After
capturing city after city along the Nile River in 730 B.C., troops
commanded by King Piye of Nubia storm the great walled capital of
Memphis with flaming arrows. Piye modeled himself after powerful
pharaohs such as Ramses II (statues), claiming to be the rightful ruler
of Egypt. His triumph over the northern chiefs would unite all Egypt
under Nubian rule for three-quarters of a century.
At
the height of his power, King Taharqa leads his queens through the
crowds during a festival at the temple complex of Nubia’s Jebel Barkal,
its pinnacle gleaming with gold. Accompanied by a sacred ship bearing an
image of the god Amun, Taharqa is robed in a priestly leopard skin and
crowned with the double uraeus that declares him Lord of the Two
Lands—ruler of both Nubia and Egypt.
An
ignored chapter of history tells of a time when kings from deep in
Africa conquered ancient Egypt. For 75 years Nubian kings ruled over
ancient Egypt, reunifying the country and building an empire. Until
recently, theirs was a chapter of history lost in the shadows.
By Robert Draper
National Geographic Contributing Writer
In
the year 730 B.C., a man by the name of Piye decided the only way to
save Egypt from itself was to invade it. Things would get bloody before
the salvation came.
“Harness the best steeds of your
stable,” he ordered his commanders. The magnificent civilization that
had built the great pyramids had lost its way, torn apart by petty
warlords. For two decades Piye had ruled over his own kingdom in Nubia, a
swath of Africa located mostly in present-day Sudan. But he considered
himself the true ruler of Egypt as well, the rightful heir to the
spiritual traditions practiced by pharaohs such as Ramses II and
Thutmose III. Since Piye had probably never actually visited Lower
Egypt, some did not take his boast seriously. Now Piye would witness the
subjugation of decadent Egypt firsthand—“I shall let Lower Egypt taste
the taste of my fingers,” he would later write.
North
on the Nile River his soldiers sailed. At Thebes, the capital of Upper
Egypt, they disembarked. Believing there was a proper way to wage holy
wars, Piye instructed his soldiers to purify themselves before combat by
bathing in the Nile, dressing themselves in fine linen, and sprinkling
their bodies with water from the temple at Karnak, a site holy to the
ram-headed sun god Amun, whom Piye identified as his own personal deity.
Piye himself feasted and offered sacrifices to Amun. Thus sanctified,
the commander and his men commenced to do battle with every army in
their path.
By the end of a yearlong campaign, every
leader in Egypt had capitulated—including the powerful delta warlord
Tefnakht, who sent a messenger to tell Piye, “Be gracious! I cannot see
your face in the days of shame; I cannot stand before your flame, I
dread your grandeur.” In exchange for their lives, the vanquished urged
Piye to worship at their temples, pocket their finest jewels, and claim
their best horses. He obliged them. And then, with his vassals trembling
before him, the newly anointed Lord of the Two Lands did something
extraordinary: He loaded up his army and his war booty, and sailed
southward to his home in Nubia, never to return to Egypt again.
When
Piye died at the end of his 35-year reign in 715 B.C., his subjects
honored his wishes by burying him in an Egyptian-style pyramid, with
four of his beloved horses nearby. He was the first pharaoh to receive
such entombment in more than 500 years. A pity, then, that the great
Nubian who accomplished these feats is literally faceless to us. Images
of Piye on the elaborate granite slabs, or stelae, memorializing his
conquest of Egypt have long since been chiseled away. On a relief in the
temple at the Nubian capital of Napata, only Piye’s legs remain. We are
left with a single physical detail of the man—namely, that his skin was
dark.
Piye was the first of the so-called black
pharaohs—a series of Nubian kings who ruled over all of Egypt for
three-quarters of a century as that country’s 25th dynasty. Through
inscriptions carved on stelae by both the Nubians and their enemies, it
is possible to map out these rulers’ vast footprint on the continent.
The black pharaohs reunified a tattered Egypt and filled its landscape
with glorious monuments, creating an empire that stretched from the
southern border at present-day Khartoum all the way north to the
Mediterranean Sea. They stood up to the bloodthirsty Assyrians, perhaps
saving Jerusalem in the process.
Until recently, theirs
was a chapter of history that largely went untold. Only in the past
four decades have archaeologists resurrected their story—and come to
recognize that the black pharaohs didn’t appear out of nowhere. They
sprang from a robust African civilization that had flourished on the
southern banks of the Nile for 2,500 years, going back at least as far
as the first Egyptian dynasty.
Today Sudan’s
pyramids—greater in number than all of Egypt’s—are haunting spectacles
in the Nubian Desert. It is possible to wander among them unharassed,
even alone, a world away from Sudan’s genocide and refugee crisis in
Darfur or the aftermath of civil war in the south. While hundreds of
miles north, at Cairo or Luxor, curiosity seekers arrive by the busload
to jostle and crane for views of the Egyptian wonders, Sudan’s
seldom-visited pyramids at El Kurru, Nuri, and Meroë stand serenely amid
an arid landscape that scarcely hints of the thriving culture of
ancient Nubia.
Now our understanding of this
civilization is once again threatened with obscurity. The Sudanese
government is building a hydroelectric dam along the Nile, 600 miles
upstream from the Aswan High Dam, which Egypt constructed in the 1960s,
consigning much of lower Nubia to the bottom of Lake Nasser (called Lake
Nubia in Sudan). By 2009, the massive Merowe Dam should be complete,
and a 106-mile-long lake will flood the terrain abutting the Nile’s
Fourth Cataract, or rapid, including thousands of unexplored sites. For
the past nine years, archaeologists have flocked to the region,
furiously digging before another repository of Nubian history goes the
way of Atlantis.
The ancient world was devoid of
racism. At the time of Piye’s historic conquest, the fact that his skin
was dark was irrelevant. Artwork from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome
shows a clear awareness of racial features and skin tone, but there is
little evidence that darker skin was seen as a sign of inferiority. Only
after the European powers colonized Africa in the 19th century did
Western scholars pay attention to the color of the Nubians’ skin, to
uncharitable effect.
Explorers who arrived at the
central stretch of the Nile River excitedly reported the discovery of
elegant temples and pyramids—the ruins of an ancient civilization called
Kush. Some, like the Italian doctor Giuseppe Ferlini—who lopped off the
top of at least one Nubian pyramid, inspiring others to do the
same—hoped to find treasure beneath. The Prussian archaeologist Richard
Lepsius had more studious intentions, but he ended up doing damage of
his own by concluding that the Kushites surely “belonged to the
Caucasian race.”
Even famed Harvard Egyptologist George
Reisner—whose discoveries between 1916 and 1919 offered the first
archaeological evidence of Nubian kings who ruled over Egypt—besmirched
his own findings by insisting that black Africans could not possibly
have constructed the monuments he was excavating. He believed that
Nubia’s leaders, including Piye, were light-skinned Egypto-Libyans who
ruled over the primitive Africans. That their moment of greatness was so
fleeting, he suggested, must be a consequence of the same leaders
intermarrying with the “negroid elements.”
For decades,
many historians flip-flopped: Either the Kushite pharaohs were actually
“white,” or they were bumblers, their civilization a derivative
offshoot of true Egyptian culture. In their 1942 history, When Egypt
Ruled the East, highly regarded Egyptologists Keith Seele and George
Steindorff summarized the Nubian pharaonic dynasty and Piye’s triumphs
in all of three sentences—the last one reading: “But his dominion was
not for long.”
The neglect of Nubian history reflected
not only the bigoted worldview of the times, but also a cult-like
fascination with Egypt’s achievements—and a complete ignorance of
Africa’s past. “The first time I came to Sudan,” recalls Swiss
archaeologist Charles Bonnet, “people said: ‘You’re mad! There’s no
history there! It’s all in
Egypt!’ ”
That was a
mere 44 years ago. Artifacts uncovered during the archaeological salvage
campaigns as the waters rose at Aswan in the 1960s began changing that
view. In 2003, Charles Bonnet’s decades of digging near the Nile’s Third
Cataract at the abandoned settlement of Kerma gained international
recognition with the discovery of seven large stone statues of Nubian
pharaohs. Well before then, however, Bonnet’s labors had revealed an
older, densely occupied urban center that commanded rich fields and
extensive herds, and had long profited from trade in gold, ebony, and
ivory. “It was a kingdom completely free of Egypt and original, with its
own construction and burial customs,” Bonnet says. This powerful
dynasty rose just as Egypt’s Middle Kingdom declined around 1785 B.C. By
1500 B.C. the Nubian empire stretched between the Second and Fifth
Cataracts.
Revisiting that golden age in the African
desert does little to advance the case of Afrocentric Egyptologists, who
argue that all ancient Egyptians, from King Tut to Cleopatra, were
black Africans. Nonetheless, the saga of the Nubians proves that a
civilization from deep in Africa not only thrived but briefly dominated
in ancient times, intermingling and sometimes intermarrying with their
Egyptian neighbors to the north. (King Tut’s own grandmother, the
18th-dynasty Queen Tiye, is claimed by some to be of Nubian heritage.)
The
Egyptians didn’t like having such a powerful neighbor to the south,
especially since they depended on Nubia’s gold mines to bankroll their
dominance of western Asia. So the pharaohs of the 18th dynasty
(1539-1292 B.C.) sent armies to conquer Nubia and built garrisons along
the Nile. They installed Nubian chiefs as administrators and schooled
the children of favored Nubians at Thebes. Subjugated, the elite Nubians
began to embrace the cultural and spiritual customs of Egypt—venerating
Egyptian gods, particularly Amun, using the Egyptian language, adopting
Egyptian burial styles and, later, pyramid building. The Nubians were
arguably the first people to be struck by “Egyptomania.”
Egyptologists
of the latter 19th and early 20th centuries would interpret this as a
sign of weakness. But they had it wrong: The Nubians had a gift for
reading the geopolitical tea leaves. By the eighth century B.C., Egypt
was riven by factions, the north ruled by Libyan chiefs who put on the
trappings of pharaonic traditions to gain legitimacy. Once firmly in
power, they toned down the theocratic devotion to Amun, and the priests
at Karnak feared a godless outcome. Who was in a position to return
Egypt to its former state of might and sanctity?
The
Egyptian priests looked south and found their answer—a people who,
without setting foot inside Egypt, had preserved Egypt’s spiritual
traditions. As archaeologist Timothy Kendall of Northeastern University
puts it, the Nubians “had become more Catholic than the pope.”
Under
Nubian rule, Egypt became Egypt again. When Piye died in 715 B.C., his
brother Shabaka solidified the 25th dynasty by taking up residence in
the Egyptian capital of Memphis. Like his brother, Shabaka wed himself
to the old pharaonic ways, adopting the throne name of the 6th-dynasty
ruler Pepi II, just as Piye had claimed the old throne name of Thutmose
III. Rather than execute his foes, Shabaka put them to work building
dikes to seal off Egyptian villages from Nile floods.
Shabaka
lavished Thebes and the Temple of Luxor with building projects. At
Karnak he erected a pink granite statue depicting himself wearing the
Kushite crown of the double uraeus—the two cobras signifying his
legitimacy as Lord of the Two Lands. Through architecture as well as
military might, Shabaka signaled to Egypt that the Nubians were here to
stay.
To the east, the Assyrians were fast building
their own empire. In 701 B.C., when they marched into Judah in
present-day Israel, the Nubians decided to act. At the city of Eltekeh,
the two armies met. And although the Assyrian emperor, Sennacherib,
would brag lustily that he “inflicted defeat upon them,” a young Nubian
prince, perhaps 20, son of the great pharaoh Piye, managed to survive.
That the Assyrians, whose tastes ran to wholesale slaughter, failed to
kill the prince suggests their victory was anything but total.
In
any event, when the Assyrians left town and massed against the gates of
Jerusalem, that city’s embattled leader, Hezekiah, hoped his Egyptian
allies would come to the rescue. The Assyrians issued a taunting reply,
immortalized in the Old Testament’s Book of II Kings: “Thou trustest
upon the staff of this bruised reed [of] Egypt, on which if a man lean,
it will go into his hand, and pierce it: So is Pharaoh king of Egypt
unto all that trust on him.”
Then, according to the
Scriptures and other accounts, a miracle occurred: The Assyrian army
retreated. Were they struck by a plague? Or, as Henry Aubin’s
provocative book, The Rescue of Jerusalem, suggests, was it actually the
alarming news that the aforementioned Nubian prince was advancing on
Jerusalem? All we know for sure is that Sennacherib abandoned the siege
and galloped back in disgrace to his kingdom, where he was murdered 18
years later, apparently by his own sons.
The
deliverance of Jerusalem is not just another of ancient history’s
sidelights, Aubin asserts, but one of its pivotal events. It allowed
Hebrew society and Judaism to strengthen for another crucial century—by
which time the Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar could banish the Hebrew
people but not obliterate them or their faith. From Judaism, of course,
would spring Christianity and Islam. Jerusalem would come to be recast,
in all three major monotheistic religions, as a city of a godly
significance.
It has been easy to overlook, amid these
towering historical events, the dark-skinned figure at the edge of the
landscape—the survivor of Eltekeh, the hard-charging prince later
referred to by the Assyrians as “the one accursed by all the great
gods”: Piye’s son Taharqa.
So sweeping was Taharqa’s
influence on Egypt that even his enemies could not eradicate his
imprint. During his rule, to travel down the Nile from Napata to Thebes
was to navigate a panorama of architectural wonderment. All over Egypt,
he built monuments with busts, statues, and cartouches bearing his image
or name, many of which now sit in museums around the world. He is
depicted as a supplicant to gods, or in the protective presence of the
ram deity Amun, or as a sphinx himself, or in a warrior’s posture. Most
statues were defaced by his rivals. His nose is often broken off, to
foreclose him returning from the dead. Shattered as well is the uraeus
on his forehead, to repudiate his claim as Lord of the Two Lands. But in
each remaining image, the serene self-certainty in his eyes remains for
all to see.
His father, Piye, had returned the true
pharaonic customs to Egypt. His uncle Shabaka had established a Nubian
presence in Memphis and Thebes. But their ambitions paled before those
of the 31-year-old military commander who received the crown in Memphis
in 690 B.C. and presided over the combined empires of Egypt and Nubia
for the next 26 years.
Taharqa had ascended at a
favorable moment for the 25th dynasty. The delta warlords had been laid
low. The Assyrians, after failing to best him at Jerusalem, wanted no
part of the Nubian ruler. Egypt was his and his alone. The gods granted
him prosperity to go with the peace. During his sixth year on the
throne, the Nile swelled from rains, inundating the valleys and yielding
a spectacular harvest of grain without sweeping away any villages. As
Taharqa would record in four separate stelae, the high waters even
exterminated all rats and snakes. Clearly the revered Amun was smiling
on his chosen one.
Taharqa did not intend to sit on his
profits. He believed in spending his political capital. Thus he
launched the most audacious building campaign of any pharaoh since the
New Kingdom (around 1500 B.C.), when Egypt had been in a period of
expansion. Inevitably the two holy capitals of Thebes and Napata
received the bulk of Taharqa’s attention. Standing today amid the
hallowed clutter of the Karnak temple complex near Thebes is a lone
62-foot-high column. That pillar had been one of ten, forming a gigantic
kiosk that the Nubian pharaoh added to the Temple of Amun. He also
constructed a number of chapels around the temple and erected massive
statues of himself and of his beloved mother, Abar. Without defacing a
single preexisting monument, Taharqa made Thebes his.
He
did the same hundreds of miles upriver, in the Nubian city of Napata.
Its holy mountain Jebel Barkal—known for its striking rock-face pinnacle
that calls to mind a phallic symbol of fertility—had captivated even
the Egyptian pharaohs of the New Kingdom, who believed the site to be
the birthplace of Amun. Seeking to present himself as heir to the New
Kingdom pharaohs, Taharqa erected two temples, set into the base of the
mountain, honoring the goddess consorts of Amun. On Jebel Barkal’s
pinnacle—partially covered in gold leaf to bedazzle wayfarers—the black
pharaoh ordered his name inscribed.
Around the 15th
year of his rule, amid the grandiosity of his empire-building, a touch
of hubris was perhaps overtaking the Nubian ruler. “Taharqa had a very
strong army and was one of the main international powers of this
period,” says Charles Bonnet. “I think he thought he was the king of the
world. He became a bit of a megalomaniac.”
The timber
merchants along the coast of Lebanon had been feeding Taharqa’s
architectural appetite with a steady supply of juniper and cedar. When
the Assyrian king Esarhaddon sought to clamp down on this trade artery,
Taharqa sent troops to the southern Levant to support a revolt against
the Assyrian. Esarhaddon quashed the move and retaliated by crossing
into Egypt in 674 B.C. But Taharqa’s army beat back its foes.
The
victory clearly went to the Nubian’s head. Rebel states along the
Mediterranean shared his giddiness and entered into an alliance against
Esarhaddon. In 671 B.C. the Assyrians marched with their camels into the
Sinai desert to quell the rebellion. Success was instant; now it was
Esarhaddon who brimmed with bloodlust. He directed his troops toward the
Nile Delta.
Taharqa and his army squared off against
the Assyrians. For 15 days they fought pitched battles—“very bloody,” by
Esarhaddon’s grudging admission. But the Nubians were pushed back all
the way to Memphis. Wounded five times, Taharqa escaped with his life
and abandoned Memphis. In typical Assyrian fashion, Esarhaddon
slaughtered the villagers and “erected piles of their heads.” Then, as
the Assyrian would later write, “His queen, his harem, Ushankhuru his
heir, and the rest of his sons and daughters, his property and his
goods, his horses, his cattle, his sheep, in countless numbers, I
carried off to Assyria. The root of Kush I tore up out of Egypt.” To
commemorate Taharqa’s humiliation, Esarhaddon commissioned a stela
showing Taharqa’s son, Ushankhuru, kneeling before the Assyrian with a
rope tied around his neck.
As it happened, Taharqa
outlasted the victor. In 669 B.C. Esarhaddon died en route to Egypt,
after learning that the Nubian had managed to retake Memphis. Under a
new king, the Assyrians once again assaulted the city, this time with an
army swollen with captured rebel troops. Taharqa stood no chance. He
fled south to Napata and never saw Egypt again.
A
measure of Taharqa’s status in Nubia is that he remained in power after
being routed twice from Memphis. How he spent his final years is a
mystery—with the exception of one final innovative act. Like his father,
Piye, Taharqa chose to be buried in a pyramid. But he eschewed the
royal cemetery at El Kurru, where all previous Kushite pharaohs had been
laid to rest. Instead, he chose a site at Nuri, on the opposite bank of
the Nile. Perhaps, as archaeologist Timothy Kendall has theorized,
Taharqa selected the location because, from the vista of Jebel Barkal,
his pyramid precisely aligns with the sunrise on ancient Egypt’s New
Year’s Day, linking him in perpetuity with the Egyptian concept of
rebirth.
Just as likely, the Nubian’s motive will remain obscure, like his people’s history.