Early African Kingdoms and Trade Geography

The Kingdom of Kush, centered in Nubia along the Nile south of Egypt, developed successively at Kerma (flourishing c. 2500–1500 BCE), then Napata (from roughly the 8th century BCE), and finally Meroë (from around the 6th century BCE to the 4th century CE), a geographic progression southward along the river that reflected shifting political centers of gravity while consistently exploiting the Nile's combination of fertile floodplain agriculture and long-distance riverine trade in gold, ivory, ebony, and enslaved people moving northward toward Egypt and the Mediterranean world. Kush's power peaked when its 25th Dynasty kings, including Piye and Taharqa, conquered and ruled Egypt itself from roughly 744 to 656 BCE, a striking reversal of the more familiar Egyptian dominance over Nubia, before Assyrian invasion pushed Kush back south; the later Meroitic phase developed its own still only partially deciphered script (Meroitic, distinct from Egyptian hieroglyphics) and exploited nearby iron ore deposits so extensively that Meroë has sometimes been called an ancient "Birmingham of Africa," a comparison popularized by the archaeologist A.J. Arkell in the mid-20th century.