Nubia

The lands below Egypt were known as Nubia and in the time of the Pharaohs were ruled by an African people that the Egyptians called the Kush. Kushite civilisation was clustered around the upper part of the Sudan, but their influence extended north through a largely arid landscape where the Nile flowed through narrow gorges hemmed in by steep cliffs. The early Egyptians described Nubia as desolate by contrast with their own fertile valley. But Nubia produced gold and controlled the traffic of Sub-Saharan products into Egypt, including elephant ivory, dark-skinned African slaves, ebony wood, valuable leopard pelts and incense from Somalia.

During the New Kingdom period the Egyptian Pharaohs conquered Nubia as far as the Fourth Cataract (1552-1070 BC). This conquest extended their kingdom south by nearly 400 miles and incorporated the large looping bend of the Nile River between the Third and Fourth Cataracts. A place called Napata became the new frontier for this merged kingdom and over successive generations the Egyptians imposed many of their own state structures and customs on Nubian society. The Kushite ruling class adopted aspects of Egyptian-style culture and when Egypt began to decline in the eighth century BC, they led African armies north to assume control over the northern kingdom. The Kings of Kush established a succession of African Pharaohs that ruled both kingdoms for almost a century (751-656 BC). The reign of this Twenty-fifth Dynasty ended when a Near Eastern people called the Assyrians invaded Egypt and defeated the Kushites. The Egyptians restored a native Pharaoh to power in the reclaimed kingdom and the Kings of Kush retreated back into the Sudan. Most of these events are recorded in hieroglyphs, but the early Greeks also heard and preserved stories from ancient Egypt.