Napatan Period

Abstract

The centuries that followed the 25th Dynasty in Nubia witnessed significant changes in the way the kingdom of Kush related to the outside world: an Assyrian invasion had expelled the Kushite kings from the Egyptian throne, and the geographical focus of Kushite royal activity then gradually shifted southward. This period has also received less scholarly attention than the 25th Dynasty that preceded it—in part because of the difficulties posed by the evidence, but also because of modern influences on the interpretation of ancient history. The surviving texts, art, architecture, and other material culture from the Napatan period are generous sources of information, but each body of evidence shows little connection to the others. In addition, most of the evidence for the period was first discovered in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century CE, when Sudan was under foreign domination, leading some of the earliest modern interpreters to depict the Nubian region as an isolated backwater during antiquity. During the second half of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century, more recent research has offered alternative interpretations of the Napatan period's foreign relations, domestic statecraft, and chronology.