Nubian Pharaohs and Meroitic Kings: The Kingdom of Kush

by Necia Desiree Harkless

Overview

NUBIAN PHARAOHS AND MEROITIC KINGS: THE KINGDOM OF KUSH Necia Desiree Harkless has completed her odyssey of 24 years initiated by a poem that emerged in the odd moments of early morning and her studies as a Donovan Scholar at the University of Kentucky with Dr. William Y. Adams, the leading Nubiologist of the world. The awesome result is her attempt to map the cultural, social, political history of Nubia "as a single people as actors on the world stage as they act out their destinies in the cradle of civilization." The underlying purpose of her book "is to reconstruct the collective efforts of the past and present Nubian campaigns and their collaborative scholarship so that the African American as well as all Americans can begin to understand the contributions of the civilization of Africa and Asia as a continuous historical entity." The history of the Kingdom of Kush begins with its earliest kingdom of Kerma in 2500 BC. It continues with the conquest of Egypt by the Nubian Pharaohs in 750 BC, reluctantly recognized as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty of Egyptian Pharaohs. They ruled as black pharaohs from their Kingdom at Napatan until they were forced one hundred years later to retreat to Napata by the Assyrians who assumed control of the Egyptians. It was at Meroe, the last empire of the Kush, that forty generations of Meroitic kings and queens continued the Kingdom of Kush reaching monumental and dynastic heights. Their symbiotic relationship with Egypt was over, allowing them to develop their own indigenous culture with a language and script of their own. Their architecture, arts, politics, material and spiritual culture in the minds of many scholars surpassed that of Egypt. Over two hundred pyramids have been investigated. It is an epic that will be long remembered. The dawn of Christianity in the Kingdom of Kush has been found in the treasure cove of the Frescoes of Faras.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781425944964
Publisher:	AuthorHouse
Publication date:	08/28/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 10.90(h) x 0.50(d)

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NUBIAN PHARAOHS AND MEROITIC KINGS

THE KINGDOM OF KUSH

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By NECIA DESIREE HARKLESS

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2006 NECIA DESIREE HARKLESS
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4259-4496-4

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Chapter One

AFROCENTRISM AND NUBIAN SCHOLARSHIP

Afrocentrism is a response to the tradition created by non-Africans that Africa is a continent without history. It was perceived as a land of mystery and barbarism with the potential for exploitation and expansion, derived from the myths and legends about the land of gold. Charles H. Wesley, the noted Black historian, stated that "the history of European expansion in Africa was written and published as African history, and it was assumed that there was no history of any value among black men prior to the arrival of white men". The African American scholars, known as revisionists, have within the last two decades found allies in various fields to confirm their own views that Africa was a cradle of civilization and Egypt was fundamentally African.

Scholarship is a way of articulating and working out some of the issues which one confronts. Because of the culture one lives in, many answers exist between historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists, semanticists, and those in religion and mythology. The approach found in this chapter will focus on African and African American historians, psychologists, mathematicians, scientists, educators, and ethnologists. Nubian scholarship will include Egyptian Nubia, the lower Nile Valley and Sudanese Nubia in the Middle Nile Valley. Afrocentric scholarship includes the Nile Valley culture of Ancient Egypt. The Afrocentric scholars to honor the traditions of "the ancestors" by calling them by their name have substituted the name Kemet for Egypt. Kemet (KMT) is a phonetic rendition of the name that the people called their country.... the formal name seems to have been Tawy (The Two Lands) but the commonly used name was Kemet that means the black land along the banks of the Nile River. The people called themselves the Kemites (The Black Ones)

The ferment of African American scholarship on Egypt reached a groundswell in 1984 with two historic conferences. The Black Nationalists convened the First Annual Ancient Egyptian Studies Conference in February 1984, at Los Angeles "to reconstruct and to construct, pose and put in place an African paradigm for both our liberation and ever higher levels of human life." The Nile Valley Conference held on September 26-30, 1984 in Atlanta, Georgia was dedicated to the celebration of the founding of the Morehouse College Chapel. It was also dedicated to Dr. Benjamin Mays who was the president of Morehouse for twenty- seven years. The purpose was to bring into focus the research of the last fifteen years on the Nile Valley "which has changed forever the ideas about who created the Nile Valley civilizations, what they achieved, and the impact they left on Africa and the world...."

The Colonial Period, 1850-1950

The black scholars of this period represent both the Afrocentric and Eurocentric views prevalent during the colonial industrializing period. Martin R. Delaney, the first known black ethnologist, represents both the American and British world view, when he recorded that blacks had no place in the creation of early civilizations. Delaney was a physician, surgeon and practitioner in the diseases of women and children. Delaney was also a member of the International Statistical Congress of London, a member of the social Science Congress of Glasgow, Major in the United States Army and one of the Justices of Charleston, South Carolina. In 1880, he wrote Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color, with A Compendium of Ethiopian and Egyptian Civilization.

Delaney used the known classical texts of Diodorus, Pliny and others to establish the primacy of the Ethiopian in the creation of civilization, the bible to establish the dispersion of mankind after the flood, and archaeology to confirm biblical beliefs. As for the races and color, Delaney wrote about three pure races and the effects of miscegenation. After extolling the Ethiopians and the Egyptians, he wrote, "the African race should not be adjudged by those portions of the race found out of Africa ... The race is a noble one and worthy to emulate the noble Caucasian and Anglo-Saxon.

The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History has been active in the field of research and publication since 1915. W.E.B. Dubois was one of the first black scholars to challenge the view of Africans having no history before the coming of the Europeans to Africa. His book, The Negro, published in 1915, was an attempt to outline African history from an African American perspective, which set and early framework for viewing the unity of the African people throughout the Diaspora. Dubois wrote" when Asia overwhelmed by Egypt, Egypt sought refuge in Ethiopia (Nubia) as a child who returns to its mother, and Ethiopia then dominated Egypt and successfully invaded Asia.

Drusilla Dunjee Houston, founder of Mc Alister Seminary in Oklahoma, as a journalist was inspired by Dubois and also her father's extensive library, which she called "dry bones of history". In 1926, she published Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Kushite Empire, Vol. I which takes the reader on a glorious pilgrimage beginning with the origin of civilization into ancient Egypt and Ethiopia, establishing linkages among the ancient blacks who inhabited the populations of Arabia, Persia, Babylonia, and India.

William Leo Hansberry taught history at Howard University, one of the leading black colleges for twenty-seven years. During his tenure, he laid the foundation for the systematic study of African culture and peoples. In 1931, Hansberry wrote Sources for the Study of Ethiopian History. "Ancient Kush, Old Aethiopia, and the Balad es Sudan" was published in the Journal of Human Relations, vol. 8, 1960. According to Dr. John Henrike Clarke, retired professor of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, New York, the articles of Professor Hansberry appeared throughout the world in journals and conference papers; but he only published two books: Africa and Africans Seen by Classical Writers, 1977 and Pillars in Ethiopian History, 1974, Howard University Press.

Since the establishment of the organization for the Study of Negro History in 1915, the Afrocentric view has prevailed. Many of the ideas that were ignited by the radical concepts of the British author, Gerald Massey and E.A. Budge, the Egyptologist helped to reverse the trend of European scholarship. Massey's basic premise was Africa was the source of the world's people, languages, religion, and myths and Egypt was Africa's mouthpiece. Budge through his research reached the conclusion that Egypt could only be understood by references to its African underlay. The research of Reisner also encouraged African and African American scholarship.

The Period of Transition: 1950-60

The period represents the movement for liberation and independence both in Africa and America. Following World War II, the need to understand the national movements and the resumption of Archaeological activities in Nubia created new interests on the part of European scholars as well as African American and African scholars. In 1952, Thomas Hodgkin, a fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, stated that it was unfortunate that most of the history was presented from a European point of view and that we must begin to "rid our minds of those preoccupations that influence our thinking on the subject". He further stated, "We shall probably have to wait a little while for the history of Africa to be written by African scholars for an African reading public.

According to many African scholars, revising their histories became even more important in establishing nationhood. African scholars expanded their work on the prehistory of Egypt and Ethiopia based on the report by Dr. Leaky to the Pan African Congress of prehistory in 1959, which reinforced the ideas of origin of civilization in Africa. During this period an obscure Senegalese scholar who had been studying in Paris to become a physicist, began studying Egyptology, linguistics, anthropology and other related subjects, which would later make him a leader in a new field of African Historiography. In the Period of Liberation, this scholar became world renown as Cheikh Anta Diop 'the high priest of New Wave Egyptology' and Afrocentrism.

African American scholarship on Nubia did not emerge until the 'hot summers' cooled after the sixties. The Soviet scholars had already begun to engage in research in Africa to further the Cold War objective and to refute the imperialist propaganda that had always maintained that African had no history of their own. The first known work in this regard was presented in 1956 at the USSR Academy's Institute of Ethnography.

Post-Colonial Period (period of liberation) 1960-1990

The Post-Colonial period was one of intense struggle for civil rights by the African American in America and the political independence for many Africans for many African countries on the African continents. In both instances, the search for historical identity by African and African American scholars was critical. Cheikh Anta Diop wrote The Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality in French. It was published in 1974 in English. Diop died in his sleep in 1986.

Martin Bernal, originally in the field of Chinese history, wrote Black Athena: the Afro-Asiatic of Classical History in 1987. The same year, Basil Davidson, well known friend, and contemporary of Diop wrote, "It is a profoundly liberating work because it sheers away the murk of racism and is a major attempt to help old history back upon its feet again." Nubia: Corridor to Africa, written by W.Y. Adams in 1977 and reprinted in 1984, is a classic study of Nubia and synthesis of the twentieth century archaeological campaigns in Nubia. This work represents the first Nubiocentric view as opposed to the Eurocentric Egyptologists in the field. Bruce Williams, Oriental Institutive, University of Chicago, added some recent research in the Sudan in his 1980 article on "The Lost Pharaohs of Nubia". The information that Williams advances is nothing new since black writers have presenting the same view, even more extensively, in the Destruction of Black Civilizations (Williams, 1976) and Introduction to Africa Civilizations, Jackson, 1980. In essence William states:

"... people in Nubia (sometimes called Kush) had an advanced political organization hundreds of years before the first dynasty of Egypt. What we think of as Egyptian civilization may have moved from the south to north, a concept which is contrary to current thinking on the subject."

According to an article written by Felicity Barringer entitled "Africa's Claim to Egypt's History Grows More Persistent" a new generation of Egyptologists "has been increasingly willing to view ancient Egyptian civilization as rooted in Africa instead of the Middle East." Based on the abundance of research on the Nile Valley Civilization, the revisionist view has been presented by a number of black scholars over the past two decades. Frank B. Snowden, Jr. would be considered anachronistic by the revisionists because of his views. As professor emeritus, Department of Classics at Howard University, his career has spanned over fifty -four years since his graduation from Harvard University. During the career of Dr. Snowden, he has explored two worlds, but still clings to his view of color-blindness:

"One existed, as he has shown [in his writing], Before Color Prejudice and "From the Pharaohs to the Fall of The Roman Empire" in The Image of The Black in Literature and Art, which was clearly one of difference without discrimination, where color did not keep a people from being 'counted in'. The other world is our own, marred by an 'acute color consciousness' not found in antiquity nor warranted by reason or revelation."

Papers of the revisionists have been published by Malauna Karanga and Jacob Carruthers in African World View: Research, Rescue and Restoration, which represent selected papers of the proceedings of the First and Second Conferences of The Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations. Governance, history, spirituality, and philosophy and creative production are addressed. Papers are similarly addressed in the publication of the proceedings of the Conference on Nile Valley Civilizations edited by Ivan Van Sertima, editor of the Journal of African Civilizations. This could be the beginning for the establishment of the twin disciplines of Nubiology and Meroitics in American Universities, as it is in some of the European institutions, which could reflect scholarly arguments for a black heritage and the resolution of the debates regarding the ancient views of Egypt.

Chapter Two

ETHIOPIA (NUBIA) AND THE GREAT TRADITIONS

The name of Ethiopia for the modern mind evokes the images of a distant place of famine, distress, and death. It was not so for the peoples of the Mediterranean and Red Sea. They remembered and recounted tales of the noble Ethiopian traditions. The Aethiopes were the first mentioned in the great epic poems of Homer. He described them as the furthest of humanity. Herodotus wrote that the gods attended the banquets in their lands and the sun probably sets in their country.

The distant land of the Ethiopians was an enigmatic land in the minds of all ancient peoples. It was thought to have its beginnings with the creation of the universe. It extended south of Egypt and the Mediterranean basin, far to the east and west, to the ends of the earth, to Arabia, even to India. The Ethiopians gave the doctrine of astrology to all mankind, and their reputation and wisdom was great, being in all else wiser than other men.

The Oral Tradition

The noble tradition of Ethiopia was spread throughout the ancient world by travelers, warriors, sailors, priests, poets and the oracles. The rumors, tales, and legends became the oral corpus of Ethiopian myth and reality. Robert Graves states that "true myth may be defined as the reduction to narrative short-hand of the ritual performed in public festivals and in many cases as recorded on temple walls, vases, seals, bowls, mirrors, chests, shields, tapestries, and the like." The religion, history and drama of the people cannot be understood without its myths that are now our classics, beginning with Virgil and Homer. These myths of over two thousand years accretion have been dismissed as fairy tales of super-mortal and extra-human men. They were fabricated through necessity by fanciful minds to glorify the heroes and gods of a transcendent time.

The Classical Tradition

The Graeco-Roman Mediterranean world has been celebrated over two thousand years through the epic works of the Iliad and the Odyssey that were based on historical events which occurs about 1250 B.C. Homer composed the Iliad about 750B.C., approximately the time when the Ethiopian (Nubian) Pharaohs were in ascendancy and ruled Egypt. Common tradition states that Homer was the son of Maon, and that in his old age he was blind and poor.

As an Asiatic Greek, Homer enjoyed all the acclaim of a bard, member of a semi-religious craft and served as apprentice in his youth. His poems formed the basis of Greek literature. Single authorship was disputed through the ages. However, it is acknowledged that he was the synthesizer of his time, just as the musical genius of Bach enabled him to bring together the lore of his age that has never been surpassed. Homer's birthplace and date were always matters of dispute. No less than seven cities claimed this ancient bard as a citizen. The epics of Homer, particularly the Iliad, have been celebrated as the first literary works of Western Civilization as well as a document of the history of man.

Virgil, the first Latin poet, added to the Homeric corpus with his poem, Aeneid that was based on Homer's Aeneas. It is in the Latin Aeneid that the sweeping adventures and the glories of the Trojan War come alive through its hero Aeneas. Aeneas was chosen by Jupiter to found a new race, which was to become the Romans.

Virgil begins the Aeneid with "Arma verumque cano" (I sing of arms and a man). Aeneas is everyman speaking for all men of all times, singing of arms, heroes and gods, and the divinity that is the birthright of mankind. Those words still ring clear in my ears from my high school Latin class. My father piqued my interest and curiosity as he filled in the unexplained lines of my translation. I learned first-hand about Virgil's tribute to the Ethiopians who had given aid to Rome's ancestors in the Trojan War. Aside from the mythological elements in the Iliad, Virgil's sources were historical. Graves asserted: The Trojan War is historical, and whatever the immediate cause may have been it was a trade war. Troy controlled the valuable Black sea trade in gold, silver, iron, cinnabar, ship's timber, dried fish, oil and Chinese jade.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS....................vii
List of Illustrations....................ix
PREFACE....................xi
1. AFROCENTRISM AND NUBIAN SCHOLARSHIP....................5
2. ETHIOPIA (NUBIA) AND THE GREAT TRADITIONS....................10
3. NUBIAN ODYSSEY AND CONSERVATION....................20
4. CAMPAIGNS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY....................27
5. NUBIAN TEMPLES AND ROYAL TOMBS: ANCIENT ROOTS OF THE NILE....................38
6. NUBIA AND THE NURTURING NILE....................46
7. INVISIBLE NUBIANS MADE VISIBLE....................61
8. EGYPTIAN CHRONOLOGY....................70
9. NUBIAN CHRONOLOGY....................82
10. CONCEPTS OF GODSHIP AND KINGSHIP....................99
11. GODSHIP: ORIGINS OF THE KINGDOM OF KUSH....................113
12. GODSHIP: THE ETHIOPIAN DYNASTY....................124
13. KINGSHIP: MEROITIC PHASE - THE LONG DENOUEMENT....................136
15. THE RESTORATION OF PHARAONIC GREATNESS....................170
16. THE LEGACY OF THE KINGDOMS OF KUSH....................182
BIBLIOGRAPHY....................197
ENDNOTES....................201
INDEX....................207