At the entrance to the Louvre exhibition dedicated to the black pharaohs, the Piankhy triumphal stele offers a key document on their epic. This cast on loan from the British Museum (the original is in Cairo) shows the Kushite ruler enthroned as a pharaoh, with the vanquished kinglets of Egypt prostrate at his feet. Next to it, 159 tight lines of hieroglyphics detail the dazzling conquest of Piânkhy who, leaving around – 720 from Napata, his capital in Nubia, went up with his army all the valley of the Nile to the delta, to found the XXVth dynasty there. This will only reign over Egypt for about sixty years, before being overthrown by the Assyrians in Memphis, but it has left remarkable vestiges.
Among these, the Louvre has brought together stelae, reliefs, statues, funerary objects, papyri and archival documents from its own collections, from recent excavations in Sudan or on loan from the major museums of Berlin, Copenhagen, Oxford, London or New York. As a preamble, the reproduction of a Nubian tribute scene (Tomb of Houy at Gournet Mouraï) with its processions of Africans bringing the pharaoh golden cylinders, cattle and a giraffe, reminds us that the kingdom of Kush had first been dominated for five centuries by the pharaohs of the New Empire. A key datum to understand how much Nubia had already adopted Egyptian culture, its pantheon and even its writing, long before the black pharaohs who will thus slip easily into the clothes of their predecessors. As proof, this monumental ram statue of Amun-Re protecting Amenhotep III (Pharaoh of the 18th dynasty) that Piânkhy appropriated to take it further south, to Djebel Barkal, the pure mountain and home of the God Amon.
Recognizable round faces
After a somewhat austere section on expeditions to Nubia in the 19th century, here is this great ram-god again, between whose legs Taharqa, the son of Piânkhy, slipped this time to adorn the majestic temple he had built in Kawaii. We recognize him by his round face, his muscular torso and, on his headdress, the double uraeus (cobra) which marks the domination of all the Kushite pharaohs over the two lands: their kingdom and Egypt.
Giant maps on the picture rails and large watercolors or photographs of the sites guide the visitor through this vast Empire: from Sanam, Napata and Kawa, located south of the third cataract in Nubia, to Memphis, port and capital of Egypt, where a fragment of a statue and two stelae found in the Serapeum by Auguste Mariette bear the names of Chabaka and Taharqa respectively.
A large section is also devoted to the temples of Thebes, in the center of the Nile valley, which the Kushite pharaohs enriched with numerous monuments. A statue of Isis nursing Horus and a bronze case with large gold-encrusted eyes, dedicated to Shepenoupet II, daughter of Piânkhy and sister of Taharqa, attest to her title of high priestess, « divine adoratrice of this sanctuary.
Defeated by the “Lion of Assyria”
The fall of the black pharaohs is superbly illustrated by a large relief in the British Museum which recounts, like a comic strip, the capture of an Egyptian city by Assyrian archers climbing the walls using ladders, brandishing severed heads of ‘Africans, taking others prisoner, hands tied behind their backs. An ivory plate adorned with gold, lapis and carnelian continues this cruel story where we see the lion of Assyria slaughtering a Kushite soldier with crimped hair.
A head of Psammetichus II then presents us with the first Saite pharaoh of the new dynasty, who succeeded in reunifying Egypt thanks to Greek mercenaries, represented here by elements of bronze armor, vases decorated with fighters. He pushed on to Nubia where the Kushite kings had taken refuge to sack their capital Napata. Witnesses to this warlike incursion, the seven statues, including those of Taharqa and Tanouétamani, the last two black pharaohs, found broken in 2003 in a pit in Doukki Gel, in Nubia near Kerma, and reconstituted using 3D printing, we greet at the end of the journey.
In 1871, the Egyptologist Auguste Mariette was inspired by this epic to write the libretto ofAida, Verdi’s opera, and design the costumes. On a proposal from the Louvre, Michel Ocelot took up the torch, whose animated film, The Pharaoh, the Savage and the Princessin theaters on October 18, returns in turn to this fascinating destiny of the Nubian pharaohs (1).
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Landmarks
Around – 780. While Egypt was fragmented into various kingdoms, a new dynasty was born in Nubia, in the land of Kush, with Napata as its capital.
Around – 720. The Kushite king Piânkhy sets out to conquer Egypt. It goes up to Thebes, then to the Nile delta.
– 712. His son Chabataka takes Memphis. Beginning of the XXVth dynasty of these black pharaohs who reign over Egypt and up to the confluence of the White Nile and the Blue Nile (current Khartoum).
From – 690 to – 665. Taharqa had many temples built at Karnak, Kawa and his 51-meter-high pyramid tomb at Nouri.
– 663. Tanouétamani loses Memphis before the repeated assaults of the Assyrians, who push as far as Thebes. The Kushites retreat to their kingdom of Nubia.
– 593. Sack of Napata by Psammetichus II, Saite Pharaoh of the 26th Dynasty.