Nubian kings once conquered Egypt and ruled it as pharaohs
Egypt usually plays the conqueror in ancient history, but in the eighth century BC the Nubian Kingdom of Kush reversed the roles. Under King Piye it took over Egypt and ruled as the 25th Dynasty. Nubia, the Nile corridor south of Aswan, had already hosted one of Africa's earliest civilisations for a thousand years.
Nubia stretches along the Nile from the First Cataract, just south of Aswan, to the meeting of the Blue and White Niles near Khartoum. Its first great culture, Kerma, flourished from around 2500 BC until about 1500 BC, when the New Kingdom pharaoh Thutmose I conquered it. Egyptian rulers then held much of the region for roughly four hundred years before power swung the other way and Kush became the dominant Nubian state.
A gold amulet shaped like a ram's head, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, comes from that Kushite period of Egyptian history, dated to about 721 to 664 BCE and weighing 65 grams. Later the current reversed again. Between the 3rd century BC and the 3rd century AD, Egypt under Greek and then Roman rule annexed northern Nubia, a strip classical writers called the Dodekaschoinos. The small sandstone Temple of Dendur, finished by 10 CE under Augustus, stood there until Egypt gave it to the United States in 1965; it went to the Met two years later.
Kush fell in the 4th century AD after an invasion from Aksum, and three Christian kingdoms rose in its place: Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia. The last two lasted about a thousand years. Their decline led to Nubia being divided in the 16th century, the north taken by the Ottomans and the south by the Sennar sultanate, and to rapid conversion to Islam and partial adoption of Arabic. The Khedivate of Egypt reunited the region in the 19th century; today the border between Egypt and Sudan runs through it.
Ancient Nubians are credited with early use of antibiotics and with geometry that underpinned the first sun clocks, alongside trigonometric methods comparable to Egypt's. Studying them draws on archaeology, history and philology together, a field known as Nubiology.
Source: Nubia
