One of the most spectacular exhibits in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is the Shrine or Kiosk of Taharqa, the pre-eminent Nubian pharaoh of the Twentyfifth Dynasty. It comes from Kawa, on the Nile opposite Dongola, and was a gift from the Sudanese government in appreciation of British support for the rescue of Nubian monuments at the time of the construction of the Aswan High Dam (which drowned the whole of ancient Lower Nubia). The kiosk is a mine of information, particularly as a gallery of the Nubian physiognomic types that had become standardised (or fashionable) at that time. Taharqa (690–664 BCE) himself, fifth and most prominent pharaoh of the Dynasty, appears several times in the company of deities and in different combinations of Egyptian and Nubian dress and crowns. So does the god Amun, both in his humanoid form, wearing the twin-plumed crown, and in his ram-headed manifestation with the exotic atef crown. Other divinities, mainly female, accompany Taharqa and range in profile from standard Egyptian types to pronouncedly ‘Negroid’ versions. One cannot imagine that these figures are intended to be ethnographically realistic, but they do seem to constitute an inclusive statement, both about the pharaoh's legitimacy as ruler of Egypt as well as Nubia, and about the full range of diverse peoples and divinities of the new Egyptian-Nubian state. In front of the kiosk is one of the granite rams, incarnations of Amun-Re, which in pairs guarded over small figures of Taharqa set before the entrances. Another of the rams from the Shrine of Taharqa is in the British Museum. Incidentally, these rams are no mere symbols; any sheep farmer will recognise them as superb specimens of a pedigree flock, suggesting that their breeders were members of a flourishing pastoral economy.

Yet, until the mid-twentieth century very little was known about these farmers, their culture, and the civilisation they had created between the Second and Sixth Cataracts by the early part of the first millennium BCE.