Taharqa

Taharqa was born around 710 BCE into the royal house of Kush, the powerful Nubian kingdom of the upper Nile in what is now Sudan. His father, King Piye, and his uncle had marched north and conquered Egypt, so that the kings of Kush became the pharaohs of Egypt's 25th Dynasty — the line history remembers as the 'Black Pharaohs'. When Taharqa took the throne around 690 BCE, he ruled a single empire stretching from the Mediterranean delta all the way to Napata, governing from the ancient capital of Memphis while keeping his heart in the Nubian homeland beneath the sacred mountain of Jebel Barkal.

His reign became a golden age. A great Nile flood and good harvests filled the granaries, and Taharqa poured that wealth into stone: he raised the towering colonnade at Karnak in Thebes, and built or restored temples across Nubia — at Kawa, where granite rams of the god Amun stood guard before his shrine, and at Sanam and Jebel Barkal. Historians count him among the most prolific builders of the entire ancient world; travellers on the Nile in his day passed temple after temple bearing his name.

But to the north loomed the empire of Assyria, the most fearsome military power of the age. The Hebrew Bible names him 'Tirhakah king of Cush' (2 Kings 19:9) as Egyptian forces moved against the Assyrian king Sennacherib. Later the Assyrian kings Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal invaded outright — in 671 BCE they captured Memphis and even Taharqa's own family, and drove him south. This is honest history: a brilliant, prosperous reign that ended in retreat to his homeland.

Taharqa died in 664 BCE and was laid to rest at Nuri, beneath a steep pyramid about 51.75 metres square at its base — the largest pyramid ever built in ancient Sudan. It was set so that, seen from Jebel Barkal, the New Year sun would rise directly over its peak. With him went over 1,070 small shabti figures of granite, alabaster and green ankerite. Even his enemies could not erase his mark on the Nile valley.