The Kingdom of Kush: The Nubians Who Built the Steep Pyramids — Sleep Podcast

If you were lying in the white Nubian desert tonight, with the last of the day’s heat going out of the stone, you would not be far from the river. It is there, low in the dark, a slow ribbon of water moving south, the way it has moved for a hundred thousand years. And if you looked up from that desert floor, toward the hills to the north and the south, you would see them: the steep pyramids of a kingdom that built on the far bank of the Nile, that washed its kings in the river, and that kept the old words long after Egypt had lost them. A slow bedtime history of the people of Kush.

About an hour and a quarter, in the voice of the show. We cross the river, and find the land of gold; we sit with the first peoples, and in Kerma the mudbrick city; we dance with Egypt through the long twilight; we meet the king who washed his hands in the Nile, and the king who kept the old words; we stand in the double kingdom and the lion god, and before the Assyrian war; we follow the move to the new capital, and the steep pyramids; we meet the language we cannot read, the queen-kings, and the land of iron; and we come, at the end, to the Roman head, the long peace and the end, the Christian kingdom, and the last word.

A slow, unhurried reading, for the edge of sleep. About seventy-five minutes. Where the scholarship is open, the narration says so.

Sources (a selection): Török, The Kingdom of Kush (1997) and Between Two Worlds (2009); Pope, The Double Kingdom under Taharqa; the Meroitic and Napatan inscriptions (Kawa, Naga, Musawwarat es Sufra); the El-Amarna letters (C 1, the “king who washed his hands”); the Assyrian annals of Ashurbanipal (the sack of Thebes, 666 BC); the Meroitic pyramid tombs (Meroe, Pyramids of Meroe); the Christian Kingdom sources (Mereb, The Coptic Kingdom); the British Museum and National Museum of Sudan collections; World History Encyclopedia, “Kush” and “Meroe” entries.