CHAPTER SIX

THE KINGDOM OF KUSH BETWEEN THE WITHDRAWAL FROM EGYPT AND THE END OF THE "NAPATAN" DYNASTY (FROM 656 TO THE MID-3RD CENT. BC)

"Then this god said to His Majesty, 'You shall give me the lands that were taken from me. ,,1

1. THE SOURCES

1.1. Textual evidence From the twenty-nine royal documents in hieroglyphic Egyptian listed in Table A (Ch. II.l.l.l ), seventeen date from the period discussed in this chapter. The monumental inscriptions of Anlamani, Aspelta, Irike­ Amannote, Harsiyotef and Nastasefi present valuable information on concepts of the myth of the state and the developments in the legiti­ mation process. They were analysed from these particular aspects as well as from the viewpoint of the structure of Kushite government in earlier chapters in this book (Ch. V.3-5). As documents of political and cultural history, they will be discussed in this chapter, together with the rest of the royal inscriptions preserved from this period, which are, however, fragmentary or pertain to special issues as building or restora­ tion and economic management of temples. Besides monumental royal documents, there are hieroglyphic texts connected to temple cults and mortuary religion from this period. These will be touched upon in Ch. VI.3.2. The historical evidence is complemented with hieroglyphic Egyptian and Greek documents relating to the Nubian campaign of Psamtik II in 593 BC (Ch. VI.2.1-2), further with Herodotus' remarks on Nubian history and culture (c£ Ch. II.l.2.2) and a number of remarks of varying historical value in works of Greek and Latin

1 Irike-Amannote inscription, Kawa IX, line 60, FHNII No. 71 (trans!. R.H. Pierce). FROM 656 TO THE MID-3RD CENTURY BC 343 authors. They will be quoted in the following on the basis of the crit­ ical analyses presented in the Fontes Historiae Nubiorum. 2 On the whole, the evidence is unevenly distributed in time and space. It can, howev­ er, be complemented, on the one hand, with the evidence of the royal titularies (Ch. V.2.2) and, on the other, with the settlement historical and archaeological evidence (Ch. Vl.l.2-3). The royal documents of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty rulers and their 7th and early 6th century BC successors Anlamani and Aspelta were the products of learned priests educated and active in archives attached to the principal Amun temples. The texts composed by them reveal the close connections of these archives as institutions with the court. The wide range of quotations from classical Egyptian literary texts3 on the one hand, and from earlier Kushite royal documents, on the other, found in these inscriptions indicate the initiative of the archives, to put together "libraries" of political and cultural identity.4 The quotations also reveal that the royal documents composed in the archives and "exhibited" (Ch. V.5.1.5) in the temples were regarded conceptually as well as stylistically as normative text collections. The royal inscriptions of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty and the early Napatan period are historical insofar as the events recorded in them (inthronisation, temple foundation, donations, miraculous inundation etc.) are narrated in a logical chronological order and also fixed in time with one or two regnal year+season+month+day datings. All datings derive from records kept in the temples and were connected to the fes­ tivals celebrated and rites performed in an actual sanctuary. Charac­ teristically, Piye's Great Triumphal Stela mentions only the (allusive) dates of certain festivals but does not present any exact dates in con­ nection with the campaign5 and the whole of the stela text is dated as a royal decree with the conceptually significant date "first month of the season of Inundation", when the decree was issued. Similarly, Ta­ harqo's retrospective descriptions of events in his life before his ascent to the throne, or the references made six years later to events of his

2 FHNI, II. 3 Grima! 1980; 1981 a. For the notion "classical" see J. Assmann: Gibt es eine 'Klassik' in der agyptischen Literaturgeschichte? ZDGM Suppl. 6 (1985) 35-52. 4 Manuelian 1994 2ff., 409 and Eyre 1996 428f. suggest that the quotations of Egyptian literature in Kushite royal inscriptions were intended to assert "the commu­ nity, coherence and identity of the ruling class as 'Egyptian'", disregarding the fact that the quotations appear in the context of Kushite and Kushiticized Egyptian concepts, see Ch. V passim. 5 Grima! 1981 a 295.