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EPILOGUE 145 lthough no one realized it at the time, the disaster of 671 effectually terminated Kushite aspirations to control the entire Nile Valley to the Mediterranean. Two further Assyrian invasions in 666 and 663 b.c. drove home the point that Kushite arms could not sustain the claim to hegemony over Egypt which the kings of Napata asserted. And even in the face of the Assyrians’ brutality and ineptitude (which brought about their own retreat from Africa before 660 b.c.), Assyria’s geopolitical stance towards Kush was shared by most Egyptians. The regents Assyria designated in Egypt, Necho of Saïs and his son and successor Psamtek, both embraced Assyrian hostility towards the Napatan regime and perpetuated it long after Assyrian troops had been withdrawn. Taharqa and his successor, Tanwetamani, were to return, to be sure; but the sudden appearance of Assyrian forces had sent them scurrying southwards without risking battle. Thebes, where they temporarily holed up, was far more sympathetic to Kush than Middle and Lower Egypt, and perhaps here they thought a stand might be made. The swiftness of the Assyrian advance, however, terri~ed the southerners, and by the time Ashurbanipal’s advanced guard entered the southern city, the army of Napata had retreated to its homeland. Despite pretentious claims echoing in the royal titulary and ideology for centuries in the future, the Kushites were never again to occupy Egypt. The new regime in Egypt centered upon Saïs in the Delta. Because it derived its dubious authority through appointment by the king of Assyria, Saïs had to establish its legitimacy by force. As Assyria grew weaker thanks to civil war and a prolonged con_ict in Elam, Psamtek I (664–610 b.c.) declared independence and sought to bolster his claim through the recruitment of mercenaries from Lydia, Ionia, and the Levant. Now he A could face the south with a marginal superiority in personnel and equipment . By the close of the seventh century the Egyptians were taking active steps once and for all to neutralize the surviving Twenty-~fth Dynasty. A garrison of Greek mercenaries was ensconced at Aswan before 600 b.c., and a _eet of warships assembled. Necho II led a _otilla of two dozen vessels southward about 598 b.c., ostensibly against the Kushites, and in 593 Psamtek II dispatched an even larger force comprising Egyptian, Greek, Judaean, and Aramaean contingents. While the frail king remained in the comparative safety of Aswan, his troops proceeded southwards led by Generals Potasimto and Ahmose, the latter of whom had enjoyed some limited military success in Asia. The battle was joined somewhere north of Dongola, and the Egyptians emerged victorious. The Kushites sustained thousands of casualties and could only watch as Napata and surrounding towns went up in _ames. Anlamani, the Kushite king, disappeared, and for more than a century our sources virtually cease. The events of 593 made Egypt secure and forever drove a geographical wedge between it and the Sudan: any hope the Twenty-~fth Dynasty may have enjoyed of once again returning to the Lower Nile and Delta perished . Although Kushite kings continued to be buried in pyramids according to Egyptian custom up to the early Christian era and to employ Egyptian art and architectural forms even longer, these cultural manifestations became increasingly bastardized and degenerate. Probably before the middle of the sixth century b.c. the royal family had abandoned Napata as a residence, although royal burials continued at Nuri until about 300 b.c. By the ~fth century the descendants of the Twenty-~fth Dynasty had turned Meroe, two hundred kilometers north of modern Khartum, into their capital, and there they survived largely cut off from the north, a culture gone to seed in terms of its Egyptian roots. As a hybrid exponent, however, of African themes in Egyptian forms it thrived for eight centuries. Finally, about a.d. 320, the sixty-~rst successor of Tanwetamani disappeared, and the state was overwhelmed by the rising kingdom of Axum in Ethiopia.1 But historical memory had reserved for Kush an ironic twist of misinterpretation . In later times Nubia and Kush drifted into a remote and mythic position in the collective memory of the Mediterranean peoples. “Ethiopia” became an archetype of human society in its pristine innocence , divinely created and still close to the gods. The retention in the Sudan of forms of ancient Egyptian culture long after they had disappeared in Egypt proper deceived the observer into wrongly concluding...

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