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By Root 558 0

Egypt. But Taharka’s sandals were too big for Tanutamon, and even Taharka had not been able to stop the Assyrians. Asshurbanipal returned, and Tanutamon followed his uncle’s example, retreating first to Thebes and then, when that city was threatened, to Napata. In the far regions of the south the Cushite kings were safe, for no Assyrian wanted to pursue them through the difficult regions of the cataracts. But Thebes, abandoned by its soi-disant king, met the full fury of Assyrian wrath. The sack of Thebes was an effective object lesson to rebels; for over fifty years its fall haunted the memories of men and found an echo in the words of the prophet Nahum when he threatened Nineveh with a similar fate.

Asshurbanipal also left a description of the destruction of Amon’s holy city. “Heavy booty, beyond counting, I took away from Thebes. Against Egypt and Cush I let my weapons rage and showed my might.” The conquest ended the glory of Thebes, and the pretensions of the Cushite dynasty.

If we want to think in terms of national psychoses, we might say that the Cushite kings had developed a trauma about Egypt. Up and down, back and forth; every time they had sallied forth to Memphis, the Assyrians had appeared and sent them packing. Enough was enough. They were safe and prosperous in their own kingdom, and there, from this time on, they stayed. The subsequent history of the kingdom of Cush, which turned its eyes away from Egypt and to the south, is fascinating, and I wish we had time to talk about it in detail. The capital was finally shifted even farther south, to Meroë, and here a version of Egyptian culture lingered for centuries, mixed with various native elements. The last pyramids in Africa were built in Cush, odd little redbrick imitations of the towering monuments of Giza and Dahshur. A new language developed, called Meroitic; temples and palaces were built and maintained. Cush looked to Egypt as the font and origin of its culture, but never again did it contemplate the Two Lands as a field for conquest. The splendor of Egypt, which had dazzled the vision of Piye and Taharka, had blinded Tanutamon.

BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD

Sooner or later, most historians succumb to the urge to discover causes in history. We have had occasion to ponder causality once before when we talked about the genesis of civilization and hauled out the homely analogy of the wagon on the slope. I could belabor this figure of speech further. It lends itself, with an aptitude I had admittedly not foreseen, to the process of decline as well as to the process of growth. But I will assume that the reader is imaginative enough to invent his own images: wagons grinding to a halt, level and monotonous plains, etc. Let us, instead, go on to consider some of the factors which have been suggested as causes for the decline of Egyptian civilization: the rise of the priesthood, which not only controlled a paralyzing amount of the national wealth, but exercised a stagnating influence upon experimentation and new ideas; the power of the army and the military leader; the appearance of iron, which is not found in Egypt, as a material for weapons and tools; the pressure exerted by the great folk migrations; the corruption of the native Egyptian genius or ethos by poorly assimilated influences from without; the increasingly formalized social structure, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer; the substitution of form for content and resignation for struggle in the intellectual and spiritual realms.

There you are; a nice representative sampling. None of the above is original with me, as far as I know. Perhaps I ought to invent a couple of my own: (1) that fatal something in the psychology of the Egyptian people, the desire for regimentation and blind obedience; (2) the will of God.

I doubt if I can persuade the reader to take my second cause seriously; even devout historians assume that the Deity works through certain ascertainable rules. The first of my suggestions may not sound so immediately implausible. Its absurdity should become apparent