Enrichment: Nubia and the Conquest of Egypt

Name ______Class ______Date ______Enrichment: Nubia and the Conquest of Egypt

Directions Read the selection below. Then answer the questions that follow.

Nubian kings already ruled northern Nubia at the time of the earliest Egyptian records around 3000 b.c. The Egyptians of the time called Nubia “Ta Sety,” or the “Land of the Bows,” because Nubian bowmen were famous in the region. In about 1950 b.c., Egypt conquered Nubia (or Kush, as Egyptians of the time called it). In the years that followed, Nubia took on many aspects of Egyptian culture, including the worship of many of the same gods and burial of kings in pyramids.

By the 800s b.c., Egypt had become disunited, with foreign rulers in the north. The southern Egyptians asked Nubia for protection. About 750 b.c., the Nubian leader Piye invaded northern Egypt. The entire country was united again, from the capital city Meroë, in Kush, to the Mediterranean Sea. Kushite leaders ruled for the next 100 years. Unlike many leaders who took over foreign lands, Piye did not kill or otherwise punish those he had conquered. Instead, he kept them on to run the government and military forces. He and the men who ruled after him became the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty of Egypt. In about 650 b.c., the Kushites were pushed out of Egypt by the army of the Assyrian empire. Kush remained a powerful kingdom to the south of Egypt for hundreds of years.

1. What did the Egyptians call Nubia when it was under Egyptian rule?

2. Which Nubian ruler reunited Egypt?

3. Activity Write and illustrate a page from a children’s book about Nubia, the life of Piye, or the Nubian conquest of Egypt.

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