Ancient Egypt is so famous that it can hide its neighbors. South of Egypt, along the Nile in what is now Sudan, lay Nubia, home to a series of kingdoms that traded with Egypt, fought it, were conquered by it, and once conquered it in turn. Farther southeast, in the highlands of modern Ethiopia and Eritrea, rose Aksum, a trading power that a Persian writer of the third century counted among the four great kingdoms of the world, alongside Rome, Persia and China.

Kerma, the first kingdom of Kush

The Egyptians called the land to their south Kush. Kerma, the first major Kushite kingdom, flourished from about 2500 to 1500 BC near the Nile's Third Cataract. Its capital had a towering mudbrick temple, and its royal burials held hundreds of sacrificed attendants and cattle skulls, signs of a wealthy, cattle-keeping monarchy. Kerma was strong enough to raid Egypt; around 1500 BC Egypt's New Kingdom pharaohs struck back, conquered Nubia and ruled it for about five centuries, building temples and drawing gold from its mines.

Napata and the Kushite pharaohs

As Egyptian power faded, a new Kushite kingdom grew around Napata, beneath the sacred mountain of Jebel Barkal. Its kings worshiped the Egyptian god Amun and saw themselves as guardians of Egyptian tradition. In the late eighth century BC King Piye marched north and took control of a divided Egypt. Kushite kings then ruled Egypt as its pharaohs, the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, until the Assyrians drove them out by 656 BC.

Meroe

Kush's center later shifted south to Meroe, where royal burials moved by around 300 BC. Meroe sat in good grazing and farming country and near the Red Sea routes, and excavations show large-scale iron smelting there. Meroe's people wrote in hieroglyphs and in a script of their own. Scholars can sound out Meroitic writing, but the language it records is still mostly not understood, so much of what Kushites wrote about themselves stays closed to us.

Kushite rulers were buried under steep pyramids. Nubia has more pyramids than Egypt, though most are smaller, with sharper angles. Royal women held real power. The title kandake, which became "Candace" in Greek and appears in the New Testament, marked queens and queen mothers, some of whom ruled in their own right. Around 25 BC the kandake Amanirenas led Kushite forces against Roman Egypt. After years of fighting and negotiation, the peace Kush made with Augustus dropped Rome's demand for tribute, an unusually favorable deal with the empire at its height. Meroe declined in the fourth century AD as trade shifted toward Aksum.

Aksum

Aksum rose in the first centuries AD on the northern Ethiopian plateau, exporting ivory, gold and incense through its Red Sea port of Adulis to the Roman world, Arabia and India. Its rulers raised giant carved stone stelae, the largest over thirty meters tall, as monuments over royal tombs. Aksum struck its own coins in gold, silver and bronze, from the late third century AD, which placed it among very few states of its age to issue gold coinage.

King Ezana, who ruled in the fourth century, left inscriptions in Ge'ez, Greek and South Arabian. A Syrian Christian named Frumentius, captured as a youth and raised at court, helped bring him to Christianity around the 330s. The coins record the change: under Ezana the cross replaced the pagan crescent and disc on Aksum's coins. Ethiopia thus became one of the oldest Christian states in the world. Aksum later sheltered early followers of Muhammad fleeing persecution in Mecca, a story covered in more detail elsewhere. Its power faded from the seventh century as Red Sea trade changed hands, but its church, script and memory carried on. Under the later Zagwe kings, the churches of Lalibela were carved downward into solid rock.

Christian Nubia

In the sixth century the Nubian kingdoms along the Nile also became Christian. When Arab armies from Egypt failed to conquer them, the Baqt was a treaty between the Nubian kingdom of Makuria and Arab-ruled Egypt, agreed in 652, that set up a regular exchange of goods, including enslaved people, and kept the peace for some six centuries, one of the longest-lasting treaties in history.

Worked example: the head under the steps

The Greek geographer Strabo, writing for a Roman audience, describes how Kushite forces attacked Roman Egypt around 25 BC, sacked the frontier town of Aswan and carried off statues of Augustus. A Roman army then marched south, sacked Napata and, Strabo implies, taught Kush a lesson. In 1910 the archaeologist John Garstang, digging at Meroe, found a fine bronze head of Augustus buried beneath the steps of a temple that celebrated victory. Anyone who climbed those steps walked over the emperor's face.

Each source tells part of the story. Strabo shows the Roman view, eager to stress punishment. The buried head shows the Kushite view, a trophy turned into a permanent humiliation of the enemy. The peace terms, which spared Kush any tribute, suggest the war ended closer to a draw than Strabo admits. Reading the written account against the object lets a historian hear a side that left no words we can yet read.