The Twenty-fifth Dynasty was remarkable, as it represented a reversal of the dynamics of millennia. Generally, the Egyptians had hitherto dominated Nubia (known as Kush in ancient times), either directly or indirectly, culminating in the kingdom being absorbed into the Egyptian state as a vice-royalty during the New Kingdom. But in the middle of the 8th century BC, Kushite kings took over southern Egypt, and then became overlords of a new twin kingdom. Their rule ended only with a series of Assyrian invasions, forcing them to withdraw back to the Kushite heartland of Upper Nubia (modern northern Sudan) during the 660s BC.
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As with all other rulers of ancient Egypt, the demise of paganism, and the concomitant loss of understanding of hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic texts at the end of the 4th century AD, meant that for the next millennium-and- a-half, all available information about the Twenty-fifth Dynasty came from Classical and Biblical sources. Both provided much data, the former in the shape of the accounts of Herodotus and Manetho. The Old Testament mentions the Kushites in the context of the conflict between Assyria and Judah around the end of the 8th century BC, particularly with reference to the failure of the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem in 701 BC. However, while Herodotus gave a succession, Sabacos-Anysis–Sethos, Manetho’s list ran Sabacôn–Sebichôs–Tar(a)cus. This would cause much puzzlement for early Egyptologists.
The dynasty’s homeland of Nubia (or ‘Ethiopia’ as it was generally referred to down to the 19th century) was regarded by a number of the Classical authors as a source for the civilisation of Egypt. Indeed, when the first travellers penetrated south of the First Cataract of the Nile in the early 19th century AD, they perceived the monuments they saw there to be cruder than those in Egypt itself, evidence of their exceptional age. Thus, George Waddington and Barnard Hanbury, who visited Gebel Barkal and its environs in 1820, felt that Taharqa’s temple B300 (actually dating to the 7th century BC) was ‘older than any of the temples of Egypt, or even Nubia’.
