main reason for failing to take the city. The war that took place between King Taharqa and the Assyrian King Sennacherib was a decisive event in western history, with the Nubians being defeated in their attempts to gain a foothold in the Near East by Assyria. Sennacherib's successor Esarhaddon went further, and invaded Egypt itself, deposing Taharqa and driving the Nubians from Egypt entirely. Taharqa fled back to his homeland where he died two years later. Egypt became an Assyrian colony, however king Tantamani, after succeeding Taharqa, made a final determined attempt to regain Egypt. Esarhaddon died whilst preparing to leave the Assyrian capital of Nineveh in order to eject him. However his successor Ashurbanipal sent a large army into southern Egypt and routed Tantamani, ending all hopes of a revival of the Nubian Empire. During Classical Antiquity, the Nubian capital was at Meroë. In early Greek geography, the Meroitic kingdom was known as Ethiopia (a term also used earlier by the Assyrians when encountering the Nubians). The civilization of Kush was among the first in the world to use iron smelting technology. The Nubian kingdom at Meroe persisted until the 4th century AD. After the collapse of the Kushite empire several states emerged in its former territories, among them Nubia.
Christianity and Islam (543–1821)
By the 6th century, fifty states had emerged as the political and cultural heirs of the Meroitic Kingdom. Nobatia in the north, also known as Ballanah, had its capital at Faras, in what is now Egypt; the central kingdom, Muqurra (Makuria), was centred at Dunqulah, about 13 kilometres (10 miles) south of modern Dunqulah; and Alawa (Alodia), in the heartland of old Meroe, which had its capital at Sawba (now a suburb of modern-day Khartoum). In all three kingdoms, warrior aristocracies ruled Meroitic populations from royal courts where functionaries bore Greek titles in emulation of the Byzantine court. A missionary sent by
