Wretched Kush: Ethnic Identities and Boundaries in Egypt's Nubian Empire

"Wretched Kush is the standout book on the Kush, which was an urbanized culture to the south of Egypt in what was known as Nubia. It was predominantly in what is now Sudan, further up the Nile. Most of our written evidence about the Kingdom of Kush comes from the Egyptians, who were usually expanding into their kingdom or their area of control. What I was particularly interested in for my book was the border. The Egyptians established a very clear border by building a series of forts. The investment in these forts was huge—you don’t see anything else like it in the wider Mediterranean until Hadrian’s Wall and the Roman Empire . The Egyptians were clearly worried about the Kush to the south. This book is the perfect starting point to understand Kushite history. It’s about the archeology and what it tells us, and about the relationship between the Egyptians and the Kush through the perspective of the Kushites. The book is using Egyptian evidence but tries to understand how they might be exaggerating or ultimately inventing the Kush in their own culture. They’re creating this bogeyman figure as a way of asserting their own ideology, belief systems and ideas about the pharaoh’s role of maintaining order and justice—where everywhere outside of his control is chaos. The Kingdom of Kush becomes an embodiment of that, in many ways. The title sums it up: ‘wretched Kush’ is what the Egyptians called the Kushites. One interesting issue I had to tackle a few times was whether or not the ancient world had a concept similar to racism or not. The color of skin comes up a lot with the Kush in how they’re depicted. The Egyptians painted different cultures with different skin colors. It seems to be about who they are not. They have dark skin. We don’t have dark skin. Those people have light skin. We don’t have light skin. We know who we are because we’re not them. The Kush are a great example of how identities can be built culturally through opposition with others. The Kushites were originally a pastoralist, semi-nomadic group. They settled and built towns, but they maintained a lot of that pastoralist tradition and culture. For example, cattle were still widely acclaimed in their society, and one way we map just how much power or influence a person might have had is by the number of bucrania they are buried with (bucrania are the top of the cow’s skull with the horns still attached). There’s one person who is buried with nearly 5,000, which shows the importance of this individual. Also, through analysis of the bones, we can see that the bucrania came from a massive area around the Kush kingdom. As is always the way with boundaries, things go in different directions, and we also see Kushite religion come north into Egypt. The cow goddess Hathor is argued by some scholars to possibly be originally a Kushite goddess, or maybe an amalgamation with one. This book really digs into what we can know about Kushite culture. Much of that relies on the archeology, but what I particularly like about Stuart Tyson Smith is that he doesn’t ignore the written evidence, even though it’s Egyptian. There is. The Kushites built small pyramids, and you can still visit some of those. It’s not the same as walking around Rome, and Sudan is not necessarily somewhere you can go and visit at the moment. But there are things to see."