Kushite warrior

KUSHITE WARRIOR from the Late Bronze Age, during the time when Kush was ruled by the Egypt’s New Kingdom from 1504 BC to 1077 BC, following the Egyptian conquest, destruction and subsequent abandonment of the first Kushite royal city, Kerma, as retribution for the Kushite support of the invasion of Egypt by the Levantine Hyksos. The Kushites were a people living in the territory of Kush, along the Upper Nile in what is now southern Egypt and Sudan from the Neolithic to Late Antiquity.

Around the third millennium BC, Kerma grew from an archaic cluster of African round huts to a big city of rectangular mudbrick houses that resembled those of their northern Egyptian neighbours, although the native African tradition of round huts with a conical thatched roof persisted alongside the new style of construction. The city of Kerma had a royal audience hall built like an African round hut but of enormous dimensions, next to a massive rectilinear mudbrick religious monument called the Western Deffufa. Near Kerma, there was another city called Dukki Gel, that wasn’t destroyed by the Egyptians and was continuously inhabited under their rule, in which the mudbrick defensive walls and houses had a round shape following the local African tradition, unlike Kerma.

The population of Kush wasn’t ethnically homogenous, as the name Kush referred to a region south of Egypt rather than a single ethnic group. Southern Kush had a strong Nilotic component, while further north the Afro-Asiatic (Egyptian and Cushitic) component was higher. Egyptian New Kingdom represents the skin tones of the Kushites ranging from jet black to reddish brown. Egyptian art often shows Kushite warriors wearing leopard skins or leather loincloths, while the more Egyptianized urban elite of Kush wore sheer white linen garments, colourful sashes and sometimes Egyptian jewellery. The Kushites covered their hair in red clay, and according to Herodotus, painted their bodies white and red before battle. They were armed with oval cowhide shields, wooden clubs, axes, daggers, bows and arrows tipped with metal or stone, and spears made of metal or antelope horn, and practiced tattooing and scarification.

In the 8th century BC, the Kushites conquered Egypt and stablished the 25th dynasty, a dynasty of black pharaohs. The Kushites are the ancestors of modern-day Nubians, an ethnic minority in southern Egypt whose ancestry is of both Nilotic and Afro-Asiatic origin. The territory of Bronze Age Kush is often called Nubia nowadays, but this name is quite anachronistic for such an early period.