Taharqa

In 690 BCE one of Piankhy's sons, Taharqa, became the king of Egypt and Kush. He went to Egypt when he was barely twenty and, as far as we know, spent nearly all of his life in Egypt. As a young man, he became a general in the army and was a great fighter and leader. After he became king, he designed and had built many new and beautiful buildings.

	Portrait of Taharqa (690-664 BC), from his colossal statue found at Jebel Barkal.
	Courtesy of the Sudan National Museum, Khartoum.

Taharqa was very successful for the first 19 years of his reign. Unfortunately for him, the Assyrians began attacking Egypt in 671 BCE. At first, his armies withstood the attacks, but the Assyrians finally broke into Egypt and captured Memphis in 667 BCE. They seized Taharqa's treasures and took his wife and son, the crown prince, captive.

Taharqa escaped to Napata, where he died less than 5 years later. He was buried in a giant pyramid at Nuri, Sudan, about 10 km (6 miles) from Jebel Barkal. When his tomb was excavated in 1917, the archaeologists found that it had been robbed and also flooded with water. After pumping it out, they found over 1200 carved stone funerary figures, called "shawabtis" (which the king hoped would do his work in the afterlife). They also found one solid gold object that the thieves had missed: a beautiful finger ring engraved with an eye (for good luck). The ring was very large in size, indicating that the king had very fat fingers and that he himself was probably a very big man.

	Shawabti figure of Taharqa, from his pyramid tomb at Nuri, Sudan.
	Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.