For nearly three thousand years, a series of kingdoms flourished in the Sudanese Nile Valley—a region known in antiquity as Kush and by modern scholars as Nubia. Ancient Nubian trade networks reached across the Mediterranean to Greece and Rome and far into central Africa. In the eighth century BCE, Nubian kings based at the capital city of Napata conquered neighboring Egypt, and for nearly a century, controlled one of the largest empires in antiquity. The Nubians built major cities, temples, palaces, and more pyramids than the Egyptians. Their artists and craftspeople created magnificent jewelry, pottery, metalwork, furniture, and sculpture. Yet for many people today, this powerful history remains little known.

Ancient Nubia: Art of the 25th Dynasty presents two hundred works of art, all from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, made during the peak of Nubian power. The exhibition features masterpieces that highlight the skill, artistry, and innovation of Napatan makers and reflect the wealth and power of their kings and queens. For much of the century since their discovery, the significance of these objects was not fully realized, leading them to be interpreted as merely derivative of Egyptian material culture. Only in recent decades has a more accurate history of mutual influence among these civilizations come to be thoroughly researched, appreciated, and understood.

This Art Is Not Egyptian At first glance, much of the art in this exhibition may appear to be Egyptian. In reality, it comes from Nubia, or Kush, Egypt’s neighbor to the south, in what is today Sudan. A closer look at the objects reveals distinctively Nubian features and motifs that set them apart from works found in Egypt.

The two civilizations shared the northern Nile Valley for millennia. At certain times, they were friends and trading partners. Often, they were rivals competing to control commercial networks and precious commodities, especially gold. For some five hundred years, from about 1550 to 1070 BCE, Egypt controlled the northern part of Nubia, and cultural exchange between the two cultures flourished. The cult of Amen-Ra fostered a close religious, social, and political relationship between Thebes in southern Egypt and Napata in northern Kush. Then, in the mid-eighth century BCE, Nubians from the kingdom of Napata (750–332 BCE) conquered Egypt, unifying the valley from modern-day Khartoum in Sudan all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. King Piankhy and his four successors ruled Egypt as the 25th Dynasty. They conducted large-scale temple-building projects in Egypt, and it is hardly surprising that they adopted some features of Egyptian art and architecture. Perhaps most importantly, Kushite rulers began to leave inscriptions in Egyptian hieroglyphs, enabling scholars for the first time to read history from the Nubian perspective.

Because the first archaeologists to excavate in Sudan were trained first as Egyptologists, and because of racist and colonial biases inherent in their worldview, they often failed to recognize the ways in which Nubian art stands apart from, and sometimes surpasses, the art of Egypt. This exhibition is the first in the United States to display the art of Napata through the lens of its Nubian creators.