Kush in 218 B.C.

Kush — c. 218 BC · The Meroitic Kingdom of the Nile.

The Kingdom of Kush — the great Nubian civilisation of the middle Nile, in its Meroitic age. Heir to a thousand years of pharaonic culture and to the 25th Dynasty that once ruled Egypt, Kush in 218 BC is governed from the southern capital of Meroë, a city of iron and gold ringed by steep royal pyramids, while the holy mountain of Gebel Barkal at Napata remains the seat of Amun and the ground of kingship. Rich in gold, iron, ivory and ebony, and astride the Nile trade between inner Africa and the Mediterranean, the kingdom faces Ptolemaic Egypt across the cataracts of Lower Nubia.

South of Egypt, beyond the rapids the ancients reckoned the gates of the inhabited world, lies Kush — to the Greeks "Aithiopia," the land beneath the burning sun. In 218 BC its kings rule from Meroë, deep in the grasslands of the southern Nile, where furnaces smelt iron and the desert yields gold, and where each king in his turn is laid beneath a sharp-sided pyramid. To the north the old capital of Napata still holds the great sanctuary of Amun beneath Gebel Barkal, the Pure Mountain, from which the kings draw their right to reign. Here too rule the formidable royal mothers, the queens whom later writers would call Kandake. At the cataracts the kingdom touches Ptolemaic Egypt; between them stretches the gold-bearing corridor of Lower Nubia — for now a frontier of trade and rivalry rather than of war.