Kingdom of Kush

State · 1,000 BCE – 346 CE · at its largest around 700 BCE

Nubian kingdom on the middle Nile, ruled from Napata and later Meroë, whose kings conquered Egypt as its 25th Dynasty in the 8th century BCE.

In the guided tours

Great empires of Africa: Three thousand years of African kingdoms, trading cities and empires, from Kush and Aksum to Mali, Great Zimbabwe and Ethiopia.

On its lands while it lasted

Thebes (3,200–801 BCE): Capital of Middle Kingdom of Egypt (2000 BCE–1782 BCE), New Kingdom of Egypt (1500 BCE–801 BCE).
Hebron (c. 1,000 BCE): Capital of Kingdom of Israel (1000 BCE–930 BCE).
Napata (c. 1,000 BCE – c. 346 CE): Capital of Kingdom of Kush (1000 BCE–346).
Mesha Stele (c. 840 BCE): Basalt stone inscribed by King Mesha of Moab recording his revolt against Israel; found at Dhiban in 1868, it is one of the earliest extra-biblical references to Israel and now stands in the Louvre.
Kushite conquest of Egypt (c. 727 BCE): The Kushite king Piye marched north from Napata and subdued the rulers of Egypt, establishing the Twenty-fifth (Nubian) Dynasty.
Alexandria (331 BCE): Founded by Alexander the Great on Egypt's Mediterranean coast, it became the capital of Ptolemaic Egypt and a leading centre of Hellenistic learning.
Petra (c. 312 BCE): The rock-cut capital of the Nabataean kingdom in southern Jordan, famous for tombs and temples carved into sandstone cliffs such as Al-Khazneh.
Euclid's Elements (c. 300 BCE): Euclid of Alexandria compiled the Elements, a 13-book treatise on geometry and number theory that remained the standard mathematics textbook for over two thousand years.
Pyramids of Meroë (c. 300 BCE): About 200 steep-sided pyramids built as royal tombs for the rulers of the Kushite kingdom of Meroë in Nubia.
Library of Alexandria (c. 285 BCE): Founded under the early Ptolemies, it became the most famous library of the ancient world and a centre of scholarship for the whole Mediterranean.
Lighthouse of Alexandria (c. 280 BCE): Built on the island of Pharos under the Ptolemies, it was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World; earthquakes had destroyed it by the 14th century.
Eratosthenes measures the Earth (c. 240 BCE): Eratosthenes, head of the Library of Alexandria, estimated Earth's circumference by comparing the angle of the Sun at Alexandria and at Syene.
Cleopatra (69 BCE – 30 BCE): The last active ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, she allied with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony; her death after defeat by Octavian ended the dynasty and Egypt became a Roman province.
Fayum mummy portraits (c. 100 CE): In Roman Egypt, faces painted in wax on wooden panels were bound over the faces of the mummified dead. They are among the few painted portraits to survive from the ancient world, and they look strikingly alive.
Ptolemy's Almagest (c. 150 CE): Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria set out a mathematical model of a geocentric universe in the Almagest, which dominated astronomy for more than 1,400 years.