From Slave to Pharaoh

The Black Experience of Ancient Egypt

Donald B. Redford

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781421404097
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Egyptian Ancient History
• Index: History

Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

In From Slave to Pharaoh, noted Egyptologist Donald B. Redford examines over two millennia of complex social and cultural interactions between Egypt and the Nubian and Sudanese civilizations that lay to the south of Egypt. These interactions resulted in the expulsion of the black Kushite pharaohs of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty in 671 B.C. by an invading Assyrian army.

Redford traces the development of Egyptian perceptions of race as their dominance over the darker-skinned peoples of Nubia and the Sudan grew, exploring the cultural construction of spatial and spiritual boundaries between Egypt and other African peoples. Redford focuses on the role of racial identity in the formulation of imperial power in Egypt and the legitimization of its sphere of influence, and he highlights the dichotomy between the Egyptians' treatment of the black Africans it deemed enemies and of those living within Egyptian society. He also describes the range of responses—from resistance to assimilation—of subjugated Nubians and Sudanese to their loss of self-determination. Indeed, by the time of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, the culture of the Kushite kings who conquered Egypt in the late eighth century B.C. was thoroughly Egyptian itself.

Moving beyond recent debates between Afrocentrists and their critics over the racial characteristics of Egyptian civilization, From Slave to Pharaoh reveals the true complexity of race, identity, and power in Egypt as documented through surviving texts and artifacts, while at the same time providing a compelling account of war, conquest, and culture in the ancient world.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Egyptians and Nubians
• 2. The Problem of Frontiers
• 3. Nubia: Egypt’s Primary Sphere of Influence
• 4. “Plotting in Their Valleys”: The Unruly Tribesmen
• 5. From Chiefdom to State and Back Again: The Final Conquest of Kush
• 6. The Egyptian Empire in Kush
• 7. The Silent Years: The Abandonment of Lower Nubia and the Rise of Napata
• 8. The Sudan Invades Egypt
• 9. The Invasion of Piankhy
• 10. The Twenty-fourth Dynasty
• 11. The Resistance to Assyrian Expansion
• 12. “Taharqa the Conqueror”
• 13. Egypt of the “Black Pharaohs”
• 14. Thebes under the Twenty-fifth Dynasty
• 15. The End of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty in Egypt
• Epilogue
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index