Napatan kings rebuilt Egyptian temples to make their rule stick

During their conquest and rule of Egypt, from around 750 BCE to the middle of the 600s, the kings of Napata set out to have their government accepted. They did it with practical measures: respect and reverence shown to particular Egyptian gods, Amun above all, and to the temples and towns where those gods were worshipped. Rebuilding shrines, funding priesthoods and appearing at the great festivals are the ordinary instruments of a ruler governing a population whose loyalty he does not yet hold. Augustus restored the temples of Rome after the civil wars for the same reason. The Mughal emperors paid for Hindu institutions in India. The British in India took over the ceremonial forms of the court they had displaced. Read the Napatan temple programme as cultural surrender and the politics vanishes from it. Western scholarship read it that way for generations, granting imperial calculation to Rome and to the Mughals while withholding it from an African state doing the same work.

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.