Nubia & Kush

On the right bank of the Nile, near the Fourth Cataract in northern Sudan, a flat-topped sandstone mountain rises about a hundred metres above the plain. At its southern corner a pinnacle about 75 metres high stands apart from the cliff. Seen from the right place, it looks like a rearing cobra, the uraeus that Egyptian kings wore on their brow, crowned with the tall white crown of Upper Egypt. The mountain is Jebel Barkal. Egyptian pharaohs of the New Kingdom called it the "Pure Mountain" and said that the god Amun lived inside it. When Egypt's hold on the south collapsed, a line of Nubian kings took over the claim: the god in the mountain, they said, had chosen them. Around 728 BCE one of them, Piye, marched north and conquered Egypt. For about seventy years, as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, Nubian kings ruled as pharaohs from the Sudan to the Mediterranean, and their descendants went on attributing their kingship to the Amun of Jebel Barkal for nearly a thousand years more.

Kush: names and periods

Nubia is the Nile valley between the First Cataract at Aswan and the region of Khartoum, now divided between Egypt and Sudan. Egyptians called its southern kingdoms Kush; Greeks and Romans called its people Aithiopes, "Ethiopians", which in the Bible and classical writers usually means Nubia, not modern Ethiopia. Its religious history falls into several periods, each with good archaeology:

• Kerma (c. 2500–1500 BCE), a powerful kingdom centred on the town of Kerma above the Third Cataract, destroyed by the armies of New Kingdom Egypt.
• Egyptian rule (c. 1500–1070 BCE), when pharaohs built temples to Amun at Jebel Barkal, Soleb and elsewhere and governed Nubia through a viceroy, the "King's Son of Kush".
• Napata (c. 800–300 BCE), the kingdom based at Jebel Barkal and its royal cemeteries at el-Kurru and Nuri, whose kings ruled Egypt as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty.
• Meroë (c. 300 BCE–350 CE), when the royal centre moved south to Meroë, and a distinct Nubian religion, with its own gods and its own script, came fully into view.
• Christian Nubia (6th–15th centuries), the kingdoms of Nobadia, Makuria and Alodia.

Kerma: the great mounds

Kerma left no texts, so its religion is known only from buildings and graves. In the centre of the town stood the Western Deffufa, a massive solid mud-brick structure about 18 metres high, entered by a narrow stair: almost certainly a temple, with ceremonies held on its top. East of the town lay a cemetery of some 30,000 graves. The largest, the royal tumuli of the Classic Kerma period (c. 1750–1500 BCE), were circular mounds up to 90 metres across. When George Reisner excavated them between 1913 and 1916 he found, in a corridor across the largest (KX), the remains of hundreds of people buried at the same time as the ruler, many lying curled on their sides, and argued that they had been sacrificed to accompany him. Later study has supported the conclusion that large numbers of retainers died at royal funerals, though the exact counts are uncertain. The graves also held beds, sandals, bows, cattle skulls in their hundreds arranged in crescents, and Egyptian statues and objects carried off in raids. Cattle clearly mattered to Kerma's religion as they did to its economy; what the Kerma people believed about the afterlife is inferred from what they buried.

Kerma's neighbours further north, the C-Group and the Pan-Grave people, also buried their dead with painted cattle skulls. Much earlier, in the late fourth millennium BCE, the elite graves of the A-Group at Qustul held an incense burner carved with a boat, a seated figure and what looks like a royal crown. In the early 1980s the archaeologist Bruce Williams suggested that pharaonic kingship might have begun here, in Nubia (his full excavation report followed in 1986). The proposal was widely criticized: the burner is of Egyptian limestone, much of the iconography is reconstructed, and royal tombs at Abydos in Egypt are older. Williams himself later said he meant Nubian participation in the making of pharaonic civilization, not its origin.

Amun in the Pure Mountain

The New Kingdom pharaohs who conquered Nubia brought Amun, the god of Thebes, and they found him a home. At Jebel Barkal, Thutmose III (c. 1450 BCE) founded a temple and declared the mountain "Pure Mountain", the southern seat of Amun, a counterpart to Karnak in Thebes. Amun there was often shown with a ram's head, a form especially popular in Nubia, where rams may already have been sacred. The pinnacle's shape could be read as a uraeus, a crowned god or a phallus, and the Egyptians used it, the archaeologist Timothy Kendall argues, as proof that the god in the mountain had intended kingship over Kush from the beginning. The coronation of later Nubian kings took place in a temple built directly beneath the pinnacle.

The Kushite pharaohs

Around 750 BCE a Kushite dynasty buried at el-Kurru emerged at Napata. Its king Kashta extended control to Upper Egypt; his son Piye invaded Egypt about 728 BCE, defeated the rival kings of the Delta, and set up a great granite stela at Jebel Barkal recounting the campaign. The Victory Stela of Piye is one of the most vivid texts of ancient Egypt, and a deeply religious one. Piye presents himself as Amun's agent, restoring order and the true worship. He orders his troops to purify themselves before fighting at Thebes and to honour Amun there; he refuses to enter the presence of Delta rulers who were ritually impure because they had eaten fish; and he is outraged when he finds the horses of a defeated king starving in their stables.

His successors Shabaka, Shebitku, Taharqa and Tanwetamani ruled Egypt as pharaohs of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty until the Assyrians drove them south in the 660s BCE. They presented themselves as restorers of Egypt's ancient religion: they rebuilt temples, revived Old Kingdom styles, and installed royal women as God's Wife of Amun, the high priestess of Thebes. Shabaka had an old theological text copied onto stone, the Shabaka Stone, which describes the creation of the world by the god Ptah through his heart and tongue, that is, by thought and word. Taharqa built on a large scale at Karnak, Jebel Barkal and Kawa; the Bible remembers him as "Tirhakah king of Ethiopia", marching against the Assyrians in the time of Hezekiah (2 Kings 19:9).

The Kushite kings also revived the pyramid, abandoned in Egypt for centuries. Piye was buried under a pyramid at el-Kurru, with his favourite horses: teams of chariot horses, 24 in all for four kings, were buried standing nearby with silver plumes and bead trappings. Taharqa began a new cemetery at Nuri, where more than twenty royal pyramids still stand. Nubia today has more pyramids than Egypt, built over about a thousand years.

Meroë and the Nubian gods

After the Twenty-fifth Dynasty was driven from Egypt, the kings of Kush ruled on in Nubia, and from about 300 BCE their royal cemetery moved south to Meroë, between the Fifth and Sixth Cataracts. Meroitic religion kept Amun, Isis, Osiris and other Egyptian gods, but it gave pride of place to gods of its own.

• Apedemak, a lion-headed god of war and victory, the protector of the king. At Naqa, his temple built by King Natakamani and Queen Amanitore in the first century CE shows him with a lion's head on a human body, as a three-headed, four-armed god, and as a serpent with a lion's head rising from a lotus. At Musawwarat es-Sufra, the Lion Temple of about 220 BCE carries the earliest known images of Apedemak and of other Nubian gods.
• Sebiumeker, a god of creation and procreation, shown as a guardian in a double crown; Arensnuphis, a companion god often paired with him; and Amesemi, a protective goddess shown with a falcon on her head or a crescent moon.
• Isis, whose cult Meroë shared with Egypt, above all at the temple of Philae near Aswan.

Meroë also had its rulers. From the second century BCE several queens ruled in their own right, with the title kdke, Kandake (Greek Kandakē, Latin Candace). One of them, Amanirenas, fought the Roman army of Augustus's prefect in the 20s BCE and negotiated a treaty on favourable terms. The Book of Acts (8:27) mentions "an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians", baptized by Philip on the road to Gaza; "Candace" there is the title, not a name.

The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (first century BCE) tells a striking story about Meroë: that its priests could order a king to die, sending a message that the gods had willed it, until a king named Ergamenes, who had studied Greek philosophy, marched on the temple and killed the priests instead. Ergamenes is usually identified with the Meroitic king Arakamani of the third century BCE. How much of the story is true is uncertain; it is a Greek account of a far-off land, and no Meroitic source confirms it.

Philae: the last temple of Isis

The island of Philae at the First Cataract, on the border of Egypt and Nubia, was the great shrine of Isis in the late period, and Nubians were among its most devoted worshippers. From the Ptolemaic period the revenues of the region south of Aswan, the Dodecaschoenus, were given to the temple. Meroitic embassies came to worship there, and between about 175 and 275 CE Nubian priests held high titles in the temple and left inscriptions in Demotic, Greek and Meroitic. The last known inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Graffito of Esmet-Akhom, was carved at Philae on 24 August 394 CE, beside a figure of the Nubian god Mandulis. When Egypt had become Christian, the temple stayed open largely because the Blemmyes and the Nobades of Nubia still came to worship Isis. The emperor Justinian had it closed around 535–537 CE and its statues taken to Constantinople. It was, as far as is known, the last temple of the old Egyptian religion.

Christian Nubia

In the mid-sixth century missionaries from Constantinople converted the kings of Nobadia, in Lower Nubia, followed by Makuria and Alodia further south. Nubia remained Christian for about 900 years. In 652 Makuria's army held off an Arab invasion, and the two sides agreed a treaty, the Baqt, which kept the peace for some six centuries. The cathedral of Faras, excavated by a Polish expedition in the 1960s before Lake Nasser covered it, held more than 120 wall paintings of the eighth to fourteenth centuries: Nubian kings, queens and bishops, painted with dark skin, under the protection of Christ, the Virgin and the archangels. Many are now in Warsaw and Khartoum. Christian Nubians wrote in Old Nubian, Greek and Coptic. The kingdoms declined from the thirteenth century, and by the sixteenth Nubia had become Muslim.

The believer's lens

The religion of Kerma and of Meroë has no living community, and only fragments of the Meroitic texts can be understood, so its inner meaning is mostly inferred. What the Kushite kings themselves wrote, in Egyptian, is clear: their power came from Amun, who dwelt in the Pure Mountain, chose each king as his son, and gave him victory, and the king in return owed the god purity, justice and temples. Piye's stela speaks in that voice: a king who fights for the god, keeps himself pure, and is merciful to those who submit.

Nubian Christianity has heirs today: the Coptic and Ethiopian Orthodox churches recognize its saints, and the Faras paintings are revered as religious art. Many Sudanese and Nubians today, most of them Muslim, regard the Kushite past as a source of national and cultural pride, and in the wider African diaspora the Kushite pharaohs have become symbols of Black African achievement, sometimes linked to claims that Egyptian civilization itself came from Nubia. The archive records that pride; the historical claims are sorted in the next section.

The skeptical lens

Most of what is said about Nubian religion before the Kushite kings is reconstruction from graves and buildings. Kerma's beliefs are inferred from its burials; the meaning of the deffufa's rites is unknown.

For the Napatan period the texts are Egyptian, and they are royal propaganda: the Victory Stela is a king's account of his own justice and piety. It is detailed and plausible, but it is not neutral.

For the Meroitic period, the Meroitic script was deciphered in 1909 by F. Ll. Griffith, so its signs can be read aloud; but the language is still largely not understood, for lack of long bilingual texts. It is thought to belong to the Northern East Sudanic family, but many words and most longer texts remain opaque. So the Meroitic gods are known mainly through images, names and Egyptian parallels.

Two popular claims go beyond the evidence. The first is that pharaonic kingship began in Nubia; the Qustul case is weak, as above, and Egyptian royal tombs are earlier. The second is that the Twenty-fifth Dynasty was the moment Egypt "became Black". Ancient Egyptians were a Nile Valley people with many ties to Nubia across all periods, but modern racial categories map poorly onto ancient populations. What is certain, and remarkable, is that a Nubian kingdom conquered and ruled Egypt as its devoted restorer, and that Kush sustained its own civilization for more than two thousand years.

Diodorus's tale of priests ordering the king to die is uncorroborated. The end of Meroë is also debated: an Aksumite inscription of King Ezana (c. 350 CE) describes a campaign in the region against the Noba and others, but Meroë seems already to have been in decline, and the inscription may describe a campaign against rebels rather than the kingdom's destruction.

Symbology and sacred encoding

• The uraeus mountain. Jebel Barkal's pinnacle as a natural image of the royal cobra: a landscape read as a divine sign of kingship. Kushite kings wore not one uraeus but two, the double uraeus, generally interpreted as a claim to rule both Kush and Egypt (the exact meaning is debated).
• The ram. Amun as a ram, or a ram-headed sphinx, was the chief sacred image of Napata; rams' heads appear on royal jewellery and on the avenues of Jebel Barkal and Kawa.
• The lion. Apedemak's lion head, and lions on temple walls and pylons, were emblems of divine protection and royal victory. At Naqa's Lion Temple the god is also a lion-headed serpent: two sacred beasts combined.
• The Meroitic script. Kush developed its own writing around the second century BCE: a hieroglyphic form, used on monuments and derived from Egyptian signs, and a cursive form for everyday use. It has 23 signs and works as an alphasyllabary, an unusual design in which each consonant sign carries an inherent vowel a unless marked. It was one of the first writing systems in Africa created for an African language. Its sacred use appears in funerary texts, prayers to Isis and Osiris on offering tables and stelae, which follow a fixed formula and can therefore be partly understood.
• Pyramids. Nubian pyramids are smaller and steeper than Egypt's, with chapels at their foot; they revived an Egyptian sign of kingship and eternity and gave it a southern form.
• The Faras paintings. The practice of painting Nubian rulers under the direct protection of Christ, the Virgin or an archangel, one hand on the ruler's shoulder, encoded divine sanction of kingship in Christian form.

Connections

Kush was Egypt's closest neighbour and twin (ch02). Its kings restored Egyptian religion and wrote its texts; its gods passed north and south. The Twenty-fifth Dynasty meets Pre-exilic Israel (ch07) in Tirhakah's march against Assyria, and Meroë meets Early Christianity (ch16) in the Ethiopian eunuch of Acts 8, the first African convert in Christian scripture. Philae links Kush to the long survival of the Egyptian cult of Isis that spread through the Roman world (ch18). Its sacred kingship, with a king chosen by the god in the mountain and, in Diodorus's story, subject to the priests' command, belongs to the comparisons in Sacred Kingship (ch49). Christian Nubia stood beside Eastern Orthodoxy & Byzantium (ch60) and the Ethiopian church described in the Vault's Kebra Nagast (V66), and its long peace with Muslim Egypt belongs to the history of Islam (ch21). Kerma's retainer burials stand with the other royal sacrifices discussed in Sacrifice & the Scapegoat (ch51).

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From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch68.html · a comparative library of the sacred.