AfroMythos: Tellings

Kush wrote its own language in its own letters for some six hundred years. Since 1911 we have been able to read every sign aloud, yet most of the words still mean nothing to us. Follow the script from two royal names on a boat stand to the last inscription on a temple column, by way of a lion god whose hymns were written in Egyptian. Read it with pictures and sources: https://afromythos.com/empires/meroitic-script

Halloween is not an African festival. But Africa has its own beings of the forest path, the riverbank and the dark doorway. For the last week of October, one story a night, each told as a belief and traced to its source. Read it with pictures and sources: https://afromythos.com/halloween

Black heaps of slag still stand beside the ruins of Meroë, the royal city of Kush. In 1912 a British scholar called it “the Birmingham of ancient Africa”. Follow the evidence instead: a furnace rebuilt and fired again, ninety-seven radiocarbon dates, an old myth about how Africa learned iron, a king’s road across the desert, and the goods that went north along the Nile. Read it with pictures and sources: https://afromythos.com/empires/meroe-iron

Kush built more pyramids than Egypt did, steeper and smaller, over about a thousand years. Follow them from Piye’s grave at El-Kurru to a flooded tomb at Nuri, an architect’s drawing cut into a chapel wall, and the chapels where the dead were fed; then meet the people who numbered, robbed, copied and rebuilt them, and the pyramids’ troubles today. Read it with pictures and sources: https://afromythos.com/empires/pyramids-of-kush

Around 25 BC an army from Kush took Aswan and pulled down the statues of Rome’s new emperor. Follow the queens of Meroë: a title the Romans mistook for a name, a war told from both sides, an emperor’s head buried under a temple step, a queen carved as large as her king, and the women who carried their name into Khartoum’s streets in 2019. Read it with pictures and sources: https://afromythos.com/empires/kandakes

In the eighth century BC kings from Kush, in what is now Sudan, marched north and ruled Egypt for about ninety years. Follow them from a holy mountain at Napata: a king named for his country, a march that ended at Memphis, a conqueror angrier about starving horses than rebellion, a puzzle about which king came first, a great flood, the Assyrian wars and a tomb painted with stars. Read it with pictures and sources: https://afromythos.com/empires/kushite-pharaohs

Not long before 1550 BC an army led by Kush marched deep into Egypt; soon after, an Egyptian king seized a letter meant for its ruler. Follow the first kingdom of Kush, at Kerma in Sudan: a temple of mud still nearly 20 metres high, a round hall for the king, pots fired upside down, graves fronted by thousands of cattle skulls, the people buried with their kings, the Egyptian conquest, and seven broken statues found in 2003. Read it with pictures and sources: https://afromythos.com/empires/kerma

Around 280 BC, in a young city on Egypt’s Mediterranean shore, a line of kings set out to gather every book in the world. Follow the scholars of Alexandria, the Egyptian priest who wrote Egypt’s history in Greek, the shadow at Aswan that measured the Earth, and the long, slow end that no single fire explains. Read it with pictures and sources: https://afromythos.com/empires/great-library

Before dawn on a summer morning, a bright star climbs out of the eastern glow, and Egypt knows the river will soon rise. Follow the sky-watchers who turned that star into a year, the night into hours, and a goddess into a map of heaven. Read it with pictures and sources: https://afromythos.com/empires/reading-the-sky

Around 1600 BC, a scribe in Thebes copied a book of surgery: 48 injuries, from the head down, each with a verdict. Follow Egypt’s doctors from the wound to the pulse, the tooth and the birth, and follow their books out of Luxor into the world. Read it with pictures and sources: https://afromythos.com/empires/first-doctors