26/09/2013
Jebel Barkal (“Mt. Barkal”) (var. Gebel Barkal, Gebel el-Barkal, and in some early sources Gebel Berkel/Birkel) is the modern Arabic name of a lone sandstone butte on the western edge of Karima, Sudan, about 365 km NNW of Khartoum and 23 km downstream from the Merowe Dam at the fourth cataract of the Nile; its coordinates are 18º 32’ N, 31º 49’ E).1 Situated about 1 1/2 km from the right bank, it rises to a height of 104 m above ground level and confronts the river with a sheer cliff 80 to 90 m high and approximately 200 m long .The mountain’s unusual appearance – its isolation, sharp profile, and spire-like pinnacle, 75 m high – made it a natural wonder in ancient times and excited intense theological speculation. When the Egyptians conquered northern Sudan (Kush/”Upper Nubia”) in the early Eighteenth Dynasty (ca. 1504 BCE), they identified Jebel Barkal as the birthplace and chief southern residence of their state god Amun. As part of their program of conquest, they established the cult of Amun in many places in Nubia, but Jebel Barkal seems to have had a unique importance for them as a creation site and home of a primeval aspect of Amun who renewed life each year with the Nile inundation. Beneath the Jebel Barkal cliff the Egyptians constructed a major religious center and gave it the same name as Karnak (Ipet-Sut), Amun’s great sanctuary at Thebes, some 1250 km downriver .The Egyptians called the hill variously Dju-Wa’ab (“Pure Mountain”) and Nesut-Tawy (“Thrones of the Two Lands.”) (which in Dynasty 25 and the Napatan Period sometimes became Neset-Tawy [“Throne of the Two Lands”]). The settlement which grew up around it they called Napata, which became the southernmost town in their African empire. Jebel Barkla’s most distinctive feature is the colossal free-standing pinnacle on the south corner of its cliff . This towering monolith, unparalleled in the Nile Valley, was anciently perceived as a gigantic natural statue with many overlapping identities: a rearing bureaus serpent, a phallus, a squatting god (or several), and, depending on the direction from which it was seen, a vague human form crowned with a sun disk or a White Crown – or perhaps even a Red Crown or Double Crown. Most conspicuously in public art it was interpreted as a uraeus, wearing the tall, knobbed White Crown. Because the bureaus, worn on the front of the the king’s crown, was the primary symbol of Egyptian kingship, and because the White Crown was the symbol of royal hegemony over Upper Egypt (or “the South”), the pinnacle on Jebel Barkal apparently “proved” to the Egyptians that the mountain was an original source of their “Upper Egyptian” kingship and that this kingship, granted by Amun of Jebel Barkal, included all of Kush.
Kingdom of Nabta:
Man as we related earlier in this series, deriving from different genuine historical studies, has lived in the Sudan for at least more than seven million years, in and around the valley of the Nile which wanders more than 4,000 miles from the lakes of Central Africa to the Mediterranean, and thus the Sudan might well have been the cradle of civilisation, rather than some other studies claim that the Euphrates was the cradle of human civilisation. About four centuries before Christ the Ox-driven water wheel, which still plays a vital role in the country’s and other countries’ economy, was introduced to the Sudan. At the same time it had known long distance trade by using camels, brought by the Persians to Egypt and from there to Sudan.
“Given its proximity to Egypt and the centrality of the Nile River that both countries share, it is not surprising that historically Egypt has influenced Sudan significantly especially the northern part of the country. Ancient Cush, located in present-day northern Sudan, was strongly influenced by Egypt for about 1,000 years beginning ca. 2700 B.C. Although the Hyksos kings of Egypt temporarily broke off contact, Cush subsequently was incorporated into Egypt’s New Kingdom as a province about 1570 B.C. and remained under Egyptian control until about 1100 B.C.” Historians say.
Long after the occupation of Egypt to Sudan, the Sudanese took advantage of the deterioration of the Egyptian Empire, and “Kashta” the first great kings of Kush succeeded in recovering the independence of his country, and established of his kingdom’s capital in the city of “Nabta” at the bottom of the fourth cataract (current city of Karima). His son and successor “Ba’nkhi” managed to occupy Egypt in 725 BC and laid the foundations of a state that stretched from the Mediterranean to the outskirts of Abyssinia, and Palestine. However, the state followed a similar approach on the same track of the Egyptian civilization, as “Amon” remained the official deity of the state, and its kings adopted the same Pharaonic titles, and buried their dead and decorate their tombs as the Egyptians did, and with the same Hieroglyphic pattern of writings on the cemeteries. But nevertheless here the Sudanese civilization got the upper hand in the fields of government and economy.
Tirhakah
the last king of Egypt of the Ethiopian (the fifteenth) dynasty. He was the brother-in-law of So (q.v.). He probably ascended the throne about B.C. 692, having been previously king of Ethiopia (2 Kings 19:9; Isa. 37:9), which with Egypt now formed one nation. He was a great warrior, and but little is known of him. The Assyrian armies under Esarhaddon, and again under Assur-bani-pal, invaded Egypt and defeated Tirhakah, who afterwards retired into Ethiopia, where he died, after reigning twenty-six years
