Monday, November 21, 2005

Nubia's Black Pharaohs

The full article is available only to Discover subscribers, but the following teaser appars on their article (to see the full teaser click on the link above).:"Striding toward an excavation near the base of the pinnacle, archaeologist Tim Kendall pauses momentarily to admire what he calls the 'little mountain with big secrets.' Thousands of years ago, Jebel Barkal and Napata, the town that grew up around it, served as the spiritual center of ancient Nubia, one of Africa's earliest civilizations. The mountain was also considered a holy site by neighboring Egypt, whose pharaohs plundered and tyrannized Nubia for 400 years. But in the eighth century B.C., Nubia turned the tables on its former colonizers. Its armies marched 700 miles north from Jebel Barkal to Thebes, the spiritual capital of Egypt. There the Nubian king Piye became the first of a succession of five 'black pharaohs' who ruled Egypt for six decades with the blessing of the Egyptian priesthood. What happened? asks Kendall. How did the Nubians, overrun by Egypt for centuries, crush their colonizers? And why did the priests of Thebes decide the black pharaohs had a mandate from heaven? Kendall has been searching for those answers for 20 years".

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