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.

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.