 I'd like to welcome our audience back to the new perspectives on ancient Nubia series. And before I introduce today's speaker, I would like to give the floor to Sam Fisteri, who is our collections manager. Thank you, Aaron. We'd like to begin by acknowledging that Berkeley, California is on the territory of the Huchun, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chichenyo Alone. We respect the land and the people who have stewarded it through many generations. And we honor their elders, both past and present. There's no question that our society is poised at a moment of change. We see it when fellow Americans are unjustly detained, when our citizens are wrongly harmed, and when our communities are in the streets for months on end protesting just in order to be heard. The bottom museum of biblical archaeology and the Archaeological Research Facility, ARF at University of California, Berkeley, acknowledge the pain and outrage of our community members who bear the weight of existing in a society designed to work against them and feel the devastation most keenly. Here at the museum and at ARF, we've been moved by the courage of those most deeply affected and the tenacity of those protesting for change. The bottom museum and ARF stand in solidarity with the African-American community and we join your calls for justice. Collectively and individually, our staff condemns police brutality and the systematic racism that has long been enacted against the black community and other communities of color. It has persisted for too long and it has resulted in the unjust and premature ending of lives. So let us say their names. Rihanna Taylor, Tony McDade, Amar Dabri, George Floyd, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, and so many others. Let us as organizations be perfectly clear. Black lives matter. We lend our thoughts and actions to those who every day actively work to make this statement a living, breathing ideal and to those who continually live in the reality of racial injustice. Likewise, we lend our expertise to the cause by incorporating relevant material into our exhibits, programming, and curriculum. We know very well that this moment has been a long time coming and we are in the fight for equality, justice, and accountability. Through this lecture series, we aim to raise awareness of ancient Nubia, a vibrant region in Northeast Africa with a rich archeological and historical legacy. Learning about the ancient peoples of Nubia is one way to de-center the usual academic focus on Egypt and biblical and classical lands in order to reconceptualize the past. Decolonizing our views of the past as through the research presented in the New Perspectives on Ancient Nubia series, we hope will lead to a more just and equitable future. Thank you very much, Sam. Well, it's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Jeremy Pope, who is Associate Professor of History at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He has excavated at Jevil Barcol in Sudan and the Karnak Temple in Egypt. In 2014, he published a book-length study of domestic governance during Egypt's 25th dynasty entitled The Devil Kingdom Under Terhaco, Studies in the History of Kush in Egypt, 690 to 664 BC. That same year, he also published an analysis of Kushite foreign policy in the Near East, entitled Beyond the Broken Read, Kushite Intervention and the Limits of Listoir and Venomente that appeared in Isaac Kalimi and Seth Richardson's edited volume, Sennacher about the Gates of Jerusalem, Story, History and Historiography. Pope's interest in Kushite foreign policy was pursued further in a chapter entitled, Sennacher's Departure in the Principle of Laplace that appeared last year in Alice Bellas' edited volume, Jerusalem's Survival, Sennacher's Departure and the Kushite Role in 701 BCE. His lecture today previews some research that he is conducting for another study that will focus upon warfare during the 25th dynasty. Dr. Pope's presentation today is entitled, Like the Coming of the Winds, Kushite Pharaohs and their Armies in the Near East. So Dr. Pope, welcome and the floor is yours. Thank you for that introduction. It's a pleasure to be here, even if only virtually. Let me go ahead and share the screen. There we go. It'll take a second to come up completely. So during the first quarter of the 7th century BC, a Kushite king of Egypt took his soldiers out for an evening run. His name was Taharco and he was so pleased with the soldier's performance that he commissioned this hieroglyphic inscription to commemorate the event. Toward the end of today's lecture, we will return to this stela to examine the details of the evening run that it describes. But right now, I wanna draw your attention to the author's poetic imagery. He wrote of the troops arrival that it was like the coming of the winds. This does not seem to have been part of the stock phraseology of Egyptian royal inscriptions. But his chosen simile would likely have resonated with the Kushite and Egyptian soldiers themselves. Powerful winds were a recurrent feature of life in ancient Northeast Africa and they continue to be so to this day. Just last year, a massive Habub blew into the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. Anyone who witnessed the coming of that wind can readily attest that winds can be disorienting and arrive with unexpected speed. Like an effective army, a wind can cause a force of men to change course, change plans or even retreat. And the aftermath of a powerful wind is often profound and enduring. So Taharko scribe chose a very apt simile. However, as an historian with the benefit of hindsight, it seems to me that this simile was even more appropriate than the scribe himself intended. Because in addition to being fast, unexpected, disorienting and impactful, winds are frequently also evanescent, leaving just as quickly as they came. The impact of a strong wind often outlives lives its presence, leaving only witness testimony as surviving proof of its role. This too is an apt description of the armies commanded by the Kushite kings during the eighth and seventh centuries BC. When Kushite armies first swept into lower Egypt, they extracted oaths of fealty and then withdrew as quickly as they had come, leaving no permanent military presence there in the Delta. In fact, the Kushite king left Egypt altogether. He had effectively established a new political formation known to historians as the double kingdom of Kush and Egypt. But the ties that bound those two countries together were initially more diplomatic than coercive. Nearly a decade would pass before his royal successor would return, first to upper Egypt and then with a flurry of violence into lower Egypt. Here the Kushite royal house would remain as Egypt's 25th dynasty. But only for the next 50 years, after which the invading Assyrians ultimately forced the Kushites to withdraw from Egyptian soil. The double kingdoms military engagements with the Near East appear to have been even more ephemeral. Attempts to posit a Kushite and Egyptian military garrison at Lakish have been inconclusive. And we know of the double kingdoms military intervention in that region only from Near Eastern sources. In fact, our only truly contemporaneous documentation of the double kingdoms activity abroad comes from the testimony of their enemies, the Neo-Assyrians. For each of the years listed here, the Assyrians claimed to have engaged with the armies of Egypt, often specifying the involvement of troops from Kush. In fact, one of these encounters was set on the plain of Al-Tekka, not far from Lakish and Jerusalem. Yet not a single one of these events or their Near Eastern participants are explicitly mentioned in the entire corpus of surviving Kushite royal inscriptions, whether in Egypt or in Kush during the reigns of the 25th dynasty or those of its descendants. When addressing conflicts in the Near East, the surviving records of the double kingdom provide only bombast, like this scarab, which alludes vaguely to a Kushite victory over enemies who are described only as sand dwellers. The Kushite and Egyptian inscriptions apparent silence on events in the Near East would be less remarkable if the available corpus of records from the 25th dynasty were small or were generally uninformative about military engagements or other historical events and personages. But this is decidedly not the case. The era of Kushite rule in Egypt yields several royal inscriptions and these include some of the most lengthy and detailed accounts of domestic affairs ever to be composed in the ancient Egyptian language. The example that you see here, the great triumphal stele of the Kushite King Pionki was hailed by Egyptologist Miriam Liktaim as the foremost historical document of Egypt's late period. But it does not speak of the double kingdom's engagements with Assyria or Judah. We will return to this text later in the hour to mine it for details about the military's armament and strategy. But it does not provide testimony for those armies' interventions in the Near East. The double kingdom's pictorial record of military action has proven even more evanescent. The loose block that you see here was recently discovered within the temple of Amun at Jabal Barkel near the Kushite city of Napata and the excavator has dated it to the early years of the 25th dynasty. The relief carving shows a welter of feet and one hand reminiscent of new kingdom battle scenes in which the defeated enemy is depicted in a chaotic melee. But the rest of the scene has not survived in large part because the temple itself is in an utterly ruinous condition. It's soft, friable, Nubian sandstone scoured by millennia of blowing winds. As a result, we have from the double kingdom no extensive war scenes. In their absence, military historians instead pour over 19th century hand copies of scenes that have long since disappeared. The scene that you see in triplicate copy here derived from that same Kushite temple of Amun at Jabal Barkel in a context dated to the 25th dynasty. When it was first copied by John Gardner Wilkinson he conjectured that the scene must contain Tirhaka's sculptures of his defeat of the Assyrians. But Tony Spalinger has since critiqued this theory noting that the enemies depicted here are notably lacking the beard of an Assyrian soldier. And their headgear and conspicuous chest rats match better the representations of African enemies in later Kushite art. Hand copies of this Jabal Barkel relief scene can again tell us much about armament during the 25th dynasty. But they do not provide testimony of military action in the Near East. We also lack the private autobiographies of soldiers who serve the double kingdom. For the 25th dynasty, there is nothing comparable to the new kingdom inscription of Amosa son of Abana who regaled visitors to his tomb with tales of his martial exploits. In place of such texts, we must rely instead on the objects found in burials. The burial that you see here derives from a Kushite cemetery at Tumbos. And the array of weapons found alongside the body has been taken to belong to a soldier. I agree with this theory, but it remains just that, a theory. As Derek Gwellsby has observed, weapons have also been found with the tombs of young children, frustrating our attempt to differentiate between soldier and civilian. In fact, it is difficult to determine with confidence the extent to which the double kingdom actually raised a professional standing army as opposed to ad hoc militias. Likely, some combination of the two was marshaled for campaigns abroad, but we have little evidence of the proportions in which they were represented in those campaigns. If we are willing to assume some continuity within the Kushite military over the first millennium BC, then we can reconstruct some details of its weaponry and organization on the basis of later Kushite inscriptions after the 25th dynasty, as well as later Greek descriptions from the likes of Heratis and Strabo. And perhaps even from the detailed reliefs of Kush's Merawitic period, a thousand years later. But with these bodies of evidence, we must be constantly wary of conflation and anachronism. The Greek sources seem to conflate the Kushite soldiers with other peoples of dark complexion, as all were termed Ethiopian in the Greek corpus. The Merawitic reliefs, for their part, contain details like elephants that are simply not attested alongside the armies of the 25th dynasty, as much as a thousand years earlier. Faced with such a fragmentary and lacunus record of the military during the 25th dynasty, it would be tempting to take the records of their enemies as the supreme authority. In the Assyrian inscriptions and reliefs, the double kingdom is derided and consistently depicted as the crushed foe, led away from any battle in chains. There could be no doubt that the Assyrians did inflict repeated defeats upon the double kingdom, including the final and decisive one achieved by Ashurbanipal in the middle of the seventh century BC. And the absence of any Kushite and Egyptian testimony to these events might be construed as avoidance. Yet the Assyrian dismissal of the double kingdom's armies must then be confronted with the views expressed in the Hebrew Bible, and particularly within the book of Nahum, written only decades after Ashurbanipal's ultimate victory. The prophet Nahum recalled the former might of Thebes asserting that Kush and Egypt were her strength and it was limitless. There's also the rather suggestive fact that both the Hebrew Bible and Sennacherib's royal inscriptions report of King Hezekiah seeking an alliance between Judah and the double kingdom. Likewise, Esserhadin's annals reveal that Baal, king of Tyre, put his trust in his friend Taharko, king of Kush, and threw off the yoke of Asher. Attempts to reconcile these conflicting images of the double kingdom would seem to lead to an impasse with each side questioning the veracity of just one subset of the surviving evidence. Was the double kingdom's military a credible threat to the might of Assyria, as suggested by the words of Nahum and the actions of Hezekiah and Baal? Or was the double kingdom that they envisioned as a powerful ally, nothing more than a wishful fantasy, incapable of inflicting any setback upon the Assyrian military machine? I would submit that this debate is a red herring. Just as we possess some reliable evidence that the Assyrians achieved multiple victories against Kush and Egypt, we also possess equally reliable evidence of a different outcome. Take for instance Babylonian Chronicle One, which reports that in the seventh year of Esther Haddon's reign, on the fifth day of the month of Adar, corresponding to 673 BC, the army of Assyria was defeated in Egypt. Was the double kingdom a credible threat to Assyria? On this occasion, apparently so. And consider the source pedigree of this text. It is neither Kushite propaganda, Egyptian propaganda, nor Assyrian propaganda. And it derives from a cultural milieu that owed allegiance to none of these powers. The Chronicle is also devoid of literary flourish. It's reporting as dry, matter of fact, and unembellished. We could hardly ask for a more credible source. Yet this achievement on the part of the double kingdom is nowhere reported in the surviving records of Kush and Egypt. Perhaps our sources are not comprehensive. The available evidence would therefore suggest that the double kingdom could and did inflict at least one setback upon their Assyrian foes. The question of whether the double kingdom was a credible threat seems already to have been answered in 673 BC. And the question of whether Assyria could counter was answered just as clearly in 671, 667, and 663 BC. So rather than debating whether the double kingdom was a credible threat, it would seem more logical then to ask why the forces of Kush and Egypt were successful against Assyria in 673 BC, but unsuccessful in multiple sequels just a few years later. What were the strengths, weaknesses, and priorities of the armies fielded by the double kingdom in the eighth and seventh centuries BC? I propose to explore this question by addressing each of the five criteria that you see here. Manpower, weaponry, armor, transport, and training. After we have examined each of these in detail, we should have a much clearer image of the double kingdom's armies as they took to the battlefield. Now, the first factor, available manpower, can be summarized very quickly. In assessing the earlier military conflicts between Kush and Egypt, scholars have often emphasized the smaller population of Kush. Across the past five millennia, the Nubian Nile south of Egypt has been characterized by a much narrower flood plain, yielding fewer and smaller agricultural settlements. For the Bronze Age, Egyptologist David O'Connor has estimated for the Nubian region a population of roughly 460,000, as compared to 4.5 million for Egypt. And these numbers did not seem likely to have changed radically by the era of the 25th dynasty. Yet, this contrast between Kush and Egypt is not particularly relevant to the double kingdom, because the 25th dynasty had in fact combined much of the population from Kush and Egypt into a single fighting force. As a result, the double kingdom may have had a population of as many as 5 million people from which to draw potential enlistees and conscripts. This may be directly compared with the kingdom of Judah, whose population has been estimated at between 120,000 and 250,000 people. Just a little wonder then that a king of Judah would call upon the double kingdom for military assistance. As a counterweight to mighty Assyria, however, the manpower of the double kingdom would not have measured up. In Assyria, 4.5 million was not the population of the land. It was just the estimated number of people relocated from the conquered provinces into the Assyrian heartland. The size of Assyria's professional army has been estimated at 200,000 men. And Tamash Desho posits that as many as 40,000 Assyrian troops would have been deployed to a battlefield at any one time. The double kingdom's fundamental deficit and manpower is an important starting point for our analysis. In set peace engagements, prioritizing hand-to-hand combat among the infantry, armies of the double kingdom could not expect to achieve much success against the Assyrians. Any setback that they inflicted on the Assyrians in 673 BC is better explained by other factors. On the subject of weaponry, one could easily fill the hour with discussion of the variety of swords, pikes, hatchets, knotted clubs, and antelope horn javelins employed by ancient armies. And the double kingdom is no exception. But I'd like to focus our attention on the two weapons seen in this relief scene from Kush, spears and bows. At about the spears, we need to highlight only one detail. Recent excavations at Tombos in Nubia have revealed that iron was already in use during the 25th dynasty for spearheads, javelins, and harpoon points. This newer metal was, of course, harder than bronze and capable of producing a sharper edge. The example that you see here derives from a tomb that also contained a fawn scarab bearing the name of Shabako, very likely the Kushite king who occupied the throne of Egypt when the double kingdom faced off against Sennacherib's Assyrian army at Al-Tukka in 701 BC. Even so, the numbers of iron weapons found in Egypt and Kush during this period remain small in comparison to the armament of Assyria. And the extent of local iron production is still unclear for the 25th dynasty. There's consequently no reason to assume that the iron spearhead would have conferred any advantage for the double kingdom against its most formidable opponent. In a discussion of specifically Kushite weaponry, the bow deserves the lion's share of our attention. As an artifact of wood, the bow is uniquely representative of the evanescent character of Kushite military force because precious few examples have survived the millennia. The example that you see here is from a tomb at Tombos and it's been reduced to a crumble of termite frass, but it has left an impression in the burial pit whose triple curved outline still extends across nearly a meter. For the ancients, the bow was the symbol of Kush or more precisely, it was the symbol of the larger Nubian region in which the Kushite state was centered. As many in the audience today will already know, this region was designated in Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions as Ta-Seti, conventionally translated as land of the bow. However, this name has presented a host of logical pitfalls for modern interpretation. About 15 years ago, I delivered a lecture at an American museum and during the question and answer session that followed, one of the audience members opined that the armies of Kush must have been hindered by this reliance on the bow because he said, the bow is a primitive weapon. This struck me as an interesting problem for thought. Is the bow, in fact, a primitive weapon? In one sense of the word primitive, the answer is clearly yes. As shown on this palette from pre-Dynastic Egypt of the fourth millennium BC, the bow's utility in the hunt ensured that it would be an early focus of technological development in human societies. Yet this is not the sense of primitive that the audience member was invoking. He did not mean simply that the bow was ancient, but also that it was crude or rudimentary, a disadvantage for the Kushite soldier who relied upon it. Did the ancients regard the bow as a rudimentary weapon? A cursory glance at ancient Egyptian evidence might seem to suggest so. In their inscriptions, the Egyptians frequently referred to the enemy nations that surrounded them as the nine bows, the pajetiyu. And images of these pajet bows were depicted on the pharaoh's sandals so that he could step on them throughout the day. Thus, in a popular lecture series, the Egyptologist Bob Breyer, a pines of the term bowman, and I quote, bowman. That's a sort of negative, negative, negative way to describe foreigners. Certainly, the Egyptians intent was not complimentary, but what precisely was the intended insult? Did they mean to emphasize that the weapon itself was inadequate? This would be a dubious inference because across Egyptian history, the standard hieroglyph representing the Egyptian soldier was a man carrying a bow. If the weapon itself was despised, then why would the Egyptians use it so frequently to represent their own soldiers? Perhaps then, the pejorative connotation of the nine bows and their bowmen was not a critique of foreign weaponry but a foreign bellicosity. Foreigners were perceived as threatening and the bow captured that threat in a single object. If so, then the bow must be taken seriously as an ancient weapon. Here, I would turn your attention to the work of Gad Rousing who authored a monograph on the subject. His comments are instructive, so I will quote them at some length here. Rousing states, modern man, perhaps accustomed to seeing homemade bows in the hands of children, will usually underestimate the bow as a weapon. This is unjustified. The bow and more particularly the composite bow is technically one of the most complicated and most advanced artifacts among those of perishable materials. The bow differs from all other early weapons and being able to store the energy supplied by human muscle, the methods of its manufacture, the use of the various types and their geographical distribution reveal a complicated evolution and illuminate a human activity which presupposes technical reasoning and intelligent evaluation of long experience. Indeed, it's difficult to imagine any ancient weapon that would have surpassed the efficient lethality of the bow. Among ancient projectile weapons, the bow produces a higher velocity and a flatter trajectory across a longer range than any of the other options. Moreover, Rousing emphasizes that modern steel and fiberglass bows are not an improvement upon the older wooden bows in either range or accuracy. In fact, Gabriel and Booth calculate that the ancient bow was 44 times more accurate than the 18th century musket. Kushite reliance on the bow would not, therefore, seem to have placed the soldiers of the double kingdom at any special disadvantage in the Near Eastern Theater of War. But how did Kushite production and use of the bow compare to that of other nations? How did military expertise in Tassetti, the land of the bow, compare to that of the other countries of bowmen, especially those in Egypt's northern and eastern borders? Here, I should credit a brilliant article published in the year 2000 by Alexei Vinogradov that has received too little attention over the past two decades. Comparing the bow that is written on the left in the toponym Tassetti, with the bow drawn on the right for the stereotyped nine bows, Vinogradov noticed that these do not appear to depict the same bow. The stave shown here on the left ends in distinctively coiled horns rather than the usual knocks. The toponym Tassetti was consistently written with this bow, the set bow, and never with the peget bow, shown here on the right. This symbolized four nations in general. For this reason, Vinogradov argues that Tassetti should not be translated generically as land of the bow, but specifically as land of the set bow, a reference to a unique model of the bow, deemed characteristic of Nubia. As the set bow on the left was used to describe Tassetti across millennia of history, it must have been an archaic model that remained in some use within the region. But this conservatism should not surprise us. Rowsing has observed that the expertise needed to produce and use specific types of bows is often very specialized and laborious. So archers do not readily abandon an archaic model in favor of a new one. Drawing upon Herodotus' description of the bows employed by Ethiopians, Vinogradov further proposes that the set bow may have been characterized by its extraordinary length, which was prepared with steam in order to compel the wood, cane, and horn to achieve the model's distinctive curvature. A bow of such length would have been unwieldy if carried into hand-to-hand combat. So it was likely reserved for stationary snipers or perhaps for raking to soften the front lines of advancing enemy troops. Crucially, the name Tassetti was also a self-appalachian used by the Kushites. So there is no reason to assume that the set bow was deemed by the ancients an inferior weapon. It's also important here to avoid absolutes. The set bow was not necessarily the main bow employed in Nubia, and it was certainly not the only bow employed there. It seems merely to have been regarded as distinctive to that country. This association may have something to do with the fact that Kush had more direct access to the wood and wild game of the neighboring African Sahel and Savannah, particularly the East African oryx, whose horn is often used in the production of composite bows. Nubia seems to have been associated not only with the set bow, but also with the skill of the local archers who used it. In the first century AD, plenty of the elder reported that the inhabitants of Nubia were called men with three or four eyes because they had particularly keen sight in using arrows. Eight centuries later, Ibn Abid al-Kham noted that the soldiers of Nubia were nicknamed the pupil smiders because they were so accurate with the bow that they often struck the eyes of unfortunate invaders from the North. Thanks to the evidence of material culture, we can also speak with some specificity about the techniques employed by archers in ancient Kush. The Kushite whom you see here on the left was buried with an archer's ring or loose, still encircling his right thumb. Another example of which is shown here on the right side of this image. In the middle of the first millennium BC, the inclusion of these rings and burials was concentrated between the fourth and sixth Nile cataracts, the heartland of the kingdom of Kush. And they indicate that Kushite archers drew the bowstring with the thumb and locked it in place with the index finger. This technique is widely known as the Mongolian release, but archers' rings are tested in Kush much earlier than their first appearance in Central Asia. The thumb draw also creates several advantages for the archers, not only allowing for a longer draw, but also for a different placement of the arrow on the stave. In the so-called Mongolian release, the arrow is laid on the outside away from the body. So there was no need for any bracer to protect the opposite forearm, allowing that arm to carry instead a small shield of particular value for horse archers. Comparatively less attention in Kush seems to have been given to arrows and especially arrowheads. The Greek sources report with some surprise that iron was rarely used in Kush for arrowheads. As the archers typically capped their projectiles instead with stone, often dipped in poison. Excavations have largely confirmed this observation. Yielding examples of arrowheads cut from flint, quartz and carnelian, some discolored possibly with a toxic coating. But the greater attention given to the bow than to the arrows is also quite rational as arrows are generally confined to one use. And the lethality of a single arrow was greatly limited when the opponent wore armor. Given how effective armor can be at warding off both the fire of an archer and the handheld weapons of an infantryman. Authors have frequently expressed some surprise that both the Kushite soldiers and the Egyptian soldiers are consistently depicted seemingly without any form of either body armor or helmet. The contrast with the neo-Assyrians could not be more stark. The 19th century drawing that you see here copies a now destroyed relief scene from the palace of Sargon II at Horsabad. And it is thought to depict battles at Raffia, Gibbathan and the Wadi El-Arish against the soldiers of the double kingdom. The Assyrian at left clearly wears a coat of body armor and those on horseback have the distinctive conical metal helmet of that era. The heads of their Kushite and Egyptian foes are shown as bare and on their bodies we see at most a cloth or leather jerkin or corset. We might be tempted to dismiss this visual contrast as nothing more than a Syrian propaganda. Were it not for the fact that Kushite and Egyptian soldiers were even less covering depicted by Kushite and Egyptian artists. The Kushite soldiers whom you see here are shown bare chested and bare headed. What do we to make of this? Would this not have placed them at an insurmountable disadvantage against the armored troops of Assyria? And if it did, why did Hezekiah of Judah and Baal of Tyre still regard the double kingdom as a potential counterweight to Assyria? And how was the double kingdom able to inflict a setback on Esserhaddin's troops in 673? In my estimation, John Darnell has explained this most clearly. He reasons that body armor was eschewed by the Kushite and Egyptian troops partially because it was ill suited to the climate of Northeast Africa but also because of the priority given instead to speed and mobility. Again, the emphasis was upon fast moving troops strategically deployed rather than upon an overwhelming mass of infantry in unified formation. As for the lack of helmets, Darnell observes that both Kushite and Egyptian soldiers are frequently shown with thick hairstyles that would have cushioned the head against blows, particularly if greased like the hair of many modern Bishareen. What this method sacrifices and protection, it partly compensates with ventilation and peripheral vision. A similar priority is manifested in the Kushite's choice of shield. As shown in this 19th century copy of that Kushite relief scene from the 25th dynasty, the soldiers carried on their left shoulders a small round shield, not the much longer shield favored by earlier Egyptian armies with the curved top and rectangular base. In fact, within the great triumphal stela of the Kushite King Pionki, commemorating the initial Kushite annexation that inaugurated the double kingdom, the hieroglyph for soldier is written for the first time with this small circular shield. It is notably associated with the first mention of the Kushite army within the text, but thereafter this hieroglyph is also used for some Egyptian soldiers within the text. So we see a theme emerging in the double kingdom's choices of weaponry and armor, a prioritization of speed and mobility, which brings us naturally to the Kushite horse, second only to the bow in its iconic representation of Kushite armies. The domesticated horse had reached Kush by at least the 16th century BC, and by the first millennium BC, it was well established there. The 25th Dynasty's fondness for horses is, of course, well known, as some of the Kushite kings famously had their horses buried alongside them at the cemetery of Al-Qurru. It's very unfortunate that we have so few surviving visual representations of the army during the 25th Dynasty, because this condition has deprived us of more detailed evidence for precisely how horses were used by the double kingdom's troops. The few copies that were made of Kushite relief scenes often show only mules, sometimes pulling carts in ceremonial processions. I do not consider the surviving visual evidence sufficient to determine whether the double kingdom regularly employed heavy eight-spoked chariots like the Assyrians, or relied instead upon the lighter six-spoked variety used by Egyptian armies in the new kingdom. Even so, we can hardly doubt that horses were used in the double kingdom's military, not only as cavalry, but also specifically for chariotry, because our surviving textual evidence often foregrounds the horse-drawn chariot in narratives of battle. Both the great triumphal stele of Pionki and Sennacherib's account of the battle of El-Tekka give pride of place to the double kingdom's chariotry corps. I will return to Pionki's stele in a moment, but some immediate attention must be given to the Assyrian evidence, because the Assyrian texts conveniently assembled by Lisa Heidorn explicitly mentioned the Assyrian's import and use of Kushite horses. In the Nineveh horse reports, the Kushite horses are termed Kuseya, and they number around 1,000, vastly outstripping the totals imported into Assyria from any other nation. In fact, many of these Kuseya horses, enumerated in Nineveh, are specifically designated as chariot horses, wearing, and I quote, the trappings of the land of Kush. If this were all of the evidence at our disposal, then we would be ill-equipped to determine whether such horses were similarly employed in Kush itself. But fortunately, the Assyrian documents also mention Kushite men and women residing in Assyria, and several of these are designated as equiries and associated with what is called the settlement of Kush, somewhere near Nineveh. One Kushite immigrant in Assyria is even titled as the chariot driver of the prefect of the land. The evidence would clearly suggest that a coveted breed of horse was raised and trained in Kush by Kushite equaries, specifically for chariot use. It would be unreasonable to suppose that the Kushite pharaohs themselves did not enjoy access to this very same breed and its Kushite trainers. In fact, a similar practice has echoed into modern times as the Dongola region of Upper Nubia is closely associated with a large, prized breed of racehorse with black body and white legs, whose training is still the province of Sudanese experts. This brings us finally to the training of the double kingdom's armies. And I will combine here a discussion of both actual battle experience, specialized expertise and training exercises. The double kingdom was not only an amalgam of polities, but also of differentiated military styles. Facing the soldiers from the South was a middle and lower Egyptian landscape comprised of semi-autonomous urban strongholds, peopled in large part by the descendants of Libyan mercenaries, experienced in siege craft. And if the later evidence of the Demotic Pedobas cycle can be trusted, a culture that valorized the hand-to-hand combat of the armed infantry. The contrast between this military style and that of the South, which seemed to date back at least to the early 18th dynasty, when Egyptian infantry massed against strongholds in Middle Egypt, while mobile units of Nubian archers and other auxiliaries patrolled the cliffs and oasis routes. Lower Egypt likely also differed from the South in its available breed of horse. Zoological research over the past century has observed that humid climates like that of the Delta have tended to enervate equine health, resulting in long-legged and weedy horses, perhaps suitable for riding, but less so for pulling a chariot. I'm reminded here of Merneptas' campaign against the Libyan force as recorded in his Karnak inscription, in which the enemy's chariots pass altogether unmentioned. At the onset of the double kingdom, I perceive in the Great Trampel Stila a deliberate contrast with this lower Egyptian cultural foil, reducing subtly differentiated regional styles into broad-stroked military stereotypes. Recall the Kushite King's initial challenge to his foes, yoke up your horses. When visiting the enemy's stables, he draws the audience's attention to the enervated state of the horses there, an encounter graphically depicted in this lunette scene. And when his arch rival, Tefnacht, flees from Memphis, the text reports that he mounted his horse because he did not trust his chariot. Now, we do not need to assume that lower Egypt was bereft of chariots. That would be unwarranted. But the text does seem to present a contrast between northern and southern military stereotypes. The double kingdom would eventually join these varieties of martial experience and training into a single fighting force. Before we leave Pionki Stila, there are two additional points worth emphasizing that seem quite distinctive to the Kushite regime. Firstly, notice that the king himself is never described as taking part in battle. He commands from afar. The same preference is reflected in other Kushite inscriptions even three centuries later. Secondly, notice that the Kushite king brings his court with him, including a house of the royal women, which then becomes the scene for diplomatic resolution at the end of the campaign. Tony Spalinger has recently termed this the parapetetic court, noting that it too would be echoed in Kushite inscriptions for the next three centuries. This description with its emphasis upon mobility and royal oversight brings us back to Taharco Stila on the Dashor Road. I introduced the subject of this Stila as an evening run, but that's something of an understatement. According to the inscription, a group of approximately 250 unseasoned recruits assembled at Memphis and ran 50 kilometers, roughly 31 miles to the Fayum Oasis, where they rested for two hours before returning to Memphis by the same route within the span of a single night. This means that the men ran a total of about 100 kilometers overnight at a pace of approximately 11 kilometers per hour, or to put it another way, a sub nine minute mile pace maintained for 31 miles. Ever the consummate Kushite Faro, Taharco Road alongside them. But the king then rewarded them with a banquet afterwards, and he praised these recruits by comparing them to this term here, which looks at first glance like nebet with two leg determinatives. The word is actually left untranslated in every published analysis of this text, but it is almost certainly to be read as the participial form of ket ket, a reduplicated verb known from Egyptian Demotic texts to refer to fast running. Read in context, Taharco is comparing these recruits to an elite corps of his army that was trained for speed. And the total distance that he had his recruits run that night was about half the span that troops stationed at Memphis would need to traverse if dispatched in an emergency to defend the country's eastern border. The cavalry and chariotry could naturally arrive at the border much more quickly, but a well-trained infantry would not lag too far behind. A survey of the double kingdom's military manpower, weaponry, armor, transport and training gives detailed confirmation to Tony Spalinger's general assessment that the army during the 25th dynasty was comprised of, quote, quickly moving units, better able to harass and geared to a swift victory rather than to a prolonged battle wherein a large deployment of troops was required. Now that we have some image of this army, its strengths, weaknesses and its priorities, let us briefly observe the evidence for those soldiers in action. At the end of the eighth century BC, soldiers of the double kingdom were dispatched on an urgent campaign beyond Egypt's eastern border to intercept the Assyrian troops that were advancing on Judah. In multiple royal inscriptions, Sennacherib reported that he met at El Teca a force of, quote, Egyptian charioteers and the bowmen chariot corps and cavalry of the king of Kush. We can easily picture them now, bare-chested sporting a thick head of hair with a lightweight circular shield on the left shoulder and an archers loose on the right thumb, drawing a triple curved bow as black horses with white legs carry them rapidly across the plane. No mention is made of any infantry in the double kingdom's ranks, a curious omission, but perhaps only a matter of emphasis or perhaps the infantry was lagging just slightly behind. Also missing from Sennacherib's account is the name of his Kushite royal opponent. Presumably the Kushite king commanded this maneuver from afar. And Sennacherib neglected to list any royal captives or provide any description of pursuing the defeated after battle. But Sennacherib does claim that he defeated the double kingdom at El Teca, after which he turned inland towards Judah. According to the later account provided by the Hebrew Bible, Sennacherib next besieged Lakeesh and then advanced upon Libna. At this point in the narrative, the biblical author states that the God of Judah vowed to put a spirit in the king of Assyria, that he would hear a report and it would convince him to return to his own land. Spirit does seem to be the best translation as it captures the sense of urgent persuasion. But the word in Hebrew is Ruach, literally a wind. An apt metaphor for any sudden unexpected disorienting and ultimately evanescent factor that might convince an invading army to change course, change plans or even retreat. Given the ambiguity of the passage, we historians should consider all such factors mentioned in the surviving evidence, including the one mentioned just two sentences later, another military contingent, sent by the king of Kush, coming fast across the plane. Thank you all for listening and thanks especially to the many individuals and institutions listed on this slide who generously provided images for my lecture today. And I'll be happy to answer any questions now that anyone might have. Should I stop sharing screen or can someone else switch it? Maybe if I stop. Should I go ahead and stop sharing screen? Yeah, why don't you do that? Okay. And you can... If I can get my cursor back, here we go. Boom. Okay. There we go. Thank you. So I think Sam will handle the interface between our internet audience and you, Dr. Pope. Okay. Great, yeah. Thank you again, Dr. Pope, for a really fascinating and thorough presentation. Yeah, like Aaron said, we've gotten quite a few questions in and we've got some time to answer a couple of them here. So to what extent was Kushite's military prowess known in the wider ancient world? You know, how widely renowned would their bowmen and horsemen have been? It seems to be pretty widely if by ancient world we're primarily focusing on the Near East. Although honestly, even the Eastern Mediterranean, the classical world, there is definitely a reputation in the classical world that appears to have been formed by, very much by the 25th dynasty, but also by their Kushite contemporaries. And this seems to extend back in time quite early. I mean, if you think about the earliest Egyptian accounts we have of battles, one of the earliest actually is actually Wenny when he sends an army of mercenaries abroad to possibly to Palestine. And most of his army, or at least the army that he enumerates that he emphasizes, is made up of mercenaries from the South. And then we get to the Amarna letters. There are constant mentions of, you know, kings in the Near East complaining to Egypt, can you send me more Kushites to guard, you know, to guard my person so that I can continue to serve you? So there does seem to be this very long tradition of Kushite soldiers being esteemed abroad, initially as mercenaries, not as necessary like an invading force. And I don't think there's any moment where Kush, at least by my estimation, where Kush establishes a military, a permanent military presence outside of the African continent. I haven't seen one that convinced me. And yet they were still able to create this reputation largely through service as mercenaries and then through the actions of the 25th dynasty, which as you've seen is a mixed bag. They definitely have some pretty devastating defeats but there also seem to have been some setbacks that they inflicted on the Assyrians. And I tend to think that was probably part of what influenced this broader perception, especially the perception of the Hebrew Bible. I mean, if you read Rodney Sadler has a book on references to Kush in the Hebrew Bible. And also there's a man who's speaking a few weeks from now, Borel is the name, right? He has a book as well on the same theme but expanded. In Rodney Sadler's book, there's a sort of thread, a theme that he highlights several points in the book of sort of a mighty Kush trope in the Hebrew Bible. It's not the only image of Kush that's presented in the Hebrew Bible, because it's a relatively diverse text, but there is a theme of Kush being military power, which I think we should take seriously. And did any aspects of Kush being well known throughout the ancient world, did any aspects of that military culture survive into the medieval kingdoms of Alwa, Makoria or Nobadia? Yeah, there's actually quite a bit of evidence on this. I don't know that I can rattle it off quite as quickly because I'm not a medievalist, but Alexi Vinogradov's article goes into this quite a bit, but also the two other places that I would point people, Lisa Hyde-Orn's article on the Horses of Kush, which is I think from 1997, I wanna say, in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, she actually includes quite a bit of medieval evidence of the sort of renowned prowess of Kushite horsemen. And also the work of David Edwards. David Edwards has expanded his analysis of, I don't mean expanded recently, but his analysis of Marroway, the Marroway to Kingdom has always been expanded to include comparisons with medieval Nubia. And there's quite a bit there about the functioning of the state and in the military specifically. There's a lot that resonates even not just with medieval Sudan, but maybe medieval Sudan in the broader sense, including medieval Canaan Borno, which is a polity over near Lake Chad. They were very much known for their horsemen. I mean, this is a region where the horse is a particularly effective weapon slash form of military transport. So one could extend this conversation into the medieval period very easily, especially if we had a medievalist here, which I'm not quite. And in the Nubian army, would there have been chariot archers or at least horseback archers and how would they have been used? I tend to think there'd be both. It's difficult to discern. I mean, this is part of the right reason why I have this, was like a five to 10 minute disclaimer. About five minutes into the lecture, I gave us a long disclaimer about all the limitations of our evidence because it is very important to realize we're trying to reconstruct the military on the basis of almost no visual evidence from the kingdom whose military that was. But for one thing, Esurhaidon sources actually specifically mentioned that when he fought against the Kushites, in one instance, they had three men chariots. Now that strongly suggests, we're talking about a chariot that has a driver, has a shield bearer and also an archer. That's typically the three man chariot. And particularly given that that was what three man chariot meant to the Assyrians, I think that's what he's referring to. That actually is a little surprising to me when I came across it in the evidence because we don't have convincing visual depictions of Kushite and Egyptian chariots from this period that would have been heavy enough. But again, we hardly have any depictions. So, you know, who's to say, there have been, there are some illustrations that people have perceived an eight-spoked chariot and some, I'm not even sure with those. Honestly, I may just be bad at math, but I count six spokes when I look at those same pictures. Most of the evidence that we have, I see pretty lightweight chariots, but it's hard for me to believe that Esser Hoddan would have claimed the enemy had three man chariots if they didn't. Unless it's just a way of, you know, sort of puffing up his accomplishment. But I find that personally unlikely. I think one thing we have to keep in mind is the possibility that there could have been an evolution in military technology across the span of the 25th dynasty. I mean, they're encountering Assyrian opponents across the span of this dynasty. If they had three man chariots with the eight-spoked wheels by the reign of Tarako, that doesn't necessarily mean that's what they were using in the reigns of Pionki and Shabbatiko and Shabbatiko. So we should at least consider the possibility that they responded to the threat and sort of up to their game. And what would have been the cause during the 25th dynasty of Egypt's later or maybe lesser adoption of iron, at least compared to some of Egypt's contemporaries like Assyria? And would any of these chariots have been made out of iron or would they have been bronze? I really doubt that there would have been a lot of iron used in the 25th dynasty, but that's kind of an argument from absence in a certain sense. The iron that we have is in pretty small quantities thus far. I mean, one of the reasons I hesitate to be too confident in assessing the role of iron during this specific period is that there is research ongoing right now by Jane Humphress and her team to try to ascertain the beginnings of iron production in Nubia. I mean, it is very striking that Maroway eventually becomes a center of iron production. It was sort of, as early as the early 20th century, archeologists had already made Maroway famous for that purpose. I think it was Archibald Sase who referred to it as the Birmingham of Africa. It was probably a bit of an exaggeration, but you do see large heaps of iron slag around Maroway. So they obviously at some point decided to focus on this. For a long time, it was assumed that they didn't actually produce it themselves until then and would have been importing it before that point. But now that we have some iron weapons in a 25th dynasty tomb from Tumboes, I tend to think there was experimentation maybe locally early on. It just, we just don't have the evidence to be able to say so with any confidence. Now as to why they lagged behind the Assyrians in that regard, it's probably worth keeping in mind that virtually everybody lagged behind the Assyrians. I mean, it's hard to find an ancient army that I wouldn't describe as lagging behind the Assyrians. So I don't know that they were so far behind that it would have been a helpless mismatch of technology. I don't perceive, partly because of the results. I mean, if they were able to inflict a setback upon them at 673 BC, it seems to me like that whole question about, determining whether or not these, the Kushites were, and Egyptians were a credible threat to the Assyrians. I don't really know that that's our question to ask or our question to answer because the evidence itself has already answered the question. We have reliable evidence that on one occasion, at least they inflicted a setback upon them. So then our task is to figure out, okay, why were they sometimes successful and not in others? And the way I view it is that, they were able, I don't think the Kushites, based on the manpower and technology they had, I don't think they ever would have been able to like inflict a crushing total defeat on the Assyrians. That just seems to be unlikely. But individual defeats, strategically deployed troops that could, as Tony Spallinger has described it, that could come in and harass, could harass and essentially force the Assyrians to change their ambitions. That seems totally plausible to me. So, yeah, I forgot actually what the question was at this point, I've gone off on a tangent. No, I think that fairly answered it, yeah. We have time for a few more here. So is there any evidence in either inscriptions or contemporary accounts of Kushite military titles or unit names or any idea about how they were organized in terms of structure or hierarchy? Very little, but when I say that, I'm really talking about the 25th dynasty. There are titles in later Kushite texts. And I kind of, in order to create a reasonable scope for this presentation, I tried to leave out marowitic and even later napatin evidence as much as possible because I'm just wary of anachronism, but also wary of going over an hour and talking. But in those later periods, we have even very soon after the 25th dynasty, we have an aspel to Stila. He refers to commanders or fortresses. There are different individuals. I think he says there are six commanders or fortresses and like he gives it, you get a sense that there's some sort of military administration in the country. And once you get to the marowitic evidence, you actually have quite a few military titles. There's a Strategos of the water, Strategos of the land. You get clear titles. I suspect that we would see the precursors of those titles if we had autobiographies of Kushite soldiers. But one of the limitations for us is that one of the peculiarities of Kush during the 25th dynasty and the subsequent later napatin period is that we really don't have monuments of self-presentation by non-royal individuals in Kush, like inscriptions especially. We've got it in Egypt. I mean, you know, the first millennium BC in many ways is like the fluorescence of personal piety and all the monuments that go with that. In Kush, for whatever reason, that seems to have been the monopoly of the Royal House. And we've got really great evidence for the Royal House but there are all sorts of individuals like the soldier at Tumbo's for whom I would love to have their autobiographical inscription, but we don't have it. So, you know, the only thing I would say about divisions within the 25th dynasty's military, it is notable that when Toharko is referring to the stealer where he has the folks running, he refers to them in a way that seems to refer to divisions, like basically a 50-man divisions that harkens back to new kingdom precedents. So, it's quite likely that we can infer a little bit on the basis of earlier evidence. I'm reluctant to infer too much from later evidence because that would seem to assume no evolution and it's always dangerous. And do stories of Apidemak as the Kushite warrior deity give any hints of Kushite war strategies? Is there any connection there? Hmm, war strategies. Well, okay. In a way, I don't know if I call this a war strategy, but it's a strategy for the deployment of violence. That's another way to put it. It does seem like particularly in the period where we have a lot of evidence of Apidemak being worshiped, there is a notable royal presence around Hafeers, around water catchment basins. Like, if you think about it, you have in Sudan, once you leave the desert, you're in a sort of dry step area, there are a lot of pastoralists. These would have been people who would be very difficult to control as a government. I mean, it's not, you can't come and tax them in quite the same way you would if they were agriculturalists living along the Egyptian Nile. They don't stay in one place. And the one way that the Kushite state seems to have figured out to control them to an extent was to control the water catchment reservoirs that they would have to visit with their flocks. So Apidemak does seem to be actually affiliated with those. That's about as close as he gets to military strategy so far as I know. There is a really nice image that I was trying to find for this talk. I never was able to get a good, high-resolution copy of it, but there's a nice image of Apidemak in a relief at Musa Arata Sufra where he has very clearly, not only is he carrying a bow, but he has the right, the thumb ring on his thumb, which is really nice detail to see. But, you know, that's not a matter of strategy. That's really just that weapon continuing to represent Kush over a long period of time. Yeah. Yeah, it's nice sometimes when the artwork and inscriptions matches up with the materials that you find actually. Yeah, yeah, ology. It's rare. Yeah. Is there any connection to the strength of the Kushite armies and the lack of an Assyrian army's presence in the Levant for 20 years or so after the Battle of El Teca? I suspect so. I mean, my view of this, I've written about this at some length recently in Alice Bellas' book. I think that the least vulnerable hypothesis for what happened on that campaign, in my estimation, and I put it that way very deliberately, least vulnerable hypothesis, is that I think the Kushites intervened in such a way to cause the Assyrians to reassess alongside a number of other factors. I don't think there was a crushing defeat of the Assyrians. I don't think the Assyrians were afraid to come back. I actually think Sennacher was a bit more practical than his sort of cartoonish image might suggest. A lot of the history of his reign suggests a relatively practical politician. And it seems to me that if the Kushites were on their way and they were a formidable force, I mean, they're formidable enough force that years later, Esther Hadden is consulting the Oracles to decide whether or not it's safe for him to march in that direction. And he's saying, will I succeed against the Harko King of Kush? If they're formidable enough force to at least give the Assyrians pause, to at least cause them an inconvenience, then I think they could actually, the least vulnerable hypothesis to me is that there was some sort of negotiation. I mean, I think this goes right along with the surrender hypothesis because very clearly both the Assyrian accounts and the Hebrew Bible show Hezekiah delivering money to the Assyrians. I'm just not convinced that the delivering of money at the end of a campaign would normally be enough to convince the Assyrians to be nice, to play nice and go home. I just find that dubious. But you throw a few other factors into the mix, including a Kushite intervention there. And yeah, I think basically what you have in my opinion across the first two decades of the seventh century BC is a kind of unsteady piece in that region with a lot of trade that's still benefiting Kush in Egypt. There's a lot that's being cedar, tin, that's being imported from the Levant into Kush in Egypt. It's hard for me to imagine that they'd be able to pull that off if they had been defeated in a crushing fashion at El Tecca never to return again. I think in many ways, both powers, Assyria and the double kingdom were sort of hands off from that region and just trading with it. And notice the first thing that Esser Hattin does when he comes to the throne, well, one of the first things he does is to try to control that trade. I mean, that's the prize here, not necessarily on the ground administrative control. I don't think that the double kingdom ever had any ambitions of having like a new kingdom style empire in the Levant. I just don't see that. It's not, to me, that's anachronistic for this time period and probably also wouldn't have worked. And I think we have time for one more question here. And this one's for me, I was really interested when you were talking about the triple curve design on the Kushite bows. And I was wondering if you talk about where that comes from, how far back do we think that people in Kush were using these bows? Yeah, I really hesitate to be too positivistic here. However, Alexi Vinogrado's article, I forget the journal that it was in, I should have actually remembered that, but his article actually cites drawings, rock art out in the, I think out in the eastern deserts of Sudan, if I remember correctly, you know, would date back to the fourth millennium BC, if not earlier, showing archers with bows that are, they're at least the length of their own bodies, okay? These are very tall bows. And remember, I mean, if we're gonna use Greek evidence for this, I don't know that we necessarily should, but Herodotus also talks about them having very long bows, very difficult to string and so on. And those have the distinctive curvature of this bow. Now, the triple curved aspect does not seem to me the most distinctive part, what strikes me looking at the hieroglyph for the seth bow, the taseti, is those curved horns at the end. I really want to consult with a true expert on archery and ask them, what would be the purpose of this? Would this be functional? Like, does this resonate with anything you've seen before? Because I haven't myself found an image of someone using such a bow in ancient art, but it is the icon for Nubia, for taseti, across millennia. And it's a very distinctive that curl, I mean, many bows, they curl back in the other direction and the notch is actually, there's a notch cut into the end so that you can actually anchor the string there. These bows curl inward and they appear to curl around. They're sort of coiled. There's something very distinctive there. And I really feel like Alexei Vernogradov noticed something that is quite remarkable to me that none of the rest of us Nubiologists seem to have noticed this before. And also his article hasn't received nearly as much attention as I would expect it would sense then, but it seems to me quite significant that it's that specific bow that is used to represent taseti, not just bows in general, they didn't just throw in any random bow. And a lot of times, if you see a computerized transcription of an Egyptian text, they will use the Pejet bow in the name taseti. That's not the bow that's used in the name, but if you read like a computerized transcription, you can easily come away with the impression that, oh, it's the same bow, Pejet bow, but it's a different shape. The Pejet does not have those curls on the end. So I don't know that I really answered your question, but I think I've essentially talked about my frustration and my inability to answer it. I find it a really interesting question and I want to, I have a positivistic itch to want to be able to come to a definitive answer, but I definitely don't have one yet. It definitely seems to be very ancient, prehistoric. Perhaps an opportunity for a bit of fun experimental archeology, if you want to get into that. Yeah, that's a whole new skill that I need to pick up, Archery. Once again, Dr. Pope, thank you for joining us. It was great to have you on this part of the series and for all those listening, join us next time. Later this month, April 29th, Renan Lemos is going to be joining us, talking about Decolonizing New Kingdom Nubia through its material culture.