The world is in an uproar over the events that continue to plague society. Events that can be stopped and avoided if those involved could give second thought to their actions. Between war, and the sub wars in the battle zones of the disenfranchised all the way to the wars going on in global destinations such as the ones the Middle East, the Congo, Bosnia, and the list goes on. Humanity is losing people every single day and to unnatural causes. Humanity is at the top of the food chain and for some strange reason it is out there killing it self off, over petty principles, drug overdoses, malicious crimes. When will it all stop?
We all sit down comparing our differences instead of sitting down and realizing what is the same in each other. Whether it may be race, money/class, height, education, or any number of other ideas that have separated the global community.
It would be a great difference in the world if 10 new people each day decided to do something different, by moving away from negative thinking. They may incounter those who used to think like them and this may be an excuse to go back to the old, however they will change if you maintain your smile, and be genuine. Pay it forward and the world will begin to see more sunshine and less darkness.
Religion, Race, Creed, culture, wealth or lack thereof has put a damper on human existence for far too long. I do not know all the solutions that are available to us. However if we begin to practice positive we will be able to have a world that can grow into the new century. It would be a waste if we step into the new decade with ancient thoughts. We have begun the new millennium with them, but we can change that as a collective.
No Man is greater than another with out his sister or his brother in all essence he is nothing. Religion is not an excuse to war, war is an excuse in itself to kill. So take in the kind words or Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, Ghandi, and the greatest Jesus Christ and rember to turn the other cheak and wish your nemesis well, the sin is far greater to the head of the enemey that loses the opportunity to anger you.
Love those in the world, but do not become of the world.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Practice Positive
Saturday, March 15, 2008
John Henrick Clarke - A great and mighty walk
This is a look into the African American Diaspora. With the help of Wesley Snipes and a great production teams. This is a insightful look into the warping differences that the African American So called Negro faced in the 20th century.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Rare Nubian King Statues Uncovered in Sudan
for National Geographic News
Statues from a highly advanced African civilization that thrived for 1,200 years along the banks of the Nile River have been uncovered by a team of archaeologists working in Sudan.
"The statues are sculptural masterpieces and important additions to our knowledge of the history of the region," said Charles Bonnet, an archaeologist with the University of Geneva in Switzerland who led the team.The statues were found in a pit in Kerma, south of the Third Cataract of the Nile.
"The general public is familiar with Egypt and the pharaohs, but it is not so aware that there was a highly important, sophisticated, and independent ancient civilization in Nubia, which is now the northern Sudan," said Tim Kendall, a Sudan archaeologist and visiting research scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.
The seven statues, which stood between 1.3 to 2.7 meters (4 to 10 feet) tall, were inscribed with the names of five of Nubia's kings: Taharqa, Tanoutamon, Senkamanisken, Anlamani, and Aspelta.
Taharqa and Tanoutamon ruled Egypt as well as Nubia. Sometimes known as the "Black Pharaohs," Nubian kings ruled Egypt from roughly 760 B.C. to 660 B.C. [see sidebar]
The land the Egyptians called Kush was situated at the nexus of important trade routes between central Africa and Egypt. The kingdom—which extended from what is today southern Egypt to northern Sudan—had a long and tangled history with ancient Egypt, a history that see-sawed between periods of warfare and occupation, and peace and prosperity.
The Kingdom of Kush
Archaeologists have found evidence of several early cultures in Nubia beginning about 3500 B.C. Central African products found in Egypt suggest to scholars that these early kingdoms traded with one another and that Nubia provided a connection along the Nile between central Africa and Egypt.
"When the Egyptians originally started exploring Nubia, which at that point consisted of many different tribes, the people of northern Sudan were very friendly with the Egyptians, and the rulers had good relations with the Egyptian pharaoh," said Kendall. "But that didn't last."
The Egyptians, feeling threatened, invaded and conquered Kush.
Between about 1500 B.C. and 1100 B.C., Kush was administered as a province of Egypt," said William Y. Adams, a noted archaeologist from the University of Kentucky, who has spent many years excavating in Sudan. This allowed the Egyptians to control its trade, and especially to control its important gold mines, which made Egypt the richest nation on Earth between about 1500 and 1100 B.C.
"What's interesting is that in military endeavors in other countries, the Egyptians let the conquered peoples maintain their own traditions and modes of worship," said Kendall. "With Kush there was much more give and take, and the Egyptians tried to incorporate or combine Nubian religious beliefs with their own. They seem to have combined their own state god, Amun, with the Nubian god and promoted the idea that these two gods were the same. This allowed the pharaohs, who claimed to be the sons of Amun, to claim to be the legitimate rulers of Nubia also."
When the Egyptians withdrew from Nubia around 1100 B.C.—for unknown reasons—a group of powerful local rulers arose. These kings of Kush also claimed to be the sons of Amun, and therefore the legitimate kings of Egypt.
Nubian Rule Over Egypt
The Nubian kings came to rule Egypt as the result of a power struggle between the reigning Egyptian kings in northern Egypt and the powerful priests of Amun in Thebes, a powerful city-state in southern Egypt.
"The priests in Thebes realized they couldn't stop the fighting themselves, so they invited the Nubian king to come to Egypt and restore order," said Adams. "One of the main reasons why Kashta [the Kush king] was willing to take on this role was that he was a puritan; he felt that Egypt had fallen into corrupt and decadent ways, and he had a real mission to restore the worship of Amun.
"He didn't stay long but his successor, Piankhy, came to Thebes, received the blessings of the priests, proceeded north and conquered and reunified the warring states," said Adams.
In addition to reunifying Egypt, the Nubian kings sought to bring back the glory days of Egypt and began a cultural renaissance. They produced beautiful sculptures and other art objects, in addition to building many superb temples and other monuments, said Kendall. The Nubian period in Egypt is known as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty.
"Just as Egypt was reaching a new Golden Age [under the Nubian kings], the Assyrians invaded Egypt, and brought destruction as far as Thebes," said Kendall. "They butchered the people, and the Nubian kings fled with the remnants of their army and court south to Kush, barely escaping with their lives."
The Nubian kings were much weakened at this point, but remained quite vocal about their claims to the kingship of Egypt. Meanwhile a new dynasty formed in northern Egypt and established control over Egypt.
"Around 593 B.C., the Egyptian king, named Psamtik II, had had enough of the Kush kings claiming his throne. He invaded Nubia with Egyptian troops, Greek mercenaries, and a fleet of ships," said Kendall.
Bonnet believes the statues he found were pulled down and smashed during this invasion.
"They were broken by the king Psamtik II [who ruled Egypt from 595 to 589 B.C.] during his military campaign," said Bonnet. "Later, they were buried into the pit, probably by the king Aspelta." Aspelta ruled Kush from around 600 to 580 B.C.
"After the statues were destroyed, we know that Aspelta ruled a long time afterwards and expanded his empire to the south," said Kendall.
Psamtik II's invasion was the last successful incursion by Egypt into the kingdom of Kush.
"Ironically," said Kendall, "less than 70 years passed before Egypt was conquered by Persia, then by Macedon, and finally by Rome, all of which put an end to native rule. The kingdom of Kush, however, continued to flourish under an unbroken line of kings until the fourth century A.D."
Nubia's Black Pharaohs
12.01.2005
Will a lost coronation temple reveal how the ancient Nubians rose up and seized the throne of the mighty Egyptians?
| NUBIAN SPHINX A five-foot-high ram statue graces the entrance of the Amun temple at Jebel Barkal. "For unknown reasons, the ram became an animal sacred to the Nubians. Sometimes Amun is shown as a man with the head of a ram," says Tim Kendall. |
On a cloudless morning in northern Sudan, the first rays of the sun cast a glow on Jebel Barkal, a small tabletop mountain perched near the Nile River. Jebel Barkal rises barely 320 feet above the surrounding desert but is distinguished by one prominent feature: a pinnacle jutting out from its southwestern cliff face. If your imagination is keen enough, the isolated butte might resemble a crown or an altar, and the pinnacle an unfinished colossal statue—perhaps a rearing serpent, its body poised to strike.
Striding toward an excavation near the base of the pinnacle, archaeologist Tim Kendall pauses momentarily to admire what he calls the "little mountain with big secrets." Thousands of years ago, Jebel Barkal and Napata, the town that grew up around it, served as the spiritual center of ancient Nubia, one of Africa's earliest civilizations. The mountain was also considered a holy site by neighboring Egypt, whose pharaohs plundered and tyrannized Nubia for 400 years.
But in the eighth century B.C., Nubia turned the tables on its former colonizers. Its armies marched 700 miles north from Jebel Barkal to Thebes, the spiritual capital of Egypt. There the Nubian king Piye became the first of a succession of five "black pharaohs" who ruled Egypt for six decades with the blessing of the Egyptian priesthood. What happened? asks Kendall. How did the Nubians, overrun by Egypt for centuries, crush their colonizers? And why did the priests of Thebes decide the black pharaohs had a mandate from heaven? Kendall has been searching for those answers for 20 years. They can be revealed, he believes, by cracking a code of geomorphological symbols at Jebel Barkal and by parsing hieroglyphic texts that refer to the mountain as Dju-wa'ab, or "Pure Mountain." "I feel as if I'm deciphering a mythological puzzle," Kendall says. "It's a real mystery story."
|
ETERNAL GLORY |
Kendall is convinced that the physical form of Jebel Barkal is a clue. His research suggests that when Egypt's warrior-pharaoh Thutmose I set out to conquer the far reaches of Nubia in 1500 B.C., priests accompanying the armies took one look at Jebel Barkal and its pinnacle and believed they had come upon the birthplace and primeval abode of Egypt's supreme deity, Amun. "Amun is god of the sun and of fertility, father of all the gods and goddesses," says Kendall. "He's male; he's female. He's the father of fathers and mother of mothers. He is the father of the king, who is his living manifestation on Earth."
The ruins of a great temple built to Amun stretch for nearly two football fields in the shadow of Jebel Barkal's cliff. It's the largest and best studied of the site's numerous temples, but not the most interesting to a researcher probing Jebel Barkal's origins as a cultic site. Rather, Kendall's focus lately has been on uncovering the original Egyptian coronation temple here. He believes a long-lost chamber was once chiseled into solid sandstone at the base of the pinnacle and that it has remained sealed off for centuries by tons of earthquake debris. For a decade, Kendall has been methodically searching for the chamber, where, he suspects, Egyptian pharaohs dating back to Thutmose III and Ramses the Great symbolically entered the mountain to be crowned by Amun. Their coronations may have been magical charades of ceremonies held simultaneously at the royal temple of Luxor in Thebes, Kendall says, but he suspects the pharaohs actually came here too.
Some scholars doubt the Egyptians would have ascribed so much significance to Jebel Barkal based simply on shapes they saw in the rock. "The more meaning I find here, the more my colleagues think I've gone off the deep end," Kendall says. But if he turns out to be wrong, he will still have collected substantial evidence to bolster his argument that Nubia deserves more respect in the annals of archaeology.
"Basically, he's moving the center of Egyptian royal ideology outside of Egypt," says Krzysztof Grzymski, curator of the Royal Ontario Museum's Egyptian and Nubian collections. Grzymski has followed Kendall's work since they both worked in Sudan during the mid-1980s. "Not everyone agrees with him, but he makes a good case. He's stirring up the world of established Egyptology."
Kendall is fair skinned, and to protect himself from the sun he wears an embroidered white shawl wrapped turban style around his head. His team—a Greek and two Sudanese archaeologists, a pair of conservators from Italy and Austria, and an American archaeological surveyor—are at the dig site today, trying to accomplish as much as they can before the sun rises higher in the sky and the desert temperatures soar beyond 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Kendall has offered to give me a firsthand look at some of Jebel Barkal's coded rock features.
|
SACRED MOUNTAIN |
It's a five-minute walk from his rented guesthouse to the site, across an undulating expanse of sand strewn with pastel-colored gravel and, in one section, thousands of shards of coarse, funnel-shaped pottery that make a crunching sound underfoot. "They're bread molds," Kendall says. "The priests baked the gods' daily offering in them and smashed the molds to remove the bread."
The sheer number of cast-off molds underscores how long Napata functioned as the cultic heart of Nubia. This was the Nubians' primary religious and coronation site in the eighth century B.C., more than 300 years after Egypt abandoned its colony (for still uncertain reasons). It remained as such for at least a millennium, until the second or third century A.D. Even after the Nubian kings shifted their political and administrative center several hundred miles farther up the Nile to the city of Meroë for better security, they journeyed north across the forbidding Bayuda Desert to be crowned at Napata.
Following a trail through the smashed crockery, Kendall and I crest a small rise, round a bend, and find ourselves surrounded by a lost world. Before us stand the ruins of the Amun temple. Now roofless and largely filled with sand, the shrine was started by the Egyptians and later expanded by the Nubians. Over the centuries, it evolved into a complex of courtyards, chapels, and covered halls extending 500 feet from the sanctuary at the rear, near the mountain's majestic bluff, to an avenue of sphinxes beyond the entry pylon. The sphinxes, of which only six remain, are giant recumbent rams that represent Amun.
The Amun temple was probably the Nubians' chief repository of ancient knowledge and religious literature, Kendall says, as well as a national museum. It would have been filled with statues and monuments that celebrated the kingdom's rulers and linked them to earlier Egyptian pharaohs, whom the Nubian kings counted as their ancestors. In every detail, the temple carefully mimics Egyptian religious architectural styles, right down to the pair of enormous gray granite blocks that supported a model of Amun's ship, a bark in which he sailed the heavens. Both blocks are inscribed with hieroglyphs and oval-shaped royal symbols called cartouches, and decorated by repeated images of the king standing in profile, with his torso turned outward and arms upraised to support a band of stars. Several bearded deities are depicted with pendulous breasts and rounded stomachs, symbolizing "the fertility of the Nile," Kendall says. On public occasions, Nubian priests would hoist the ship onto their shoulders and carry it into the temple's forecourt, where oracles performed divinations and other sacred rituals.
|
CODE BREAKER |
Aerial photographs indicate that as many as 16 temples were built at Jebel Barkal. Seven have been excavated, along with three palaces and many secular buildings. Spread out on a gravel plain of about 20 acres, the temples were situated so that the axis of each pointed toward the mountain. Two of the palaces, on the other hand, were oriented at right angles to the entryway of the Amun temple and on the right side. Egyptian tradition called for the pharaoh's residence to be placed on the starboard (right) side of Amun's bark.
From where Kendall and I stand, the pinnacle is about a hundred yards away, at the far end of the cliff. Its obvious phallic shape would have immediately struck Egyptian priests as a sign of Amun's presence, Kendall says. But because Jebel Barkal is a lone mountain, isolated from other buttes in the area and sometimes nearly engulfed by the Nile's floodwaters, the priests may also have seen it as the perfect metaphor for the primeval mound: the island where Amun pulled himself out of the waters of the Abyss and created the first gods by masturbating. Kendall draws attention to the shaft's bulging head, which he says resembles "a human figure wearing the white crown," a tall, conical headdress (shaped a little like a bowling pin) that pharaohs wore to signify their dominion over the empire's southern territories.
The lower half of the pinnacle is partially obscured, so we walk out to the forecourt of the Amun temple, past teetering columns and tumbledown walls, for a full-length view. Seen from top to bottom, Kendall suggests that the pinnacle looks like a rearing cobra wearing the white crown. The cobra, or uraeus, represented a fire-spitting goddess who could decimate enemies with death-ray precision. It was a powerful symbol of divine authority, and each pharaoh wore one on his brow as an amulet. Kendall and I continue walking to the west and look back at the pinnacle. Seen from that angle, it morphs yet again into a uraeus that's crowned by a sun disk. In Egyptian mythology, the golden sun disk symbolized the Eye of Re, a potent female deity who embodied all of Amun's daughters and chief protector goddesses.
Egyptian texts found at Jebel Barkal support Kendall's belief that the ancients saw the pinnacle as an effigy for Amun as well as a uraeus. But the most dramatic evidence of his pinnacle-as-uraeus thesis—his window into the minds of the ancients—is not textual but graphic. At Abu Simbel, the famed Egyptian rock-cut temple 300 miles south of Aswân whose entrance is adorned with four colossal statues of Ramses II, a wall relief shows the pharaoh making an offering to Amun, who appears as a man. Amun is seated inside what appears to be a pavilion guarded by a uraeus wearing the white crown. In fact, Kendall says, the pavilion is Jebel Barkal, and the uraeus is the pinnacle.
A similar scene appears in the only rock-cut temple that has been found intact at Jebel Barkal: the temple to Mut, Amun's consort and protector. Like Abu Simbel, the Mut temple is hewn out of solid sandstone, carved right into the base of the pinnacle. It's a beautifully decorated, five-chambered shrine commissioned by Piye's son, Taharqa, the most prolific monument builder of all the black pharaohs. One of its smudgy, graffiti-scarred frescoes shows Taharqa bearing an offering to Mut and Amun. In the scene, Amun is depicted as a man with a ram's head, his Nubian form. The divine couple is situated in a flat-topped pavilion with a sloping face, but the cobra emerging from it is crowned by a sun disk—just like the pinnacle as seen from the west, outside the temple doorway.
A seminal moment in Kendall's research occurred when his colleague Lynn Holden first made a connection between the pinnacle and the fresco's uraeus, providing a vital link between the mythical and the real worlds. "It changed our whole understanding of the mountain," Kendall says. "That the mountain had a uraeus would have had tremendous meaning to Egyptians. Afterward, we started to see that the pinnacle had other meanings—that it was a serpent and a phallus, that it was wearing a crown. You see that it was viewed as the center of creation, the home of the creator god, the source of kingship. When you start reading texts, you say, 'My God! This is why the Nubians thought they were entitled to the crown of Egypt.' "
Ancient Nubian texts also mention a repository for crowns, scepters, and other regalia among the Barkal temples, but it has never been located. Kendall is convinced that the references are to the missing rock-cut coronation chamber and that he'll find it just to the right of the Mut temple, buried under the heap of earthquake debris at the base of the pinnacle. Provocatively, he proposes that the earthquake that brought the face of the mountain down on top of the chamber may have occurred in the 11th century B.C., prompting the Egyptians to retreat from Nubia. "It is difficult to imagine the priesthood interpreting this event in any other way than as a sign that Amun was angry and that he wished to revoke indefinitely the reigning king's authority to rule Amun's southern domains," Kendall says.
It's a hypothetical scenario, but tempting because Kendall's chronology meshes neatly with a poorly understood period when Egypt lost control of Nubia's gold mines and lucrative trade routes to sub-Saharan Africa and plunged into a dark age of economic and political turmoil that lasted 350 years. Kendall contends that Egypt's political crisis prompted the embattled priests of Thebes to send missionaries to Napata to convert the Nubian chiefs to the Amun cult and recruit them as allies. That could explain how the Napatan royals and elite became Egyptianized so rapidly. In the short space of several generations, they adopted the written language of hieroglyphics and revived the tradition of pyramid building long after the Egyptians abandoned it. Ultimately, the Nubian king Piye marched north to restore order in the name of Amun and returned to Napata as a pharaoh.
Anthropologist William Y. Adams, a professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky and a respected world figure in Nubiology, thinks Kendall has yet to collect enough empirical evidence to fully support his "interpretation of the mountain and its symbolism." But he credits Kendall with helping to give renewed respectability to the study of ancient Nubia, which European and American scholars once treated as little more than a footnote to the study of ancient Egypt.
| SYMBOLIC WOMB |
The ancient Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote that Nubia was the original home of the Egyptians and the fountainhead of civilization. He called them Aethiopies, "the burned-face ones," because they were said to be Earth's firstborn and thus stood closest to the sun. "The Greeks and Romans romanticized the Nubians as a people living in a pure state," Kendall says. Egyptian conquest texts, on the other hand, seldom refer to Nubia without describing it as "wretched," and when Nubians appear in tomb reliefs they are usually being led in shackles or bearing tribute to the pharaohs. Tutankhamen symbolized his hold on the detestable hinterlands by carrying ceremonial staffs and canes whose handles were fashioned in the form of Nubians, their arms bound behind their backs. He ordered that Nubian figures be embroidered on the soles of his slippers and carved on the legs of his footstools so that he could perpetually trample them.
As 19th-century archaeologists came to rely more and more on Egypt's propagandistic texts, they turned away from classical histories. "The ancient Egyptian attitude towards Nubia took root in their minds, until by the end of the century it had entirely supplanted the old notion of Nubia as the well-spring of civilization," Adams writes in Nubia: Corridor to Africa. "Something of the same attitude is conveyed in the nineteenth-century term 'Darkest Africa.' African darkness, as the Victorians conceived it, was more than a matter of skin colour; it was a darkness of the mind as well."
Kendall first visited Napata in 1982, during a tour of Nubian archaeological sites sponsored by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he worked as an assistant curator. The museum boasts one of the world's most comprehensive collections of Nubian artifacts and antiquities outside of Khartoum, Sudan's capital. Most of it came to Boston via rail and sea during the post–World War I years, when the godfather of Nubian archaeology, Harvard University Egyptologist George Reisner, excavated at Napata and other sites in Sudan. Working with his trusted excavators from Egypt and a crew of 300 local men, Reisner had laid tracks around Jebel Barkal for dump carts and moved tons of earth before turning to the more delicate work of exposing the temple ruins. For all of his discoveries, however, Reisner missed plenty.
A British expeditionary group subsequently scanned the pinnacle's summit through binoculars and made out traces of hieroglyphic inscriptions but didn't hazard a guess about how the inscriptions got there. The spot is nearly 250 feet above the desert floor, straight up. Kendall discovered how in 1987, when he enlisted a mountaineer from Boston to help him scale the monolith. On the way up, he found sockets chiseled into the back side of the spire and, directly opposite on the cliff face, a series of corresponding holes. He realized then that ancient stonemasons had erected a scaffold of wooden beams in the gap between the cliff and the pinnacle, probably hoisted into place by means of a pair of shadufs, long, counterbalanced poles that some farmers along the Nile still use to lift water to their fields. At the summit Kendall found cartouches of the black pharaoh Taharqa, as well as six panels of hieroglyphs etched in a place where no one—except the gods—could read them. Long ago, he believes, the panels were covered with gold leaf, which would have reflected the sun, creating a dazzling landmark for approaching caravans.
Kendall, now a visiting research professor at Northeastern University in Boston, has maintained Reisner's old excavating concession through two civil wars: the recently settled 20-year-long conflict in the south between Sudan's Islamic fundamentalist government and the rebels, and the ongoing genocide in the western Darfur region. Fortunately, Jebel Barkal, located some 200 miles north of Khartoum, is far from those hot spots. But the area is under a siege of a different type. "When I first came here, there were no paved roads and no telephone service," Kendall says. "Now there's an Internet café, and everybody has a cell phone."
Within a year or two, continuous pavement will extend from Khartoum to a section of the Nile just 25 miles east of Napata, where a consortium of Arab nations, Sudan, and China is building a hydroelectric dam that will approximately double Sudan's power supply and irrigate now-parched lands. The dam is not likely to directly affect the ruins at Jebel Barkal, but its reservoir will submerge ancient settlements, unexcavated graves, rock-art sites, and fortresses for a hundred miles upstream. Sudan's antiquities department has urgently enlisted teams of archaeologists from around the world to document those sites before the dam's expected completion in 2008, after which the ruins will be lost forever.
|
HEAVENLY TRANSPORT |
In the meantime, Kendall hopes that he's on the verge of completing his decadelong quest to uncover the lost coronation temple, perhaps as early as next spring. In 1997 he realized that he'd barely scratched the surface at Jebel Barkal when his men dug up 30 blocks inscribed with sacred vultures flying against a starry sky—part of a vaulted passage into a freestanding coronation temple built around the time of Christ to replace the rock-cut original. Then, five years ago, his search gained momentum after six sandstone building blocks of Egyptian design turned up beneath the overburden of earthquake rubble. The blocks were cemented together in a row that extended back toward the mountain's towering cliff face and pinnacle. His local diggers have since been using hand tools to crack apart massive boulders and nibble away at the debris beneath them, removing it bucketful by bucketful, a tedious process. This year they succeeded in breaking apart several car-size boulders on top of the earthquake debris—only to find more boulders below.
We can only guess what might be inside the rock-cut chamber," Kendall says. "It may contain ritual objects, statues, textiles, wall paintings, and inscriptions." But he has no doubt he is looking for it in the right place—directly beneath Jebel Barkal's pinnacle. After a short walk from the temple of Amun, Kendall and I are standing amid the ruins of a forlorn palace. In Napata's heyday, the palace had been a two-story labyrinth of some 60 rooms, but time and the elements had since reduced its crumbling mud-brick walls virtually to ground level.
In 1919 Reisner dug deep into the palace ruins and identified four or perhaps five occupation levels, one superimposed atop another. On a level dated to around 600 B.C., he encountered quantities of charred plaster and burned timbers. By that point in history, the Nubians had been expelled from Egypt but still had pretensions to the crown. To squelch their ambitions, the pharaoh Psammeticus II marched south in 593 B.C., descended on Napata, and torched the palace and the Amun temple.
Before Reisner left the palace, he took careful note of a doorway from the throne room into a corridor that led to the palace's rear exit. A fragmentary inscription on the doorjambs reads, in part, "One goes out to the Per-wer [Great House]. . . . One enters the Per-nesr [House of Flame]. . . . " He photographed the jambs but otherwise found them unremarkable.
Seven decades later, Reisner's unpublished notes and photos turned up in a storage room at the Boston museum. That turned out to be a great stroke of luck for Kendall because when he re-excavated the palace, he found that the doorjambs had collapsed, and their inscriptions were unreadable. Still, the hieroglyphic characters appeared clearly in Reisner's photographs, and Kendall concluded that they referred to the coronation in 600 B.C. of the Nubian king Aspelta."We know from a 14th-century B.C. Egyptian coronation text that the Great House is where the king received his crown from a goddess called Weret-Hekau, whose name means 'Great of Magic,' " says Kendall. "Once she put the crown on his head, he was ushered into a temple called the House of Flame to receive the approval of the gods."
Kendall guides me down the corridor toward the palace's back door, the same path the crown prince Aspelta might have taken during the ancient and richly choreographed coronation ceremony that Kendall envisions. A priestly stand-in for Amun might have led the procession, while the prince's mother might have played the role of an attendant goddess.
They would have been following long-established Egyptian coronation rituals in which Amun, "Lord of the Thrones of Two Lands," led the prince to the Great House to receive his crown. But since the earthquake had sealed off the Egyptian rock-cut original, the Nubian rulers had rebuilt it as a freestanding temple in front of the mountain. Kendall has found remains of this temple, as well as sketchy evidence of a secret corridor at the rear of the temple that would have allowed the black pharaohs to maintain the Egyptian tradition of entering the mountain.
"In Napatan times and later," he says, "the king first went into the Great House, just as he had done during the Egyptian era, and there received his crown. Then, using a private passage, he would have crossed over to the Mut temple. Once inside the mountain he would have united with his 'mother,' Mut, who symbolically gave birth to him as her child. At this point the king became the newborn god." After receiving the acclamation of the gods assembled in the Mut temple, the newly crowned pharaoh would have stepped outside to greet his subjects.
Many centuries later we follow in their imagined footsteps, walking down a palace corridor that is barely an outline in the sand. When Kendall and I reach the end, we turn toward the mountain and pass through the remains of a door to the outside.
"What do you see straight ahead?" Kendall asks.
The portal is aimed straight at the pinnacle.
In his gut, Kendall knows there is a lost temple at the base of the pinnacle. If he has accomplished anything at Jebel Barkal, it is to think like an Egyptian, to see what they did in the sacred mountain.
"I would find it hard to believe that there won't be an Egyptian temple cut into the uraeus of the mountain," he says. "It would be wonderful visible proof that the Egyptian kings were being crowned at Jebel Barkal and leave less room for doubt."
In the meantime, at 60, Kendall is thinking ahead to his final challenge at Jebel Barkal: proving his theory that the Nubians worshipped the mountain long before the Egyptians even knew the mountain existed. "That's one of the missing links in Nubian archaeology," he says. "I hope to dig in front of the pinnacle and find pre-Egyptian deposits that show there was already a cult here when Thutmose arrived."
This story is not of my own. However has sparked the mind within me to begin the research that will uncover more behind this article from National Geographic Magazine Jan-February 2008
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.
