"a fascinating and uncelebrated ancient people the world has forgotten"
September 25, 2020 1:55 PM   Subscribe

In the Land of Kush by Isma'il Kushkush, with photos by Matt Stirn, is an essay about the kingdom on the Nile that was the southern neighbor of Pharaonic Egypt. If you want to see more photos, Valerian Guillot has put pictures from his 2016 trip online. The Kushites spoke Meriotic, which had two scripts. Ibrahim M. Omer's Ancient Sudan website has a wealth of information about the history, people and the land of Kush. Archaeological excavations keep unearthing new material. Charles Q. Choi wrote about a recent find of Meroitic inscriptions and in 2009 Geoff Emberling wrote about the race to explore sites which were submerged when the Merowe Dam was constructed.
posted by Kattullus (10 comments total) 27 users marked this as a favorite
 
Wonderful read.
posted by brambleboy at 2:38 PM on September 25, 2020 [1 favorite]


This is so cool. Fantastic post.
posted by saladin at 3:15 PM on September 25, 2020 [1 favorite]


Germane to this: Overheard at National Geographic Episode 4 - Scuba diving in a pyramid
posted by Omon Ra at 3:22 PM on September 25, 2020 [1 favorite]


With permission from the Governor-General of the Sudan, the 19th century treasure-hunter Giuseppe Ferlini 'opened' dozens of the pyramids, sometimes using dynamite to blow the tops off. He destroyed about 40.
posted by Twang at 5:40 PM on September 25, 2020 [2 favorites]


was about to chime in about this pezzo di merda, you beat me to it, Twang.
posted by progosk at 6:38 AM on September 26, 2020 [1 favorite]


Kush is mentioned many times in the Bible. It's often translated as "Ethiopia", which is incorrect. Kush was one of the eponymous sons of Ham (the son of Noah; his brothers were Canaan and what we call Libya and Egypt) and the father of Nimrod. So Kush was basically not just regarded as a significant place but had a sort of primality, the first of the great kingdoms. There's also this odd nugget of information where Moses' siblings criticise him for marrying a Kushite - and they're then punished for their disrespect.

One of the Ancient Sudan pages has what seems like a good summary of Kush's dominion over the Levant, and the victory of its king, Taharqa, over Sennacherib in a battle near Jerusalem. In later centuries Kush diminished in significance and its name was used to indicate a geographically distant point - the Persian king Ahasuerus is described as ruling "from India to Kush". So that marks its decline - from what was the pre-eminent power of the Levant, to a geographer's footnote.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:50 PM on September 26, 2020 [3 favorites]


I'm curious if the Hebrew modernizers ever made a conscious decision to make Kushi the blanket term for modern day Africans in Hebrew. They were definitely the kind of nerds who would not have forgotten about the Meroitic kingdom.
posted by ocschwar at 9:26 PM on September 27, 2020 [1 favorite]


I understand that calling people "Kushim" is considered offensive in Israel nowadays. It wouldn't have been adopted with any ill intent, though: it's one of the terms that was in current use in Rabbinic (and earlier in Mishnaic, Biblical, etc.) Hebrew. I don't even know if any of the Modern Hebrew philologists suggested changing it. Now that you mention it, it's pretty amazing that the same term has been used for three thousand years. Hebrew preserves a lot of ancient distinctions, though, like the fact that Egypt (Hebrew "Mitzrayyim", Egyptian Arabic "Maṣr") was once two conjoined kingdoms.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:21 PM on September 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


Today it is. I left Israel in 1989, and at the time, Kushim was neutral, and Shkhorim ("blacks") was an insult, because it was Yiddish influence that determined these connotations.

After 30 years of English influence displacing Yiddish influence, Kushim became offensive simply because it's a blanket term for all Africans and thus too similar to "Negro", while "Shakhor/Shkhorim" became neutral because it is in English.
posted by ocschwar at 4:22 PM on September 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


I'm always half fascinated and half enraged by things like this.

Think about the knowledge we have of the historical civilisations of Africa, the Americas, etc compared to ancient Europe. Kush occupies the same sort of period of time as Ancient Greece. We've studied the living shit out of Ancient Greece, we still tell tales and histories from there, we laud the discoveries and knowledge that they found. We have schools of philosophy and principles based on what they produced.

What are we missing from the world, because our ancestors and ourselves have been too fixated on one continent? What have we failed to realise took place in the past? What equivalents to the Hippocratic Oath or the Socratic Method have we lost from African history? What were the stories or art from Cahokia and the rest of the Mississippian culture? What was the structure of their societies? There's got to be so much that we've lost over time.

I just wish we knew what we were missing.
posted by MattWPBS at 7:05 AM on September 29, 2020 [2 favorites]


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