairs, the portico, he found.
50:43 Speaker 01 This amazing discovery is that bronze head of a Roman statue, larger than life size, that we now think is the head of the Emperor Augustus.
50:53 Tristan Hughes? Emperor Augustus, who is the emperor at the time of this war.
50:56 Speaker 01 Exactly. This was amazing. Nobody expected to find this in Sudan. It's so classically Roman. It looks like it would not be out of place in a Roman city. It's very much designed to tell you that the Romans are present, they're in control, and yet it's buried under this temple. Now, when you look more closely at it, this head, which, as they say, is larger than life size, bronze and still has the beautiful inlaid eyes. So these haven't, this has never been found before, before the early 1900s, because they would have been removed, made of calcite and glass, still staring out. It's very powerful, this statue. But when you look at the neck, this statue's been decapitated.
51:40 Tristan Hughes? Decapitated.
51:42 Speaker 01 And we know, based on Strabo's story, that Andarche, probably, and Manirenas, had swept into Egypt, burned temples and decapitated statues. And we think what's happened is that she has brought this head back as a symbol and buried it beneath the steps of this temple to symbolically tread on her enemies, on the Romans, every time she enters it. And actually, there are traces inside the temple of paintings of foreigners, similar to how you see in earlier Egyptian scenes of prisoners in tributes, where the Egyptians are marking their power
52:22 Speaker 01 over the rest of the world. The Kushites do something similar. There's rows of these foreigners, these prisoners, with their arms tied behind their back, and one of them looks very Roman.
52:33 Tristan Hughes? So archaeological evidence that seems to corroborate with that amazing story from Strabo of these Kushites raiding Roman Egypt. And, you know, I think Strabo says cutting off statue heads as well. So taking a statue back and then you've got that evidence that it's one of the best stories that I've ever heard from ancient history and I love it and I'm so glad. And it is such an incredible artefact to have endured and survived as it has. Rather briefly, I know it's a long period of time, but do we see much Roman architecture, much Roman art in Merwe in the Kingdom of Kush once this period of hostility has passed? And then there is this more more cordial relations between the two?
53:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. So as I said, the treaty lasts until the end of the Kushite period. The border is at the beginning set at Kasero Brim, ancient premise, which is now in modern Egypt. And then good sweep between the kingdoms. We see in in Merwe, the capital of the later period of Kush, something that we call the bath house. We now know it's not a bath house, but it was originally thought to be. It seems to be some kind of water sanctuary. But it's this very, very large swimming pool, basically, surrounded by statuary and statuary like lounging figures in togas with hair swept to the side. And there's a statue of Pan, the faun, playing panpipes. There's grapes.
53:55 Speaker 01 It's everything's in in blue, painted in blue. It looks very, very influenced by Rome. And this is again, what we were talking about earlier, the height of fashion in the among the elites. You would want to borrow these fancy trends from Rome. We see it among in in other things too, like tableware. People want to have the best Roman tableware and best Roman wine for parties.
54:20 Tristan Hughes? Lastly, do we know what ultimately happens to the Kingdom of Kush?
54:25 Speaker 01 Yeah. So to start with, we're not entirely sure who else is around Kush to the south. Again, it's it's the problem with having a lack of textual sources and a lack of archaeological excavation. There's not been time, it's not been in, you know, safe to excavate in some places. But There will be kingdoms, there will be these amazing cultures and civilizations that we just don't know anything about in all these places, everywhere has them. And we know Kush was trading with people to the south because we can see evidence of that in the objects in their settlements. Now with Ethiopia, it seems slightly different. There doesn't seem to be a huge amount of contact in the early periods. Possibly because of the mountain ranges separating the kingdoms. Ethiopia was a hugely powerful kingdom in its own right.
55:11 Speaker 01 By the end of Kush, there seemed to be a lot of raiding groups incurring into the Nile Valley. We know that some of the rulers are busy fighting them off. We're not entirely sure where they're coming from. Perhaps the changes in weather have driven them closer to the river, as happens in every, every kingdom. But for Ethiopia, we, we find a couple of Aksimites, so Ethiop- ancient Ethiopian objects, coins and a few graffiti, and there's a stealer. We're not entirely sure of the original fine spot of the stealer, which problematises that obviously. But it's, there seems to be this idea that King Azuma of Aksim
55:56 Speaker 01 sweeps into Kush and conquers Meroe. Now, this is what early archaeologists have thought. We think it's a lot more complicated than that. We think there may have been some strife with Ethiopia and there's certainly evidence they were there in a, to a small level based on a few of the objects. But regardless, by around three fifty A D, Kush is starting to lose power. And eventually it fragments into smaller kingdoms.
56:24 Tristan Hughes? Well, there you go. That's the end. But the Kingdom of Kush still endures a thousand years of history that we've covered today, going from the Twenty Fifth Dynasty and links to ancient Egypt. And the New Kingdom before that, all the way down through to the Roman period and the Aksimites in the fourth century A D. Loretta, we've covered a lot. Thank you so much. Very thematic as well. So really happy with what we've covered. Last but certainly not least, tell us about this new exhibition that you have curated, part of the British Museum, but touring the UK. That is very. So much promoting and focusing on ancient Sudan and its amazing heritage.
56:56 Speaker 01 Yes, so we will be having an exhibition that's opening in Portsmouth on the 31st of January and then Stirling on the 8th of August. That will showcase a selection of some of our amazing pieces from ancient Kush. We'll be showing the figurehead that we mentioned, the Isis figurehead, the crocodile part, as well as some objects from our modern Sudanese collection that tell us how Sudanese heritage and culture is obviously so rich and alive and well across not just Kush, but thousands of years, and not just the Nile Valley, but Darfur, the deserts around Sudan, the Nile River and further to the south.
57:36 Speaker 01 In each city, we will also be collaborating with local Sudanese communities who will be having their own display, which I'm really excited to see.
57:46 Tristan Hughes? Brilliant, Loretta. Well, you've put so much work into this and you've been so generous to us with your time. It just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.
57:54 Speaker 01 Thank you.
57:59 Tristan Hughes? Well, there you go. There was Dr Loretta Kilrow giving you an overview of the ancient kingdom of Kush. Their new exhibition, Ancient Sudan: Enduring Heritage, is touring the UK in 2025 and you can learn more about it on the British Museum's website. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's enough from me and I'll see you in the next episode.
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