23–22 BCE: (The Meroitic Empire Repels Rome — The Military Forces of the Meroitic Empire Successfully Turning Back a Roman Incursion in 23 BCE, Following Up …

23–22 BCE: (The Meroitic Empire Repels Rome — The Military Forces of the Meroitic Empire Successfully Turning Back a Roman Incursion in 23 BCE, Following Up with Devastating Punitive Raids into Southern Egypt That Led to a Peace Treaty with the Romans the Next Year, the Powerful Women Co-Rulers — the Kandakes — Becoming Fabled Figures in the Folklore of the Eastern Roman Empire, Mentioned in the Bible’s New Testament in Chapter 8 of the Book of Acts): The military forces of the Meroitic Empire successfully turned back a Roman incursion in 23 BCE, following up with devastating punitive raids into southern Egypt that led to a peace treaty with the Romans the next year. The powerful women co-rulers, the Kandakes, became fabled figures in the folklore of the eastern Roman Empire, mentioned in the Bible’s New Testament in chapter 8 of the Book of Acts. Rome — the empire that conquered Gaul, Iberia, Greece, Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt, and North Africa — was turned back by the Meroitic Empire and forced to sue for peace. The legions that had broken every army from the Rhine to the Euphrates were defeated, and then punished, by a Nilo-Saharan-speaking African state ruled in part by women. The Kandakes — the powerful women co-rulers whose title the Greeks garbled into “Candace” and mistook for a personal name — became legendary in the Mediterranean world precisely because they embodied something the Romans could not quite comprehend: female military and political authority operating at the highest level of state power. Acts 8:27 records an Ethiopian eunuch serving as treasurer to “Candace, queen of the Ethiopians” — a casual biblical reference to an institution of female governance that had been operating in the Nile valley for centuries. The Kandakes were not anomalies. They were the institutional expression of a cultural tradition — the Nilo-Saharan tradition of female agency — that Ehret has traced from the sororal gatekeeping of proto-Savanna Bantu societies to the queen mothers of West African kingdoms. The Meroitic Kandake is the apotheosis of that tradition: a woman who co-ruled an empire, commanded armies, repelled Rome, and was remembered in the sacred text of the civilization that Rome bequeathed to the world.