Istwa Nou

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.

In languages spoken all around the great bend of the Niger and widely across Mali, the word for horse takes the form so or siso. Those forms derive from the Punic word for horse, the language of Carthage. A loanword travels with the thing it names, so the vocabulary dates the arrival of horses in the western Sudan belt to the period when Carthaginian commerce was still running, which ends when Rome destroyed the city in 146 BCE. The route came south through the Hoggar mountains of the central Sahara. Horses arrived as a trade good sold by Carthaginian merchants to West African elites, along tracks in use centuries before the camel and later serving as the arteries of the trans-Saharan gold trade. Ehret's evidence here is entirely linguistic. It fixes a direction and a date for the traffic in horses without a single excavated animal, on the strength of a word that stayed behind in Mande and its neighbours.