Kush

Kꜣš is the Egyptian name of the land beyond the Second Cataract, written k-ꜣ-š with the three-hills determinative that Egyptian put on every foreign country. It first appears under the Twelfth Dynasty, in the records of the kings who fortified the cataracts in the early second millennium BCE, and it comes with an epithet attached: the boundary stela of Senusret III at Semna and the texts of the New Kingdom speak of Kꜣš ẖst, “wretched Kush,” the standing formula for the southern enemy. When the New Kingdom conquered the south, the same word named the province, and the viceroy who governed it from the First Cataract to Napata carried the title King’s Son of Kush, sꜣ-nswt n Kꜣš, through the whole of the empire period. The word is not Egyptian; it is the Egyptian spelling of a native name whose meaning is unknown, and whose relation to the Meroitic qes of a later millennium remains an open question. The reconstructed vowel follows the Akkadian and Hebrew transcriptions, which agree on a long u.

The entry is the headwater of the page’s largest family. Every form in it, from the Assyrian annals to the Talmud, descends from these three signs, and the fact worth holding onto is the circumstances of the first writing: the name was set down by a hostile neighbor, on fortress walls and boundary stones, with a curse attached. It was then borne by an Egyptian viceroy, written by an Assyrian scribe recording the defeat of Taharqa, and taken into the Bible as the name of a son of Ham, losing the epithet along the way and keeping the name. The pharaohs wrote it with a curse, and everyone downstream took it as simply the name of the country; the only people who never used it, so far as their stones can be read, were the Kushites.

Aithiopía is the Greek name for the land beyond Egypt, and unlike every other form on this page it is not a borrowing but a description. The Greeks themselves derived Aithíopes from aíthō, “burn,” and ṓps, “face,” the burnt-faced people; modern etymology is less sure, and Beekes treats the ancient analysis as folk etymology on a name of unknown origin. Homer puts the Aithiopes at the ends of the earth, split between the setting and the rising sun, where the gods go to feast. Herodotus makes them concrete: Meroë is “the mother city of the other Ethiopians” (2.29), the long-lived Ethiopians receive Cambyses’s spies and send the Persians home with a bow they cannot draw (3.17–25), and the Ethiopians on Egypt’s border bring Darius their gifts of gold and ebony and elephant tusk (3.97). Eratosthenes and Ptolemy inherit the name, and the Septuagint writes it wherever the Hebrew says Kush.

The form is the one name on this page that describes rather than names, and it has traveled the farthest. Because the Greek Bible chose it for Kush, Latin Christendom read Ethiopia for a thousand years where the Hebrew said something else; because the kings of Aksum, writing in Greek, took it for their own kingdom, it crossed the Red Sea and the Ethiopian highlands and settled on a different state, which keeps it today. The Greeks who coined it meant the Nile above Egypt. The name moved across a sea and a mountain range to another kingdom, and the geographers who first wrote it would not recognize the map it now labels.

Kûš is the Hebrew Bible’s name for the land south of Egypt, taken, as the lexicon states without hedging, from the Egyptian Kꜣš, with the long u that the Akkadian transcription also shows. It occurs some thirty times. In the Table of Nations Cush is a son of Ham and the father of Nimrod and of the peoples of the Red Sea shore; in the prophets it is a country, the “land of whirring wings beyond the rivers of Cush” of Isaiah 18, the ally whose fall with Egypt Isaiah 20 foretells; in Kings it has a king, Tirhakah, the Taharqa of the Assyrian annals, marching out against Sennacherib; in Jeremiah its people have the skin that cannot be changed, and in Esther it bounds the Persian empire, “from India to Cush,” exactly where Darius’s own lists put it.

The entry is where the page’s two great threads cross. When the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek, Kûš the land became Aithiopía in nearly every verse, the Greek description substituted for the Egyptian name, and the Latin Vulgate followed; the Geʽez Bible followed the Greek and wrote Ityoṗya, and a kingdom on the far side of the Red Sea read the verses about Cush as verses about itself. The Syriac Peshitta and the Talmud, reading the Hebrew, kept Kûš. So the two names divided the world by the language a church read its Bible in: east of the Greek, Kush; west of it, Ethiopia. A verse in Hebrew says Kush, the same verse in Greek says Ethiopia, and modern Ethiopia is named by the second word.

Meluḫḫa is a Bronze Age name, the Sumerian and Akkadian word for the farthest land of the Gulf trade, in all likelihood the Indus, and it has its own page in this atlas. In the Sargonid period the Assyrian scribes brought it back for a different far country. Sargon II’s rock inscription at Tang-i Var (706 BCE) names Shebitku, the Kushite pharaoh, as the king of Meluḫḫa who extradited the rebel of Ashdod; Esarhaddon’s inscriptions use the name seven times in the context of the Egyptian campaigns, paired with Egypt; and the same scribes revived Magan, the old copper-land of the Gulf, as an archaic name for Egypt itself. The reading of these passages as Kush, or as the Kushite-ruled Nile valley more broadly, is the common one, but the referent is debated and the standard edition leaves the name unglossed, which is why the entry carries the disputed label rather than passing the identification off as settled.

The form is the one name on this page that was a name before Kush existed and names Kush by pretending it is somewhere else. Assyrian learning kept the geography of the third millennium alive as a literary register, and when its kings reached the edge of the known world on the Nile they reached for the words their ancestors had used for the edge of the known world on the sea. The Indus name on the Nile is scribal antiquarianism, and it is also a measure: Kush was, to the Assyrians, as far as a place could be, and the only word they had for that far was two thousand years old.

Kūsu is the Akkadian name of Kush, written KUR.ku-u-si with the land determinative, and it enters the record at the moment Assyria met the Kushites as rulers of Egypt. Esarhaddon’s inscriptions after the conquest of Memphis in 671 BCE give Taharqa his title as king of Kush, and the Assyrian king’s own titulary expands to “king of Egypt, Paturisi, and Kush,” Lower Egypt, Upper Egypt, and the land beyond, the three terms in which Assyria carved up the Nile. The form recurs in Ashurbanipal’s accounts of the Kushite retreat, and the Babylonian versions of the Achaemenid lists later carry the same name at the end of Darius’s provinces. The spelling writes the u long and plainly, and the genitive Kūsi of the royal titles is the shape the word most often takes.

The entry is the oldest witness to how the name sounded. The hieroglyphs of Kꜣš write a consonant frame around a vowel the script could not show, and the cuneiform supplies it: the long ū that Hebrew Kûš confirms and that the atlas writes back into the Egyptian entry’s reconstruction. The political fact is just as telling. Assyria did not learn the name of Kush by trading up the Nile; it learned it by fighting Kushite kings in the Delta, and the three-part title that put Kush beside Upper and Lower Egypt is the Assyrian scribe’s record of what the Twenty-fifth Dynasty had been, an African kingdom that had made Egypt its northern province. Kush entered cuneiform as the name of the enemy who had been holding Memphis.

Kušaya is Kush in the Elamite versions of the Achaemenid lists, written ku-šá-a-ia behind the AŠ sign that Elamite set before place-names, the determinative the atlas keeps because the stone keeps it. The form is the Old Persian name in Elamite transcription, taken over in its ethnic shape, Kūšiyā, the Kushites, rather than the bare name of the land, and it stands in the Elamite column of the trilingual lists exactly where the Old Persian stands in its own. Elamite was the middle language of the Achaemenid chancery, the one in which the Persepolis administration kept its accounts, and it rendered the foreign names of the empire’s edges by ear from the Persian.

The entry is the middle pillar of this page’s trilingual, as the Elamite Mudraya is on Egypt’s, and it illustrates the limits of the arrangement. Elamite had no word of its own for any land in Africa; the name it writes is Persian in Elamite syllables, which is to say the chancery’s word, not the scribe’s. What Elamite adds is confirmation: that the Persian name was pronounced with the long u the Semitic forms share, and that in the imperial lists Kush was a people before it was a place, a column of tribute-bearers rather than a province with a governor.

Kūšā is the Old Persian name of the land of Kush, written ku-u-š-a with the long vowel spelled out, and its people are the Kūšiyā, the form the great lists prefer: on Darius’s tomb at Naqsh-e Rustam (DNa 29), in the Susa foundation charter (DSe 30), and in Xerxes’s daiva inscription (XPh 25) the Kushites stand near the end of the roll of subject peoples, beside the Libyans and the Carians, the African rim of the empire. Whether the empire ever held them is another matter. Herodotus reports Cambyses’s expedition against the Ethiopians dissolving in the desert, and then reports (3.97) that the Ethiopians bordering Egypt brought Darius not tribute but gifts, gold and ebony and ivory and boys; the Apadana reliefs show them arriving with a tusk and a giraffe. The route by which the name reached Persian, through the Akkadian and Aramaic of the chancery or from Egypt directly, cannot be fixed, and the entry carries no edge.

The form replays, for Egypt’s southern neighbor, the trilingual arrangement that the Egypt page records: Kūšā in Old Persian, Kušaya in the Elamite version, Kūsu in the Babylonian, one name carved three ways on the same monument. What distinguishes it is how little stands behind it. For Egypt the lists are confirmed by satraps, taxes, and a conquered country; for Kush the list is the whole of the evidence. On the tomb of Darius, Kush is a word at the end of a line, and that word is the only proof that the empire of the Persians ever reached it.

Ỉkš is the Demotic form of Kꜣš, the Egyptian name of Kush as the cursive script of the Late and Ptolemaic periods wrote it. The spelling has grown a vowel at the front, the prothetic ỉ that Late Egyptian and Demotic set before words beginning in a consonant cluster, and that single added letter is the hinge of the whole family: it is the vowel Coptic kept in ečōš, and it is the reason the Egyptian name can be followed in one unbroken line from the Middle Kingdom boundary stelae to the Christian monks of the Nile. The word names the land and, as an adjective, its people, in the texts of Egypt’s southern frontier through the Persian, Ptolemaic, and Roman periods, down to the Demotic graffiti that Meroitic envoys to the temple of Isis at Philae left in the third century CE.

The entry has no glyphs to show, since Demotic has no usable Unicode encoding, and its reconstructed reading is anchored on its Coptic descendant rather than guessed. Its work on the page is structural: Demotic is where the name lost its hieroglyphic hills and gained the vowel that Coptic would keep. Without it the Coptic ečōš would look like a different word from the hieroglyphic Kꜣš; with it the two are the same name a thousand years apart, caught in the middle of changing.

Noûbai is the earliest form of the name Nubia, and it enters the record as the name of Kush’s neighbors rather than of Kush. Eratosthenes, writing around 230 BCE and preserved in Strabo, describes the Nile above Egypt: on the left of the river’s course, in Libya, dwell the Noûbai, a great nation, reaching from Meroë to the bends of the river, not subject to the Ethiopians but divided into several kingdoms of their own. The old derivation of the name from Egyptian nbw, “gold,” which would make Nubia the gold-land, is now generally set aside as a learned guess; the name is more likely the people’s own, the same that Ezana’s inscriptions write as Nobā six centuries later and that the Christian kingdom of Nobatia would carry into the Middle Ages.

The entry records a succession in advance. The Noûbai of Eratosthenes live beside the Meroitic kingdom, explicitly outside its rule; by the fourth century CE the Noba are in Meroë’s place, and after them the name Nubia stands on the map where Kush had been. The Greek geographer who first wrote the name was describing a frontier people; he was also, unawares, recording the kingdom’s successor. Nubia first appears in the record as the people next door to Kush, and ends up as the name of the house.

Aethiopia is the Greek name taken into Latin entire, ae for the diphthong and th for the aspirate, and it names Kush in its Roman centuries. Pliny’s sixth book is the fullest Latin account: the expedition of Petronius, prefect of Egypt under Augustus, who in the 20s BCE fought the forces of the Meroitic queen, the candace, and reached Napata; and the praetorian soldiers whom Nero sent south with a tribune to explore, who came back to report that the country up to Meroë was solitude, solitudines, where the Greek writers had placed cities. Seneca, who heard the centurions himself, records their account of the Nile’s marshes. The Roman Aethiopia was the far side of a frontier, visited twice and conquered never.

The Latin name records the kingdom in its decline. Where Herodotus’s Ethiopians were long-lived and rich in gold, Pliny’s explorers find emptiness, and the contrast between the two reports is a measure of what had happened to Meroë’s northern reaches in four centuries. The form’s longer life lies elsewhere: when Jerome made the Vulgate around 400 he rendered Hebrew Kûš as Aethiopia, following the Greek, and so fixed the Greek description into the Bible of Latin Christendom for a thousand years. What the Greek name described, the Latin one inherited, and through Jerome the West read Ethiopia wherever the Hebrew said Kush.

Nubaei is the Latin form of the Nubian name, attested in Pliny’s catalogue of the peoples of the Nile above Egypt, compiled from the Greek explorers and from Juba of Mauretania: “from there the Nubaei Aethiopes, eight days’ journey; their town, set on the Nile, is Tenupsis” (6.191). The ethnic takes the Latin -aei ending that Pliny gives to several of his Ethiopian peoples, and the phrase classes the Nubians as one kind of Ethiopian, a people within the larger category the Greek name had established.

The entry is small, a single line in a catalogue, and it carries the page’s two threads nested in one phrase. In Nubaei Aethiopes the Nubia name and the Ethiopia name stand side by side, the one inside the other: the Nubians are Ethiopians, as Latin saw it. In the centuries after Meroë the inner term would grow and the outer would migrate, Nubia becoming the name of the middle Nile and Ethiopia the name of Aksum, so that Pliny’s phrase, read today, names two different countries. The Latin Nubaei is the seed of the medieval and modern Nubia; Pliny planted it as an adjective.

Kūš is the Syriac form of the biblical name, the Hebrew consonants carried unchanged into the Peshitta. Because the Syriac Old Testament was translated from the Hebrew in the second century rather than from the Greek, it keeps the Egyptian-derived name at every verse where the Septuagint had written Ethiopia: the son of Ham in Genesis, Tirhakah king of Kush in Kings, the land beyond the rivers of Kush in Isaiah. From the Bible the name passed into Syriac usage generally, with the ethnic Kūšāyā for its people, in the commentaries of Ephrem and the chronicles of the Syriac churches that later kept contact with the Christian kingdoms of Nubia.

The entry marks a line on the map of the Bible’s daughter languages. Greek, Latin, Armenian, and Geʽez, reading the Septuagint, say Ethiopia; Syriac and the Aramaic of the Talmud, reading the Hebrew, say Kush. The Egyptian name went east with the Semitic Bible and the Greek description went west with the Greek one, and the Peshitta’s three letters are the eastern frontier of that division. On this page they are the proof that the old name did not need Egypt to survive: it lived on in the churches of Mesopotamia on the strength of a translation alone.

Kūš in the Babylonian Talmud is the biblical name carried into the academies of Sura and Pumbedita, and its most memorable appearance is a dispute about the shape of the world. Esther 1:1 says that Ahasuerus reigned “from Hoddu to Kush,” from India to Kush, and Megillah 11a records Rav and Shmuel disagreeing about what the verse means: one holds that Hoddu is at one end of the world and Kush at the other, so that the king ruled everything between; the other that Hoddu and Kush are adjacent, and that the verse means he ruled the hundred and twenty-seven provinces as easily as he ruled two neighboring ones. The name is spelled as in the Hebrew, without points in the manuscripts, and read with the same long u.

The rabbinic Kush has no king and no capital. By the Bavli’s centuries the Meroitic kingdom was dying or dead, and the Talmud does not notice; its Kush is a cosmographic term, a boundary of the inhabited earth, and whether it touches India is a question about geography, not about Nubia. The entry pairs with the Talmud’s Yāwān on the Greece page, a name frozen at the moment of the Maccabees; Kūš is frozen at the moment of Esther, a compass point in a Persian king’s titulary. In Babylonia the name of the Nile kingdom had become a direction.

Ečōš is the Coptic descendant of the Egyptian Kꜣš, by way of Demotic ỉkš: Sahidic ⲉϭⲱϣ, Bohairic ⲉⲑⲱϣ, with a plural ⲉϭⲟⲟϣ. The Bohairic spelling with th for the Sahidic č records the different fates of the old k before a front vowel in the two dialects, and the long ō of the stressed syllable records the vowel the hieroglyphs never wrote. In Coptic the word is chiefly an ethnic term: it renders Greek Aithíops in the Coptic Bible, where the eunuch of Acts 8 and the Cushites of the prophets are ečōš, and it names the Nubian neighbor in the texts of Egypt’s southern frontier, the monastic and hagiographic literature in which Blemmyes and Nubians raid, trade, and convert.

The form is the last Egyptian stage of the Egyptian name, in use twenty-five centuries after the fortress-builders of the Twelfth Dynasty first carved it. The hieroglyphs were gone, the gods were gone, the pharaohs were gone, and the word for the people south of the cataracts was still the Middle Kingdom’s word, now written in Greek letters and used to translate a Greek Bible. On this page it closes the Egyptian thread with a symmetry: the oldest name for Kush and its youngest are the same word, and the Christian monk who called a Nubian ečōš was using, without knowing it, the vocabulary of Senusret’s garrisons.

Kasu is the name of Kush in the inscriptions of Ezana of Aksum, the fourth-century king whose titulary runs “king of Aksum and of Ḥimyar and Raydān and Sabaʾ and Salḥēn and Ṣǝyāmo and Bǝga and of Kasu, king of kings.” The name stands in the royal style of three of his stones (RIE 187, 188, 189) and in the Greek versions as Kasou; in RIE 189, the record of his Nile campaign, the Kasu are a people living at the confluence of the Takkaze and the Seda, the Atbara and the Nile, with towns of stone and straw called Alwa and Daro, which the king’s army took. The spelling writes the first syllable in the fourth order, kā, and the vowel is the entry’s puzzle: every Near Eastern form has a long u, and Aksum alone has a. Whether the Geʽez name came from the Meroitic kingdom’s own word, from the Greek of the Red Sea trade, or from some Semitic form the atlas does not hold, cannot be settled, and the entry carries no edge.

The form is the last contemporary witness. Ezana’s stone is the only text in any language that names Kush while a Kushite polity still stood and records the breaking of it, and it names it twice over: in the title, as a land the king claimed, and in the narrative, as a people his army fought on the Nile. It is also the only name for Kush on this page written by another African kingdom. The first stone to name Kush was an Egyptian king’s boundary marker; the last was an Aksumite king’s victory stone; between them lie two thousand years in which the one word we cannot read is the kingdom’s own.

Nobā is the name Ezana’s great inscription (RIE 189) gives the people against whom he marched to the Nile. The Noba, the text says, had crossed the Takkaze and attacked the peoples under Aksum’s protection, the Mangurto and Hasa and Barya, and had boasted that the Aksumites would not dare to cross the river; Ezana crossed it, fought at the ford of Kemalke, and took their towns of masonry and of straw along the Nile, the region where Meroë had stood. Two centuries later the inscription of Kaleb (RIE 191, c. 525) still counts the Noba among the king’s concerns. The spelling writes the second syllable in the fourth order, bā, and the first in the seventh, no.

The entry is the Geʽez cognate of Eratosthenes’ Noûbai, six centuries later and on the other side of the river, and the agreement of the two is the best evidence that the name was the people’s own rather than an Egyptian word for gold. Its place on the page is as the name of the inheritors. The Noba whom Ezana fought lived where the Kushites had, and the Christian kingdoms that followed Meroë, Nobatia first among them, would carry the name forward as Nubia. Ezana recorded, without knowing it, the handover: the stone that names the last of Kush names the first of Nubia in the same lines.

Etʿovpia is the Armenian Bible’s name for the land of Kush, and it tells at once which Bible the Armenians translated from. The version made after 405 followed the Greek, and so where the Hebrew says Kûš the Armenian says Ethiopia: Genesis 2:13 has the river Gihon circling “all the land of the Ethiopians,” Etʿovpacʿwocʿ, and the prophets and Kings follow suit. The spelling is Greek Aithiopía in Armenian clothing, the Greek th rendered with the Armenian aspirate tʿ, the Greek -io- with the -ov- that Armenian used for that sequence. Only in the Table of Nations, where the Greek itself had kept the personal name Chous for Ham’s son, does the Armenian write Kʿuš, and there with the kʿ that Armenian reserved for Greek chi: the eponym came through Greek too.

The entry fixes the Armenian Bible on the Greek side of the page’s great divide, and it does so with a double witness. The land got the Greek description, Ethiopia; the ancestor got the Greek spelling of the Hebrew name, with a Greek aspirate where the Hebrew had a plain k. Nothing in Armenian comes from the Egyptian word directly or from the Syriac that lay a mountain range away. For the Armenians, as for the Latins, Kush was a country they knew only from scripture, and they knew it in the language scripture reached them in.