The Black Pharaohs

X-PASTER · 2011-05-09T16:58:25+00:00

The Black Pharaohs An ignored chapter of history tells of a time when kings from deep in Africa conquered ancient Egypt. By Robert Draper National Geographic Contributing Writer Photograph by Kenneth Garrett 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 firsthandI 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 capitulatedincluding 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 Piyes legs remain. We are left with a single physical detail of the mannamely, that his skin was dark. Piye was the first of the so-called black pharaohsa series of Nubian kings who ruled over all of Egypt for three-quarters of a century as that countrys 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 storyand come to recognize that the black pharaohs didnt 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 Sudans pyramidsgreater in number than all of Egyptsare haunting spectacles in the Nubian Desert. It is possible to wander among them unharassed, even alone, a world away from Sudans 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, Sudans 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. Next>>

Thread starter X-PASTER
Start date May 9, 2011

X-PASTER

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The Black Pharaohs

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