Taharqa

For a little over a quarter of a century, from 690 to 664 BC, a Nubian king from the middle Nile ruled both his homeland and Egypt. Taharqa was the most powerful of the Kushite pharaohs of Egypt's Twenty-fifth Dynasty, a great builder of temples and pyramids, and the ruler who had to face the Assyrian Empire at the height of its strength.

Taharqa came from the royal house of the Kingdom of Kush, centred on Napata in what is now northern Sudan. He may have been a son of Piye, the king who first brought Egypt under Kushite rule, although the family's relationships are not fully certain. His own inscriptions at Kawa say that as a young man of twenty he went north to Egypt with an earlier king, Shebitku, and that he later received the crown at Memphis. The texts leave the predecessor who died before his coronation unnamed. Many scholars now identify that king as Shabaka and suspect that Taharqa came to power irregularly, perhaps by pushing Shabaka aside.

The length of his reign is fixed by a stela from the Serapeum at Saqqara recording an Apis bull installed in his 26th year, which places his rule between 690 and 664 BC.

The first part of the reign was prosperous. A very high Nile flood and rich harvests are recorded, and the king spent heavily on religion, giving large quantities of gold to the temple of Amun at Kawa. Kushite rule revived older Egyptian forms in art, architecture and theology. Taharqa added to the great temple complex at Karnak in Thebes, built a new temple at Kawa and enlarged the sanctuaries at Jebel Barkal, the sacred mountain near Napata. He also strengthened forts in Lower Nubia, such as Semna, Buhen and Qasr Ibrim.

Breaking with tradition, he chose a new royal cemetery at Nuri rather than El-Kurru. His pyramid there, about 52 metres along each side at the base, was the largest in the Nubian region, and roughly twenty later kings were buried near it. More than 1,070 shabti figures were placed in his tomb.

Egypt's influence in the Levant brought it into conflict with Assyria. The Hebrew Bible names "Tirhakah, king of Kush" as an opponent of the Assyrian king Sennacherib during the siege of Jerusalem in 701 BC, before Taharqa became king; the Egyptologist Jeremy Pope has suggested he was then a commander in his twenties or early thirties.

As king, Taharqa backed cities such as Tyre and Ashkelon against Assyrian control. When Esarhaddon invaded Egypt in 674 BC, Babylonian records report an Egyptian victory. In 671 BC, however, Esarhaddon returned, took Memphis and sent members of the royal family, including a prince and royal wives, to Assyria as hostages. Taharqa retreated south but reoccupied Memphis and the Delta by 669 BC. Esarhaddon died in 668 BC while leading a new expedition, and Ashurbanipal completed the campaign, defeating Taharqa again and pushing as far as Thebes. Local rulers in the Delta, among them Necho I of Sais, were installed as Assyrian vassals. These wars are covered in the Assyrian conquest of Egypt.

Taharqa died in 664 BC and was succeeded by Shabaka's son Tantamani, whose attempt to retake Egypt ended with the Assyrian sack of Thebes the following year. Tantamani was followed in Kush by Taharqa's son Atlanersa, and Kushite kings never again ruled Egypt. Statues and reliefs of Taharqa survive in museums from Kerma in Sudan to Oxford, where his small shrine from Kawa now stands, and later Greek writers such as Strabo remembered him as a far-ranging conqueror.

Our 700 BCE map shows the Kushite kingdom at about the time Taharqa came to power, alongside the Egypt of the Third Intermediate Period that his dynasty ruled.