747–656 BCE: (The 25th Dynasty and Cultural Encounter Between Kush and Egypt — Two Important Recent Sources on the History of Cultural Encounter Between the …

747–656 BCE: (The 25th Dynasty and Cultural Encounter Between Kush and Egypt — Two Important Recent Sources on the History of Cultural Encounter Between the Kushite 25th Dynasty Rulers and Egypt Being Gordon’s Work on the Cultural Identity of the 25th Dynasty Rulers in Context and Pope’s Study of the Double Kingdom Under Taharqo, the Kushite Pharaohs Not Simply Conquering Egypt but Engaging in a Complex Process of Cultural Negotiation Between Their Nubian Heritage and Egyptian Royal Traditions, the 25th Dynasty Representing Not a Foreign Conquest but a Reunion of the Two Halves of the Nile Valley Civilization That Had Shared Cultural Roots Since the Fifth Millennium BCE): Two important recent sources on the history of cultural encounter between the Kushite rulers and Egypt are Gordon’s work on the cultural identity of the 25th Dynasty rulers in context and Pope’s study of *The Double Kingdom under Taharqo*. The 25th Dynasty (roughly 747–656 BCE) represents one of the most consequential episodes of cultural encounter in African antiquity — and one of the most misrepresented in conventional historiography. The standard narrative treats the Kushite conquest of Egypt as a foreign invasion, as if Nubia and Egypt were separate civilizations that happened to share a river. But as Ehret has demonstrated throughout this book, the cultural traffic between the Middle Nile and Lower Egypt flowed northward for millennia before the first pharaoh. The sacral kingship that the Kushite pharaohs brought to Memphis was not a Nubian imposition on Egyptian tradition. It was a homecoming — the return to Egypt of political and religious institutions that had originated in the lands south of Egypt and flowed northward into the Nile Valley during the fifth and fourth millennia BCE. Taharqo and his predecessors were not foreign conquerors ruling an alien civilization. They were the inheritors of the older, deeper stratum of Nile Valley culture reasserting its claims over a kingdom that had always been, at its cultural foundations, African.