ABSTRACT
During the last centuries of the first millennium BC, the Kushite state emerges with a new centre of gravity, focused on Meroe in the fertile Shendi Reach between the Sixth and Fifth Cataracts. Over a period of more than 500 years the Meroitic kingdom established its control of very extensive areas of the riverine Middle Nile and its hinterlands. While it is impossible to define closely the boundaries of the kingdom – they were after all almost certainly very fluid and shifting – at its greatest extent it may have controlled some 1,500km of the river valley, extending from the Egyptian frontier to far south of modern Khartoum, probably also controlling substantial territories to the east and west (Figure 6.1). The construction of the Meroitic Empire and its imperial culture, drawing on many traditions, probably represents the most extensive political structure of the region before the nineteenth century and was almost certainly the greatest state hitherto seen in sub-Saharan Africa.
