The Kushite pharaohs brought Egypt an older southern kingship

From roughly 747 to 656 BCE, kings out of Kush held Egypt alongside their own country, and Taharqo is the best known of them. The usual account calls this a foreign conquest, as though Nubia and Egypt were two civilisations that happened to share a river. The evidence Ehret assembles through the rest of his book points elsewhere. Ideas along the Nile travelled northward for thousands of years before the first pharaoh, and the sacral kingship these rulers practised had begun in the lands south of Egypt and moved down the valley during the fifth and fourth millennia BCE. On that reading the Kushite pharaohs carried back to Memphis institutions that had been sent north long before. Recent studies by Gordon on the cultural identity of these rulers, and by Pope on the double kingdom under Taharqo, work through how they handled the encounter in practice. Two halves of one valley, briefly under one crown.

Around 700 BCE the knowledge of iron smelting began moving out from the early Great Lakes Bantu to the rest of the early Mashariki, the eastern branch of Bantu speakers. The Great Lakes region is where Schmidt and Avery documented prehistoric smelting of an advanced kind, and it acted here as the transmission node, the place from which furnace technique travelled on to communities spread across a wide stretch of eastern Africa. Ehret dates that stage from the linguistic and archaeological record together. He first set the finding out in a lecture at Columbia University in September 1974, added evidence from South Sudan when the Society of Africanist Archaeologists met at UCLA in March 1992, and published it later still. Nearly two decades separate the finding from the article. I keep the delay in view because it says something about the discipline. The resistance to African technical achievement that Schmidt later wrote about was already in the rooms where these papers were read.