750 BCE–300 CE: (The Nilo-Saharan Cultural Foundations of the Napata-Meroë Empire — The Heartlands and Most of the Peoples of This Long-Lived Empire Belongin…

750 BCE–300 CE: (The Nilo-Saharan Cultural Foundations of the Napata-Meroë Empire — The Heartlands and Most of the Peoples of This Long-Lived Empire Belonging to the Ancient Nilo-Saharan Cultural World with Its Religious Belief in a Single Divinity, This Historical Background Bringing into Immediate Question the Whole Array of Past Assumptions by Historians About the Cultural and Religious Relations of Ancient Kush to Egypt, Earlier Western Scholarship Having Tended Simplistically to View the Napatan and Meroitic Rulers and Peoples as Culturally Backward Imitators of Egypt): The heartlands and most of the peoples of this long-lived empire belonged to the ancient Nilo-Saharan cultural world, with its religious belief in a single Divinity. Taking that historical background into account brings into immediate question the whole array of past assumptions by historians about the cultural and religious relations of ancient Kush to Egypt. Earlier Western scholarship tended simplistically to view the Napatan and Meroitic rulers and peoples as culturally backward imitators of Egypt — shared elements of religious observance interpreted as adoptions by those “backward” rulers and their peoples of ideas from the “civilized” Egyptians. The condescension encoded in this framing is breathtaking. An empire that exceeded Egypt in territorial extent, that governed more people than Egypt ever did, that lasted nine hundred years after losing its Egyptian provinces, that repelled Rome and forced a peace treaty — this empire is described as a “backward imitator” of the civilization it conquered. The logic is circular and revealing: because Western scholarship assumed that cultural influence flows from “civilized” to “backward” peoples, every shared feature between Kush and Egypt was interpreted as Kushite borrowing from Egypt, never the reverse. The Nilo-Saharan religion of Divinity — the monotheistic tradition that Ehret has traced to the ninth millennium BCE — was recast as a derivative of Egyptian religion. The sacral kingship that originated among Nilo-Saharan Aquatic communities was recast as an imitation of pharaonic rule. The cultural traffic was assumed to flow in one direction only, from north to south, from “civilized” to “backward,” and no evidence was permitted to complicate this assumption.