Istwa Nou

The empire ruled from Napata and later from Meroe had its heartland in the middle Nile, and the people there belonged to the Nilo-Saharan cultural world, whose religion recognised a single Divinity. Older European scholarship began somewhere else. It treated the Napatan and Meroitic kings as culturally backward peoples copying Egypt, so any practice the two shared was counted as a Kushite borrowing and never as an Egyptian one. The reasoning runs in a circle. Influence was assumed to travel from civilised to backward, and the assumption then supplied the evidence. Set it aside and the record looks different. This was a state larger in territory than Egypt, governing more people, still standing nine hundred years after it lost its Egyptian provinces, and strong enough to fight Rome to a treaty. Ehret argues that the ideas involved, the one Divinity and the sacral kingship, have roots in Nilo-Saharan communities thousands of years older than the Egyptian cults they were said to imitate.

The Napatan state lost its Egyptian provinces in the second half of the 600s BCE and moved its capital south to Meroe, near modern Khartoum. It then remained a major power for nine hundred more years. Its territory covered twelve hundred kilometres, from near Aswan in Egypt down through the Gezira region of Sudan. It held the overland links between the Nile and the Red Sea, which was the corridor into the Indian Ocean trade, and its merchants supplied gold, ivory, rhinoceros horn, tortoiseshell and cotton cloth into that traffic. Nine centuries is longer than the Roman Empire lasted from Augustus to the last emperor in the west. Meroe across that span was a commercial and military state of the first rank, sitting on the junction of Africa's two great trade arteries. Standard world histories mention it briefly or leave it out. That gap is one reason a Haitian timeline is worth beginning in Africa rather than in the Caribbean.