Istwa Nou

The peoples of the Napatan and Meroitic heartland followed a religion that recognised one Divinity, able to appear as individually named spirits. That shapes how their kings dealt with Egypt. When Napatan rulers gave recognition to Amun, Isis and Osiris, they most probably took those figures as further manifestations of the Divinity they already knew, absorbing them into a framework they had brought with them. A century of scholarship read the same acts as submission, as Kushite kings adopting the gods of a superior civilisation. Ehret reconstructs the Nilo-Saharan religion of Divinity back to the ninth millennium BCE, which puts it thousands of years ahead of the Egyptian cults in question. On that reconstruction the traffic runs the other way. Egyptian deities were taken into an older African theology and given a place inside it. Honouring Amun at Karnak becomes an act of interpretation performed by conquerors on the religion of the conquered.

A second large African state took shape in the Ethiopian highlands across the middle and later centuries of the first millennium BCE, southeast of the Napata-Meroe empire and almost as early. The archaeology for it is thin and the inscriptions are few. Its successor is well documented. The empire of Aksum stood at its height from the early first millennium CE to the seventh century, and its wealth came from control of frankincense, myrrh, gold and ivory, the aromatics and luxuries that the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds bought in quantity. Aksum sent armies across the Red Sea to take commercially competing territory in southern Arabia. Those armies used tamed African elephants, as Hannibal's Carthaginian army had. The Persian prophet Mani, writing in the third century CE, named four great empires of his age: Rome, Persia, China and Aksum. He was in a position to know, and the roster he produced is not the one taught now.