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that had for thirty centuries towered above the east. The event is described in Kings II, which is more to be commended for its literary style than for historical accuracy; the chronicler may have confused this Assyrian campaign with another one twenty-five years later. For what it’s worth, he says that Sennacherib of Assyria led his armies against the “rebels” in Jerusalem. When the soldiers of Egypt came to defend their ally, the Assyrian king jeered at them, using the familiar analogy of the broken reed. But plague—or the visitation of God—decimated the Assyrian ranks, and the army had to retreat. The crucial meeting between Egypt and Assyria was yet to come.

Shabaka was succeeded by his brother, or perhaps his son, named Shabatka; and he in turn was succeeded by his cousin (?) Taharka, the last of the strong Cushite kings. Taharka built largely in Egypt and at Napata, and left a number of stelae at various places in Nubia, which is one reason why we know more about him than about some of his predecessors. One of the Greek historians accused him of murdering his predecessor, but this may be just a nasty rumor. His pyramid at Napata is the biggest of the lot, but it is pretty pathetic compared with even the Middle Kingdom royal tombs of Egypt. Despite their poor construction, the pyramids of Napata still stand upon the plain near Gebel Barkal. They are in ruinous condition and look peculiar because of their slope, which is much steeper than the standard fifty-two-degree angle of Egyptian pyramids. All of them were robbed in antiquity; in modern times they were excavated by Reisner, whose precise methods allowed him to reconstruct the genealogy of many generations of Cushite kings.

Before Taharka concerned himself with his pyramid, he had other problems to face. Thebes was too far south for his tastes; he resided most of the time at Memphis, where, one supposes, he could keep an eye on the activities of the threatening Assyrians. Sennacherib, the scourge of Jerusalem, was dead, but his son, Esarhaddon, was an even more formidable warrior. He had to deal with a number of rebellions among the vassal cities of Phoenicia, in some of which we may see Taharka’s fine Nubian hand. His attempts to distract the Assyrian only delayed the inevitable. In 671, Esarhaddon marched south, driving Taharka’s army before him, until at last he stood before the walls of the most ancient city of Memphis, Menes’s capital. There is a ring of truth in the Assyrian king’s grim record of the campaign; Egyptian records, needless to say, are conspicuously silent on the matter. Esarhaddon gives Taharka his due; the battles he fought were bloody ones, and he claims to have inflicted no less than five wounds upon the person of the Cushite king. Taharka’s valor was in vain. Assyria took Memphis and leveled its legendary walls. Among the captives were Taharka’s brother and the women of his house hold.

In succeeding years the fortunes of life and death turned the struggle between Egypt and Assyria into a deadly seesaw; Esarhaddon’s departure enabled Taharka to recover Memphis for a time, but after the death of the Assyrian king, his son Asshurbanipal returned to quell the stubborn Egyptians. Once again Taharka fled from Memphis to Thebes and then to Napata. This time he stayed there.

Up to this point the Assyrians had committed one important error, which later conquerors did not repeat. They conquered and departed, taking heavy loads of booty with them and extorting great oaths of fealty from the Egyptian vassals they established in office. And as soon as they left, the rumble of rebellion began again. Even in the final throes of degeneration and defeat, the Egyptians were hard to conquer. Like wheat before the storm they bent and were not broken.

When Asshurbanipal left Egypt, after chasing Taharka home to Cush, he left a power vacuum. The various petty princes of the country started their aping of imperial dignity. Taharka died soon afterward; his nephew, Tanutamon, stepped into his place. Again a Cushite king came north, besieged Memphis, and ruled