Kushite Conquest of Egypt

Beginning in the 730s and 720s BCE, the kings of the Kingdom of Kush, based at Napata in what is now Sudan, extended their rule northward into a politically fragmented Egypt, with King Piye completing the conquest around 727 BCE after a campaign recorded in detail on his own victory stele, and King Shabaka consolidating full control of Egypt by around 720 to 707 BCE. The Kushite kings, who had long revered Egyptian religious traditions, ruled as Egypt's Twenty-fifth Dynasty, presenting themselves as restorers of traditional Egyptian religious and cultural practice after a period of disunity, and sponsored significant temple building and restoration throughout Egypt, including at Karnak. Kushite rule over Egypt ended after a series of Assyrian invasions beginning in 674 BCE, culminating in the sack of Thebes, then the capital, in 663 BCE, after which the last Twenty-fifth Dynasty pharaoh, Tantamani, withdrew permanently to Nubia, though the Kushite kingdom itself endured for another thousand years, later centered at Meroe.