Captivating History

The Kingdom of Kush was completely forgotten once it met its end. The stories of its might didn’t survive in the cultures of its successor kingdoms, possibly because Christianization soon followed, which required the people of the Nubian region to turn toward the east and the myths of the Christian messiah. There was no more room for the divine rulers, Amun and Re, or a place for their sons, the kings of Kush. The kingdom continued to exist in the stories of some classical writers, but it was often considered as nothing more than a distant, probably even imaginary, kingdom, where the uncivilized savages lived.

With the renewed interest in the classical arts of Greece and Rome, the Renaissance rediscovered the existence of Kush. Still, it was not explored until Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798. Even then, it was seen as a part of Egyptian culture. The discoveries made by the 18th- and 19th-century explorers proved there were, in fact, two separate cultures. However, this explanation was greatly influenced by Darwinism. Scholars presented the entirety of Africa as a place where civilized white men ruled over the “uncivilized negroes.” Kush was no exception to them, and the general opinion was that Egypt ruled over the uncivilized Kushites. Even the rule of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty was observed as nothing more than the less fortunate Kushites imitating the superior Egyptians.

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99 Cent Bargain Book on September 8, 2020