attack from the north, in a fertile region instead of a narrow gorge in the desert, and in the direct path of the rapidly-growing immigration and trade from the south and east. Here they checked the army of Cambyses, which made Egypt a Persian province in 525 B. C. The capital fell into his hands for a time, but the country ws not subdued. The conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great, 332 B. C., left them undisturbed; and with his successors, the Ptolemies, they maintained an increasing commerce, notwithstanding the active policy then pursued to assert Egyptian supremacy in the Red Sea.
(See Breasted: A History of Egypt. N. Y., 1905.)
In 30 B. C. Egypt became a Roman province and the Nubians met a different foe. Their queen, Candace, attacked the Egyptians, and a punitive expedition by Petronius destroyed their power. (Strabo, XVII, 1, 54.) Gradually the enfeebled kingdom was engulfed by the tribes of the desert; and Pliny, whose Natural History was completed in 77 A. D., notes that of a long list of cities and towns above Philae, described a century before, Nero's embassy in 67 A. D. could find hardly a trace, and that the capital itself, Meroe, was but a collection of a few wretched huts. National decay had done its work; and the few remnants left from the attacks of the Berbers had joined the new "Kingdom of the Axumites" in the highlands to the south-east.
In later times, under the Byzantine Empire, Nubia again became a center of culture and prosperity. Its new capital, the modern Khartum, became a leader in Christian thought, and maintained its influence even after the Saracens had overrun Egypt; only finally to repeat history by being utterly destroyed by a new irruption from the desert, under the spur of Islam, and to leave again to the Abyssinian highlands the defence of what remained of its Monophysite Christianity.
Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews, II, 9) has an account of a war of the Egyptians against the Ethiopians, under the command of Moses. The Ethiopians were finally driven back into their capital, Saba, "to which city Cambyses afterwards gave the name of Meroe, in compliment to his sister. . . . it being situated at the confluence of the rivers Astaphus and Astabora with the Nile." The city was finally delivered up to the Egyptians as the condition of Moses' marriage with the Ethiopian King's daughter Tharbis, who had fallen in love with him.
Aside from the obvious anachronisms in this story, one fact is of interest: the name of the capital, Saba, indicates that Nubia was ruled, if not mainly peopled, by Arabs, who had followed the ancient trade-routes from the mouth of the Red Sea.
Glaser (Punt und die südarabischen Reiche, 42–3) notes that Napata
