Kom Ombo
Kom Ombo is the name of an industrial town 46km north of Aswan on the east bank of the Nile where an important temple of Ptolemaic-Roman date is located (24°27′ N, 32°56′ E). The town’s modern designation preserves its ancient pharaonic name, translated as "the district where original creation occurred" (nebit in hieroglyphs, imba in Demotic). The temple has been investigated by French scholars and recently an Egyptian team has begun excavations to the south of the enclosure wall.
The site appears to have been occupied in prehistoric times, based on the evidence of lithic material excavated in the area. Early historical epochs of the site are imperfectly understood, despite mentions of the town in inscriptions dating to both the Middle and New Kingdoms. The only excavated evidence of these periods consists of isolated blocks of stone, ostensibly from one or more temples, inscribed with the cartouches of a Senusret, as well as with the names of Amenhotep I, Hatshepsut, Tuthmose III and Ramesses II.
During the Ptolemaic period Kom Ombo became an important administrative center of Nome I of Upper Egypt, in part because it commands the heights overlooking the river from which troops could guarantee the security of Egypt’s southern frontier. At this time the present temple was begun by one of the Ptolemaic kings whose cartouches are, unfortunately, imperfectly preserved. By the time of Ptolemy VI Philometor (180-164 BC and again 163-145 BC) the walls of the temple were being decorated and inscribed in his name. Thereafter construction at the site continued well into the reign of the Roman emperor Macrinus (AD 217-18).
The present temple is magnificently situated on elevated rock, but the Nile has more recently changed its course and many of the temple’s outer buildings have been washed away or seriously denuded. These include the so-called mammisi (birth house), which was begun during the reign of Ptolemy VIII Evergetes II (170-163 BC and again 143116 BC), and parts of the mudbrick enclosure wall. The construction of the modern quay where tour boats moor has reduced the danger of further erosion of the river bank. Past damage has been compounded by the recent earthquake.
Despite these problems, the temple of Kom Ombo still preserves several distinctive features. Foremost among these is its ground plan, which reveals that the temple is really divided into two halves down its central axis. Such a "double temple" is rare in Egyptian architecture. The northern half of the temple is dedicated to the god Harwer ("Horus the Elder") and his consort Tasentnefert ("the beautiful sister"), who is identified with the goddess Tefnut, and their offspring, the child god, Panebtawy ("the lord of the two lands"). Panebtawy shares some of the characteristics of Sobek, to whom the southern half of the temple is dedicated. Sobek, the crocodile god, is likewise a member of a triad of deities comprising his consort, Hathor, and their offspring, Khonsu. A careful examination of the temple inscriptions and their location reveals that primacy is accorded to Harwer. This is particularly evident in the arrangement of the hieroglyphs on the outer hypostyle hall’s double architrave, beneath which are twin entrances leading to each parallel half of the temple. Passing through the outer, central and inner vestibules, one eventually comes to the sanctuary, divided in half by a hollow central wall, perhaps to give access to the now destroyed roof from which astronomical observations could be made. Some scholars maintain, however, that this passage was intended to hide a priest who would be the voice of an oracle in the name of either deity. Within each sanctuary is a black granite stone, incorrectly called an altar. These were originally the stands on which rested the sacred barks of Harwer and Sobek, which were used in processions. A series of underground crypts, of uncertain function but possibly used to store valuable ritual objects, and a suite of symmetrically arranged rooms are found at the rear of the temple.
The temple itself is surrounded on three sides by a corridor formed by extending the outer walls of the first hypostyle hall. This is again another unusual feature of the temple’s architectural design, and one which is without parallel in other temples of Ptolemaic and Roman date.
Other structures include a small chapel dedicated exclusively to the god Sobek in the northwest of the temple precinct, bounded by the enclosure wall. To the west of this structure is a curious pit, cut into the living rock and lined with blocks of stone. This feature has sometimes been identified as a cistern, but some scholars, citing the analogy of the precinct of the Apis Bull at Memphis, have suggested that it was a sacred precinct where a living crocodile, the manifestation of the god Sobek, was housed.
In the southeast is the lateral gateway of the temple’s enclosure wall. This gateway was built by Ptolemy XII (80-57 BC and again 55 BC) and is now the principal entry to the temple. In the vicinity of this gateway and almost abutting the enclosure wall is a small chapel to the goddess Hathor. The chapel has been converted into a museum which houses a selection of mummified crocodiles excavated in the vicinity of the temple.
In addition to the innovative design of the ground plan, the decoration of the temple contains some very unusual scenes and embellishments. The columns of the first hypostyle hall still preserve abundant traces of their original paint. Furthermore, some of these representations, including those of Harwer, were once embellished with inlays, mostly notably in the eyes. This same technique of inlaying the eyes is found again on the figures of colossal scale which adorn the exterior rear wall of the temple proper.
Some of the temple reliefs are extraordinarily crafted and reveal a sensitivity to spacial concerns that is indebted to advances already exploited in the reliefs of the temple of Seti I (19th Dynasty) at Abydos. One noteworthy example is a scene on the west wall of the inner hypostyle hall where Ptolemy VIII Evergetes II is shown with his wife, Cleopatra II, and his daughter, Cleopatra III. The queens, each wearing the characteristically tightly fitting sheaths and holding floral scepters, form the left hand side of a balanced composition. The contours of their floral crowns are harmoniously balanced by the placement of their cartouches above their heads. Next comes Ptolemy VIII Evergetes II, who holds in his near hand a scepter shaped like the hieroglyph w3s and extends his far hand toward Harwer in a gesture of adoration. Ptolemy here wears a festive, gossamer garment which reveals the contours of his legs beneath. Delicate as these touches are, they should not obscure the fact that the overlapping of the attributes held by Harwer in the far right of the composition recalls the arrangement of the attributes held by Seti I and the deities he adores at Abydos. The three notched palm fronds held by the near hand of Harwer twist in space and go beneath his outstretched far arm, which offers the scimitar to Ptolemy VIII Evergetes II. This generation of space is a masterful evocation of pharaonic artistic tenets.
The west wall of the Kom Ombo temple also contains a rare, cultic relief, placed on the central axis of the temple, which is dated by its accompanying inscriptions to the reign of the Roman emperor Trajan (AD 98-117). A winged sun-disc hovers over images of the wadjet eye (a protective symbol) and an array of beneficent animal-form deities. The center of the relief contains a hollowed-out shrine, flanked by depictions of ears, while images of Sobek, left, and Harwer, right, serve as vigilant sentinels. In the lowest register are representations of bound prisoners. It has been suggested that this relief was created to meet the religious needs of lower status individuals who were unable to gain access to the temple proper. They would make their supplications to an image of Ma’at, the goddess of truth, which was originally placed within the niche. The depicted ears were there to guarantee that she would indeed hearken to their prayers, and in so doing would assist them in triumphing over adversity (in the form of the bound prisoners below). The entire scene may have been framed by a system of shutters which could be opened as needed by specially appointed priests, who may also have employed a balustrade to keep the petitioners at some distance from the relief and the image of Ma’at.
A second relief on the northeastern interior wall of the corridor has generated a great deal of discussion, particularly since the upper courses of the wall have been destroyed and with them whatever inscriptions may have originally accompanied this scene. Depicted in this relief are objects, grouped into three registers, which are readily identifiable as an assortment of instruments—forceps/tweezers/ tongs, probes/awls, spatulas/spoons, and the like—as well as a variety of vessels and containers. Many scholars have identified these objects as instruments used by physicians performing surgery and dispensing different medications. Practicing physicians together with scholars specializing in the medical history of ancient Egypt, however, dismiss this notion, and there is no good evidence that the temple of Kom Ombo functioned as a medical center in pharaonic times. Others have suggested that these implements are tools belonging to a craftsmen’s workshop, probably of metalsmiths, a highly justified conclusion considering that artisans were attached to temples.
One of the peculiar features of the site of Kom Ombo is the devotion of its inhabitants to animal cults. This is evident not only in some of the inscriptions carved on the walls of the temple, in which the generations of Egypt’s deities are equated in general with the family tree of Sobek, but also in the fact that several different species of mummified animals have been found interred in the vicinity of the temple. In addition to the crocodile mummies mentioned above, these include mummified ibis and falcons, as well as serpents. The popularity of such cults among Egyptians during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods has been explained as a reaction against their foreign overlords. It was a well-known fact that the Greeks, and particularly the Romans, were appalled by Egyptian deities with animal forms, which is quite clear from the text of a biting satire by the Roman author Juvenal. Possibly the more repugnant this practice was to the Greeks and Romans, the more it was embraced by the native Egyptians as a symbol of their nationalism.
In time the inhabitants of the Kom Ombo region converted to Christianity, and archaeologists have excavated evidence of an early Coptic church here. Little remains of this church aside from column fragments and their bases.
el-Kurru
El-Kurru (18°25′ N, 31°46′ E) lies on the west bank of the Nile, 15km downstream from Karima, Sudan, and the site of Gebel Barkal, and 35km downstream from the terminus of the Fourth Cataract in Upper Nubia. Its ancient name is unknown, but Francis Lloyd Griffith proposed to equate it with the Egyptian "Karoy," the name of a place at the southern limit of the Egyptian empire during the New Kingdom.
The archaeological interest of the site was noted in the nineteenth century by, among others Frederic Cailliaud and Carl Richard Lepsius, who had observed its two standing pyramids and the ruins of other small tombs. Excavations were first conducted there by George Reisner and the Harvard University-Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Expedition between February and May 1919. Reisner found that the two large pyramids were those of a late Kushite king and queen of the fourth century BC, whose names were not preserved. The smaller ruined tombs belonged to four of the five kings of the 25th Dynasty: Piye (circa 747-716 BC), Shabako (circa 716-704 BC), Shebitku (circa 704690 BC) and Tanutameni (circa 664-553 BC), as well as their major and minor queens, and sixteen ancestors, whose names were not preserved. There was also a cemetery of horse burials belonging to the four kings of the 25 th Dynasty.
Until recently the site was known exclusively for its cemetery, which was the only part ever published by Reisner and his assistant, Dows Dunham. Reisner’s unpublished excavation diaries in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, however, indicate that for several days he probed the area of the modern village and identified remains of an important ancient walled town, thus accounting for the cemetery. El-Kurru can now be presumed to be the earliest royal seat of the Kushite Napatan dynasty. A small late Meroitic cemetery, called esh-Sheikheil (and designated Ku. 700 by Reisner) was also identified about 800m north of the royal cemetery. It was partly excavated and the material, still unpublished, is now in both the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the University Museum, Philadelphia (by exchange with the Museum of Fine Arts, 1991).
The ancient town site at el-Kurru was identified by Reisner within and at the border of the modern village. Its remains consisted of a section of an early rubble-filled wall with a rounded bastion (Ku. 1200) and an apparent later wall (Ku. 1300) with a large central gateway. Ku. 1300, which seemed to mark the edge of cultivation, was traced by Reisner for over 200m. Ancient house remains were noted immediately inside it, as was a large rock-cut well or cistern (Ku. 1400), 6×4.5m in area and 5m deep at water level, with a descending stairway. Reisner thought that this feature provided the main water supply for the community at the time of Ku. 1300. Unfortunately, no precise maps or plans of these features were ever produced. They do suggest, however, that el-Kurru was the earliest residence of the Napatan dynasty and that, prior to the ascendancy of Gebel Barkal (Napata) and Sanam, probably in the later eighth century BC, it had been the major transshipment point on the north bank of the Nile between the Bayuda desert road (to and from the Fifth Cataract region) and the Meheila road (to and from the Third Cataract region) across the Nubian Desert.
The royal cemetery at el-Kurru offers the only evidence yet available for the origin of the Napatan dynasty (later to become Egypt’s 25 th Dynasty). Unfortunately, the evidence for dating the sixteen ancestor tombs remains problematic. Radiocarbon dates from the earliest tomb (Ku. Tum. 1) range from the New Kingdom to the late ninth century BC. Stone, faience and ceramic vessels from the earliest tombs seem to belong to both the New Kingdom and the Third Intermediate Period. The fragmentary nature of the skeletal material and the chaotic mixing of the tomb contents from plundering has rendered the sex of the occupants debatable. Although Reisner dated the earliest tombs to the early ninth century BC, the chronology of the cemetery has recently become the subject of a heated scholarly debate.
The early tombs consisted of rock-cut pits or side-chambers, sealed by stone superstructures, now almost entirely quarried away. These tombs occupied the highest and best points in the original cemetery, which was bounded on either side by a wadi. The earliest tombs (Ku. Tum. 1, 5, 4, 2, in chronological order), which Reisner called "tumuli," had round ground plans and probably took the form of typical Nubian C-Group graves. From rough stone to cut stone masonry, they rapidly advanced in form. Tumulus Ku. Tum. 6 had an offering chapel on its east side, and it and its near duplicate (Ku. 19) both had horseshoe-shaped enclosure walls. The remaining ten tombs in the series, which were square in plan, were all built lower down a slope in a single line from northeast to southwest (Ku. 14, 13, 11, 10, 9, 23, 21, 8, 20, 7, in that order). Of these, Ku. 21 and 20, the only ones built without chapels, were smaller tombs that had apparently belonged to minor queens or family members of the king buried in Ku. 8, whom Reisner identified with Kashta (circa 760-747 BC). Reisner called these square tombs "mastabas," which he believed metamorphosed into small pyramids at the advent of the 25th Dynasty. Recent evaluation of the evidence by Timothy Kendall, however, suggests that even the earliest square tombs had probably been small pyramids or step pyramids built on mastaba bases.
Reisner recognized six different tomb types among the ancestral tombs and equated these with as many human "generations." He thus envisioned six probable rulers prior to Piye, the first king with whom a tomb (Ku. 17) could be identified by textual evidence. Recently, this traditional theory of the ancestral generations has come under critical review by both Kendall and Laszlo Torok. Essentially agreeing with Reisner and Dunham, Kendall has proposed, on the basis of tomb evolution, and analyses of artifacts and the human remains, that the ancestral tombs probably belonged to seven individual rulers and their chief wives prior to Piye. Since during the earliest historical period at Napata rulers were succeeded by brothers or first cousins, he suggests that the seven rulers probably belonged to no more than four generations, thus giving a mid-ninth century BC date for the founding of the cemetery. Torok, on the other hand, has proposed to view the ancestral tomb sequence as a succession of exclusively kings’ tombs. In this manner, he suggests that the founding of the cemetery occurred shortly after the end of the New Kingdom.
Within the tomb sequence at el-Kurru there is a dramatic evolution from Nubian to Egyptian burial customs. Initially the dead were buried in a contracted position on beds, oriented northwest to southeast. Through time, however, the bodies were buried extended in coffins, oriented east-west, and burials were increasingly Egyptian in style. By the reign of Piye, mummification was certainly being practiced; the royal mummies of the 25th Dynasty were shrouded with bead nets, placed in nested coffins, and these rested on raised benches that supported funerary beds. The bodies were also accompanied by canopic jars, for preservation of the viscera, and shawabtis (servant figurines). With Piye the royal tombs ceased being simple pit chambers capped by masonry superstructures. Piye’s tomb was a novel type, consisting of a partly rock-cut, partly masonry-built vaulted chamber, surmounted by a pyramid but accessible by stairway. The stairway allowed the pyramid to be built over the open tomb while its owner was still alive. After the burial the stairway was sealed by the construction of the funerary chapel. Shabako’s tomb (Ku. 15) was constructed in the same manner, but with two connected vaulted chambers at the bottom of the stairway rather than one, a custom which continued in Shebitko’s tomb (Ku. 18) and Tanutameni’s (Ku. 16). The tombs of the chief queens (Ku. 3, 4, 5, 6) were built in the same way, but their pyramids were slightly smaller in size. The kings’ pyramids ranged from 8 to 11m in base length, while the great queens’ tombs ranged from 6.5 to 7m in base length.
With Piye, the tombs of chief queens were placed on a new ridge immediately to the southwest of the ancestral field. The kings, however, continued to be buried in the original field. Minor queens for the first time were provided with smaller tombs in separate cemeteries far to the northeast but still precisely in line with the original cemetery. The minor queens of Piye, Shabako and Shebitko were buried in separate cemeteries: Ku. 50, Ku. 60, Ku. 70, respectively. All but one tomb (Ku. 53) were single-chamber tombs with no preserved superstructures.
At el-Kurru Reisner found a cemetery of twenty-four horse graves (Ku. 201-224), in which individual horses were buried standing up, facing southeast. These had belonged to the four kings of the 25th Dynasty, who had interred these animals in groups of four or eight. Two smaller circular graves (Ku. 225, 226) were also found here; one contained a dog skeleton.
Kushites
The name "Kas" first appeared at the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, in the 18th year of the reign of Senusret I, when the Egyptians, having set out to conquer Nubia, ventured above the First Cataract and went as far south as the Second Cataract. Early in 1830, at the Second Cataract site of Buhen, Jean-Frangois Champollion and Italian Egyptologist Niccolo Rosellini discovered a great stela on which the Theban god of war, Montu, is depicted presenting the king a row of bound prisoners with the names of ten places in Nubia. From this, "Kas" has been located just above the Second Cataract.
The name of the region eventually became established as "Kush," which already appears in another account of the same Egyptian victory in Nubia. Ameni, the nomarch (governor) of Beni Hasan in Middle Egypt, states that he went upriver to the south in a boat with the king, who "went beyond Kush and to the end of the earth." Less than a century later, Senusret III claimed to have established a frontier at Semna, in the mid-Second Cataract, "in order to stop all Nubians ["Nehesyw"], even their beasts, from passing it on their way north, whether they come by land or water."
Kush and Nehesyw remained mere names for a long time. In 1913, the American archaeologist George Reisner began excavations at Kerma, just upstream from the Third Cataract. His attention had been captured there by two deffufas, enormous mudbrick buildings. Not far from the Nile, the one on the west side was a compact mass of mudbricks. The one on the east side at the edge of the desert was a vast mudbrick temple, in the midst of a large necropolis of burial mounds composed of rings of white gravel around large circles of black stones. Reisner’s excavations at Kerma, especially in the cemetery, yielded a rich collection of material, above all pottery of original design. Burial in the larger tumuli was entirely in the Nubian manner: the unmummified body rested on a bed, with women, children and retainers in the same tomb. But at Kerma, Reisner also discovered Egyptian artifacts such as statues and fragments of hieroglyphic inscriptions, which led him to believe that the Egyptians had set up a sort of commercial outpost. Artifacts collected from the western deffufa suggested a center of commerce, not administration.
If Kerma really had been an Egyptian outpost, it was dangerously isolated far south of the Second Cataract and there were no significant relay stations. Thus, Reisner’s interpretation of the site was unlikely. Gradually the idea of a close relation between the name of Kush and the site of Kerma began to seem tenable to Egyptologists. This hypothesis was demonstrated in 1977 when the Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet uncovered the vestiges of a vast city with mud buildings similar to ones still found in the Saharan region of West Africa. The western deffufa was shown to be a mudbrick temple, vaguely in the shape of an Egyptian one. The site was organized like a capital city, most likely the capital of Kush, the second oldest African state (after Egypt) and a rival worthy of its great neighbor.
Due to a total lack of written records, the state of Kush arose under conditions that remain obscure. Between about 2300 and 1560 BC it developed in complexity, the nature of which can only be inferred from archaeological evidence. The state’s power probably extended far to the south, but investigations are just beginning in the region below the Fourth Cataract, where a series of long basins watered by the Nile are found. The large size of Kerma, which is in the northern part of Kush, helps to explain why, throughout the Middle Kingdom, the Egyptians remained behind their border fortresses at Semna-Kumma, above which is the extensive barrier in the river of the Batn el-Hagar ("belly of stone"). Downstream from this point, all along the rapids of the Nile’s Second Cataract and as far north as Kuban in the heart of Lower Nubia, the Egyptians constructed a series of forts within sight of each other, a kind of Maginot Line in the desert. From these fortresses, they could guard the Nile’s lines of communication and, if necessary, control local nomadic raiders. Above all, they could completely block the dangerous, looming rival of Kush.
Archaeological expeditions conducted in Nubia in the 1960s, notably at the forts of Buhen and Mirgissa, removed sand from the huge mudbrick constructions, uncovering towers, bastions and stepped walls commanding steep slopes, and well protected slits at the best angles for Egyptian archers. Unfortunately, all of these fortifications are now under the high waters of Lake Nasser.
At Kerma, research and discovery continue, in spite of the systematic campaign of destruction accomplished by the New Kingdom Egyptians, who expanded their empire southward, destroying their powerful neighbor. After the Middle Kingdom, during the troubled Second Intermediate Period, the Egyptians were obliged to abandon their forts in Nubia and withdrew to a point north of Elephantine (Aswan). However, the Theban kings of the 17th Dynasty finally reapplied the old aggressive policy toward Nubia. A stela from the time of King Kamose, found at Karnak in 1950, describes an overture made by the Asiatic (Hyksos) king, who controlled northern Egypt, to the prince of Kush, with the idea of pressing on the Thebans from both the north and south. The Thebans thwarted the plan by capturing the messenger after a breathless race on the oasis route. Kamose was able to advance to Toshka, in Lower Nubia, but it was his successor, Ahmose, the founder of the 18th Dynasty, who finally attacked the Nubians after having first destroyed the Hyksos power in the north.
Ahmose rebuilt the fortress of Buhen and perhaps advanced to the island of Sai in the forbidding region of the Second Cataract. The third king of the 18th Dynasty, Tuthmose I, defeated Kerma and put an end to Kush’s independence. Moving across the rocks at Tombos in the southern end of the Third Cataract, he conquered Kerma and the fertile Dongola basin in one stroke, and reached the Fourth Cataract. At Napata, he instituted the cult of the Theban god Amen at the foot of what would become the sacred mountain, Gebel Barkal. An inscription was found bearing his name at Kurgus, above the Fourth Cataract and south of Abu Hamed. In arriving at that point, the Egyptians had reached the vast Sudanese steppes, the boundary with sub-Saharan Africa. In the second year of his reign Tuthmose I was able to engrave a grandiose victory stela at Tombos, proclaiming that his empire stretched from Kush to the Euphrates River. The great independent African kingdom was finished and Egypt’s colonial dominion would last until the end of the New Kingdom. Occasional revolts by "base Kush" are reported, especially at the beginning of the reigns of various pharaohs, but they were quickly crushed.
All along the river, the Egyptians pursued a program of construction. In each of their settlements there are temples marking the triumph of their power over the defeated Kush.
One example is Amenhotep II’s temple of Soleb; another is the renowned complex that Ramesses II built at Abu Simbel. At Soleb, the names of those subjugated by Egypt provide a list of African peoples. Although the northernmost ones have been identified, a long series of these names remains unknown.
The heyday of Egyptian colonialism ended with the 20th Dynasty. The regions of Kush became independent and indigenous rulers returned to power, most prominently around Napata, near the sacred mountain of Gebel Barkal. Near Napata, the cemetery of el-Kurru contains the burials of a series of princes, still anonymous, buried first in indigenous-style tumuli and then later in Egyptian-style masonry mastabas (rectangular superstructures). The first names that are known here are Alara (Alul) and his successor Kashta, whose very name, meaning "the Kushite," is politicized.
From this point on, Kush became a dominant power, whose history is divided into two periods: the "Napatan" period, after the name of the ancient capital; then, beginning in the sixth century BC, the "Meroitic" period, named for Meroe, the new capital, which would survive until the fourth century AD. For 1,200 years Kush dominated a long stretch of the middle Nile, an area of fertile basins, savannas and vast deserts. Our knowledge of this kingdom is primarily archaeological. The early history is relatively well known because it overlaps the late history of pharaonic Egypt. Kashta advanced as far north as Elephantine. His son Piye (whose name was read as "Piankhy" until recently) conquered Egypt around 730 BC. He left a splendid stela in Egyptian hieroglyphs in which Egypt is described as being divided by petty polities. After conquering its coalition of princes, Piye presented himself as a faithful worshipper of the Egyptian gods and demanded that his troops respect their temples and watch over the celebration of the festivals. But Piye had withdrawn quickly to Upper Nubia, and his name is rarely found in Egypt. Various monuments near Napata bear his name, and he insisted that his remains be put in the cemetery at el-Kurru. Not far from his relatively modest tomb, his favorite horses were buried standing, in carefully excavated ditches with a deep hole for each leg.
The Egyptian 25th Dynasty, which is commonly called "Ethiopian," or more recently "Kushite," begins with Piye’s brother Shabaka, the most important ruler of the line of kings that ends with Tanutamen. For about half a century, Egypt and Nubia were united to make a great African power that effectively opposed the Assyrians’ attempted conquest of the Nile Valley. It was a double monarchy: its symbol is the double uraeus (the sacred cobra, an Egyptian symbol of kingship along with the sacred vulture). In the general impression they created, and in their dress and poses, the 25th Dynasty rulers copied styles and symbols of the earlier Egyptian pharaohs, whose successors, or even descendants, they claimed to be. Their monuments in Egypt and Nubia were designed in pharaonic style and inscribed in Egyptian (hieroglyphs). On the other hand, the reliefs and statues depict a people with the distinct physical features of the herdsmen of the Upper Nile: brachycephalic heads with large noses, pronounced cheekbones, thick lips and strong chins. The kings are also depicted wearing some new ornaments. A kind of skullcap, with a flap covering the temple, goes down tightly to the nape of the neck; a thick, knotted band holds two more flaps that hang down behind the shoulders. The heads of rams, sacred to the god Amen, decorate earrings and pendants.
Amen, the god most prominently associated with the Dynasty, was worshipped in four major sanctuaries in Nubia: at Napata, Tore (probably Sanam), Kawa and Pnubs (Tabo, on Argo Island). In each of these centers, Kushite princesses were consecrated as musicians of the god and the Kushite kings are frequently depicted with mothers, wives, sisters and female cousins. This is not the case in reliefs of this period in Egypt, although the Kushite pharaohs at Thebes were attended by the divine "votaresses," princesses sworn to virginity as exclusive wives of Amen. Endowed with royal powers, the Kushite princesses were a kind of parallel dynasty, succeeding one another from aunt to niece.
The most numerous Kushite buildings are unquestionably those of Taharka. At Napata he is represented by several temples. Many other sites in Nubia bear his name, particularly at Kawa and also at Sedeinga, where his presence remains unexplained. In the heart of the Second Cataract, in the temple that he built in the fortress of Semna, Taharka dedicated a bark stand to the deified Middle Kingdom king, Senusret II. The island of Philae, at the border of Egypt and Nubia, was also an object of his attention. However, his monuments are the most numerous at Karnak. There, in the immense complex of temples, he erected colonnades at each of the four points of the compass; he also restored several gates and built some small chapels, in many of which Osiris is depicted in multiple forms. His name can be read in the oases of the Western Desert and even as far north as the Delta, at Tanis.
The Kushite dynasty was dominated by the great conflict between the Nile Valley and Assyria. Shabaka apparently wished to maintain good relations with the Assyrians, but as he heard the increasingly urgent cries for help from the princes and cities of Syro-Palestine, especially Jerusalem, he decided to intervene. Taharka’s name resonates in the Old Testament (Isaiah 37:9, II Kings 19:9). The Assyrian king Assurhaddon (681-669 BC) tried to subjugate Egypt, but it was only his successor, Assurbanipal, who conquered it, with the sack of Thebes in 663 BC. In spite of the favorable auguries related on Tanutamen’s "Dream Stela," this king, who succeeded Taharka, was unable to permanently recapture Egypt and fled back to his kingdom of Kush. Nevertheless, the names of Kushite rulers can be seen for several more years in Upper Egypt, especially in Taharka’s inscription on the shrine of the bark of Amen, borne in a procession in the 14th year of Psamtik I’s reign (26th Dynasty). It was not until 591 BC that the Egyptians under Psamtik II, with the aid of Greek and Carian mercenaries, were able to lead a great expedition against Kush, as far south as Napata. After this, the reliefs of the Kushite rulers, depicted with their characteristic attribute, the double uraeus, were systematically destroyed throughout Egypt.
At the same time, in the view of the 26th Dynasty (Saite) pharaohs of the Delta, the balance of power was definitively shifting toward the eastern Mediterranean and southwest Asia. The kingdom of Kush, first Napatan and then Meroitic, being cut off from the Lower Nile Valley, returned to its origins and became more and more African.
The first two successors of Tanutamen are mere names to us: Taharka’s son Atlanersa (653-643 BC), and his son Senkamenisken (643-623 BC), substantial fragments of whose statues were found at Gebel Barkal. The latter’s two sons and successors, Anlameni (623-593 BC), then Aspelta (593-568 BC), are better known. At Kawa, a stela of Anlemeni tells of the king’s journey through a series of provinces in which he built temples, and also mentions his campaign against an unidentified people (perhaps the Blemmyes, nomadic peoples of the Eastern Desert). Anlameni’s brother and successor Aspelta (593-568 BC) left two great texts: one describes the enthronement or coronation where some chiefs decided to consult Amen of Napata to choose the king; the other, which concerns the prerogatives of princesses, is a transcription of the ceremony of one’s investiture as a priestess. The "Excommunication Stela," on which the king’s names have been chiseled out, is sometimes, perhaps doubtfully, attributed to Aspelta. The stela’s text remains partially obscure, but it explains that the members of a family who had plotted a murder were excluded from the Napatan temple of Amen. Aspelta was a contemporary of Psamtik II, who ordered the invasion of Kush: the date of the resulting conflict, 591 BC, is one of the very rare dates, and perhaps the only one in more than a millennium of history, that has been definitely established by a concurrence of events.
From that point on, the Kushites wished to distance themselves as much as possible from their powerful northern neighbor. Perhaps the Egyptian raid, the importance of which was long underestimated, was the reason the capital was transferred from Napata to Meroe, much farther south. Certainly Napata remained the religious capital of the kingdom: the rulers continued to have themselves buried in the nearby cemetery of Nuri until the end of the fourth century BC.
In 525 BC, the Persians threatened the Kushite kingdom, but Cambyses’s expedition against them ended in failure. The transfer of the capital can also be explained by economic and climatic conditions: the steppes around Meroe offered a much larger agricultural area than the basins near Napata. The relative abundance of trees and bushes at Meroe meant that firewood was available for processing the iron ore contained within the Nubian sandstone. Also, commerce must have been busy: Meroe was an enviable crossroads of the caravan routes between the Red Sea, the Upper Nile and what is today the country of Chad.
Concerning the many obscure centuries, historians must rely solely on the royal tombs excavated earlier in this century by George Reisner. His attempt to make the list of kings’ names correspond to the discovered pyramids produced uncertain results, which have already undergone numerous corrections and may need to be modified further. The last ruler buried at Nuri was Nastasen, a little before 300 BC. After him, the remains of the kings and princes were buried at Meroe; their pyramids constitute a flowering of Sudanese architecture. However, the fact that several rulers returned to be buried at Napata has led a few historians to believe that there were two different northern Nubian dynasties, parallel to that of their Meroitic cousins: the first immediately after Nastasen’s reign and the second in the first century AD.
