The Rescue of Jerusalem: a view from the Nile Valley

The fundamental thesis of The Rescue of Jerusalem is that it was the intervention of an Egyptian-Kushite army that proved decisive in causing the Assyrian king Sennacherib to lift his siege of Jerusalem in 701 BCE and return east. This is argued on the basis of the interpretation of data provided by the Old Testament and Assyrian records, rather than anything from Egypt or Nubia – for the very good reason that no material has yet been found there that can be associated with that campaign. The only possible exception has been a pair of texts (on stelae from the site of Kawa in Nubia, see fig. 1) in which the later-king Taharqo looks back on a time in his princely years when he came north “as a youth” from Kush to Egypt with a force of recruits to join King Shabatako. While some have suggested that this was part of preparations for the 701 campaign, there is nothing in the text itself to link the text with the events in question and, as will be discussed below, it now seems that it refers to an occasion at least a decade prior to 701.