Explore the vast range of titles available.

In the 660s BC Egypt was a politically fragmented and occupied country. However, this was to change when a family of local rulers from the city of Sais declared independence from the Assyrian Empire, and in a few short years succeeded in bringing about the reunification of Egypt. The Saites established central government, reformed the economy and promoted trade. The country became prosperous, achieving a pre-eminent role in the Mediterranean world. This is the first monograph devoted entirely to a detailed exploration of the Saite Dynasty. It reveals the dynamic nature of the period, the astuteness of the Saite rulers and their considerable achievements in the political, economic, administrative and cultural spheres. It will appeal not only to students of Egyptology but also, because of the interactions of the Saite Dynasty with the Aegean and Mesopotamia worlds, to anyone interested in ancient history.

In the 7th century BCE, the Kushite king Tanwetamani commissioned his “Dream Stela”, which was to be erected in the Amun Temple of Jebel Barkal. The lunette of the stela features a dualistic artistic motif whose composition, meaning, and significance are understudied despite their potential to illuminate important aspects of royal Kushite ideology. On the lunette, there are two back-to-back offering scenes that appear at first glance to be nearly symmetrical, but that closer inspection reveals to differ in subtle but significant ways. Analysis of the iconographic and textual features of the motif reveals its rhetorical function in this royal context. The two strikingly similar but meaningfully different offering scenes represented the two halves of a Kushite “Double Kingdom” that considered Kush and Egypt together as a complementary geographic dual, with Tanwetamani presiding as king of both. This “Mirrored Motif” encapsulated the duality present in the Kushite ideology of kingship during the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, which allowed Tanwetamani to reconcile the present imperial expansion of Kush with the history of Egyptian activity in Nubia. The lunette of the Dream Stela is therefore political art that serves to advance the Kushite imperial agenda.

The recent discovery of a well-preserved horse burial at the Third Cataract site of Tombos illuminates the social significance of equids in the Nile Valley. The accompanying funerary assemblage includes one of the earliest securely dated pieces of iron in Africa. The Third Intermediate Period (1050–728 BC) saw the development of the Nubian Kushite state beyond the southern border of Egypt. Analysis of the mortuary and osteological evidence suggests that horses represented symbols of a larger social, political and economic movement, and that the horse gained symbolic meaning in the Nile Valley prior to its adoption by the Kushite elite. This new discovery has important implications for the study of the early Kushite state and the formation of Kushite social identity.

Sennacherib's campaign to the southern Levant in 701 bc is an extensively studied episode in the Neo-Assyrian period. Nevertheless, despite the abundance of sources, the existing scholarship has left several questions unanswered. Furthermore, although economic growth is suggested to have been a motor behind Neo-Assyrian expansion, current interpretations of the campaign do not consider this to have been its main goal. This article will present an analysis focussing particularly on this economic motive, an analysis that requires an alternative interpretation of the Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions. The outcome sheds a new light not only on Assyrian confrontations with Egypt in the late 8th-century bc southern Levant but also on Judah's and Gaza's roles in the events, revealing altogether a world of long-distance trade.

Ethnic groups are usually seen as self‐defined, distinctive entities, often corresponding neatly to political or cultural units, but ascriptions of ethnic “other” juxtaposed to ethnic “self” also play a fundamental role in constructions of ethnicity, especially when cultures come into direct contact, as with Egypt and Nubia's long history of interaction. Adopting a multi‐scalar approach informed by practice theory, this chapter examines constructions of ethnicity by Egyptians and Nubians, taking state ideology, elite expressions, and everyday practices into account, and showing how state constructions of ethnic “self” and “other” contrast the situational and socially contingent dynamics of ethnicity.

The Kushite kings of Dynasty 25 and their Napatan successors brought about a renaissance in art and architecture in Egypt, and created a new artistic idiom for Nubia that would survive for nearly a millennium. The Dynasty 25 Egyptian kings were anxious to show themselves in traditional forms and pious poses. This was expressed by mirroring the texts that recorded the takeover of the country and extolled the piety of the Nubian kings and their devotion to the established norms of society. A colossal head of Taharqa, presumably from Karnak Temple is one of the great masterpieces in the history of Egyptian art. It can be seen as the ultimate development of Dynasty 25 royal portraiture. The distancing from Egypt is reflected in the arts of the Meroitic period, and indicated not only the abandonment of many Egyptian conventions but also the adoption of alternate cultural influences.

The ancient Greeks and Romans had a very long history of contact with the ancient Egyptians, and borrowed from and, at times, simultaneously influenced their artistic motifs, styles, and material culture. This chapter describes the visual and material evidence, mechanisms, and extent of exchange between these three powerful ancient cultures from the time of Egypt's inception to its absorption into the Islamic world. The Egyptians most likely stopped representing Aegeans in foreign tribute scenes because the direct contact with them ceased when the Minoan civilization fell. Contact was not revived by the Mycenaeans after they consolidated their hold on Crete and the other Aegean islands. In body type and pose, Kushite sculpture emulated Old Kingdom sculptural forms. The Saite sculptors were interested in surface modeling, a technique which may have influenced the sculptors of the Greek kouroi.