A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [59]
Compared with the one at Giza, this sphinx is very small – about the size of a spaniel – but it is particularly interesting, because it’s not just a hybrid of a man and a lion but a fusion of Egypt and the kingdom of Kush, now northern Sudan. It’s made out of sandy grey granite and it’s beautifully preserved. The muscular lion’s back, the mane of hair and the powerful outstretched paws are all classically Egyptian – but it’s not a typically Egyptian pharaoh’s face, because this man is unquestionably a black African, and this sphinx is the image of a black pharaoh. Hieroglyphics on the sphinx’s chest spell it out: this is a portrait of the great King Taharqo, the fourth pharaoh to rule over the combined kingdoms of Kush and Egypt.
I’m referring to the world as it was around 700 BC. Even though populations were tiny – only about 1 per cent of today’s world population occupied the whole of the globe then – large-scale conflicts were frequent and bitter. War was everywhere, and one of the features of the period was the conquest of long-established centres of wealth and civilization by poorer peoples living on the edge. In the case of Egypt, this occurred when the mighty land of the pharaohs was conquered and for a time ruled by its southern neighbour – the kingdom of Kush.
For thousands of years Egypt had looked on its southern Kushite neighbour essentially as a rich but troublesome colony that could be exploited for its raw materials – there was gold and ivory and, very importantly, slaves. In this almost colonial relationship, Egypt was very much the master. But in 728 BC the balance of power flipped. Egypt had become fragmented and weak, and the Kushite king, Piankhi, took the opportunity to send his armies north, where they picked off the cities of Egypt one by one, until finally the north was quashed, and the Kushites were in charge of an empire that ran roughly from modern Khartoum to modern Alexandria. In order to govern this new state, they created a new national identity, a hybrid that would combine both Egypt and Kush.
Taharqo, represented by the British Museum sphinx, was the most important of all the Kushite kings. He initiated a golden age for his immense new kingdom, and he succeeded largely because, rather than imposing Kushite customs on the Egyptians, he absorbed and adopted theirs. Even in Kush itself, Taharqo built pyramids on the Egyptian model, and he worshipped the Egyptian god Amun; he restored temples in the Egyptian style, and his officials wrote in Egyptian hieroglyphics. It’s a pattern that we see again and again in successful conquests: the conquerors use the existing symbols and vocabulary of power, because those are the ones that are already familiar to the population. It makes sense to keep using a language of control that everybody is accustomed to accepting. The Sphinx of Taharqo, in its calculated mixture of the two different traditions, is not just a striking portrait of the Kushite ruler as a traditional Egyptian pharaoh; it’s also a lesson in political method. And, for a short period, that method worked brilliantly.
This brief Sudanese conquest of Egypt has been a largely forgotten history. The official narrative of Egypt underplayed the Kushite disruption, blandly calling the reign of the Kushite kings the 25th Dynasty, thus quietly incorporating them into an unbroken story of an eternal Egypt; but Kush’s historical role is now being energetically reassessed, and Sudanese history in some measure rewritten.
In the British Museum we have a curator who has been central to this work of recovery and re-evaluation. Dr Derek Welsby, a leading expert on the archaeology of the Sudan, has been digging along the Nile for many years. He has done a lot of work at Kawa, north of Khartoum, where this sphinx came from. It was made to go into a temple there, which had been restored by Taharqo.