Vanished Worlds

Part 2: Meroe - The Head of Caesar


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In 25 BC, a Kushite queen led thirty thousand soldiers north and took three Roman cities. She brought the head of Augustus Caesar back to the desert and ordered it buried face-up beneath a temple threshold, so that everyone who climbed those steps would walk unknowingly over the emperor's face. She then won the peace negotiation. The Kushite account of this war — carved in forty-five rows of a script that has been phonetically readable since 1909 — sits in the British Museum. We cannot understand a single sentence of it. Part 2 of 2.

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