The Kushite Period

The Kushite Period, roughly 1070 BCE to 350 CE, refers to the long history of the Kingdom of Kush, centered in Nubia along the Nile south of Egypt, across its successive Napatan and later Meroitic phases, a civilization that both absorbed deep Egyptian cultural influence and, for a remarkable stretch of the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, conquered and ruled Egypt itself as its Twenty-Fifth Dynasty of "Black Pharaohs," including rulers such as Piye and Taharqa, who built pyramids of their own at Napata and El-Kurru on a smaller but more numerous scale than their Egyptian predecessors. Expelled from Egypt by Assyrian invasion in the seventh century BCE, Kush retreated to Nubia and later relocated its capital further south to Meroe, developing its own indigenous Meroitic script, still only partially deciphered today, and building an economy based on iron smelting substantial enough that Meroe has sometimes been called an ancient "Birmingham of Africa." Kush maintained trade and diplomatic contact, and periodic conflict, with Ptolemaic and then Roman Egypt for centuries. The kingdom declined and was likely conquered by the rising Kingdom of Aksum around 350 CE.