Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [67]
To the Egyptian south was the land of Kush. In this direction aggression flowed in the opposite direction from that across the Libyan border. The Egyptian motive can be inferred from the transparent etymology of their name for Kush, Nubia—from nābaw (Coptic nūb), ‘gold’—although the chief mines were inconveniently sited in the eastern deserts. But like Egypt, it could also be seen as an integral part of Kūmat, ‘The Black Land’, made up of fertile Nile silt, the kingdom that existed only as a ribbon development along the great river. Egypt had been operating south of the natural boundary at the first cataract throughout the Old Kingdom, mining gold and establishing a settlement at Buhen, by the second cataract. It gained full control of Nubia in the nineteenth century, lost it again in the eighteenth, re-established control in the sixteenth and then held it for five hundred years. The Egyptian viceroy was given the title ZIR nasuwt kuš, ‘King’s Son of Kush’, to emphasise his centrality in the government. Around 1087 the holder of this office abused his position to occupy the Egyptian capital, Thebes, and then withdrew south of the first cataract to declare effective independence for Nubia.
Nothing more is then heard of Nubia for 260 years, but around 728 the ruler of Kush, now based at Napata but investing himself with full pharaonic splendour, asserted a claim to celebrate the worship of the gods at Thebes, Memphis and Onw (Heliopolis). He was able to enforce his claim, and the next sixty years saw Kushites in (fairly loose) control of Egypt. The unity of the Black Land had come back to haunt its erstwhile masters.
This unity was ended, as it happened, by a full-scale Assyrian invasion, coming in from the opposite end of the country in 664 BC. In the aftermath, a new dynasty in Egypt restored indigenous control within its traditional borders,* while the Nubian kings returned to their own land and moved their capital from Napata to Meroe, 400 kilometres farther up the Nile. There they founded the Meroitic civilisation, which lasted until AD c.250, with an alphabetic script based on hieroglyphs. The language they wrote in this way is not related to Egyptian, and is not fully understood to this day.
Once again there was no known impact on Egyptian as used in Egypt itself, despite the long coexistence of Egypt with Nubia. The details of influence are difficult to judge since we have no direct evidence of the language spoken in Kush at the time. During the period of Egyptian control of Kush, Egyptian must have been used widely at elite levels in its northern regions, but use of Egyptian did not survive the withdrawal of links between the two countries, despite the evident enthusiasm for things Egyptian which persisted south of the border. The mutual imperial adventure had lasted, on and off, over two thousand years, but it had left both partners without any lasting linguistic link.
Another country where Egypt attempted conquest was the land of Canaan to its north-east. Since the earliest period there had been trade links with Palestine, and around the middle of the second millennium these became particularly strong with the Phoenician city of Byblos, which supplied cedar timber logged in Lebanon. Around 1830 BC, a pharaoh invaded the south of Palestine, but little is known of his motives or any consequences. Four centuries later, there was a sustained campaign to control the whole country as far north as the borders of Mitanni. This has been explained as an attempt to free Egypt once and for all from the threat of foreign domination, recently suffered under the so-called Hyk-sōs kings (a Greek rendering of hqR hrst, ‘ruler from abroad’). But there is no evidence, linguistic or other, that this dynasty, whoever they were, had come from the north-east.
Whatever the motive, Egypt did succeed in establishing Egyptian over-lordship throughout Palestine and Syria as far as Ugarit in the north. This is