The Empire of Kush, folks! Going through my Total War: Rome 2 saves, I found an old save of the Nubian kingdom of Kush. Apparently I had recently conquered all the way up the Nile to Alexandria, pushing the Ptolemies into Libya. I decided to continue from there.
Kush was a warrior nation on the Upper Nile south of Ptolemaic Egypt that worshiped the traditional Egyptian gods, resisted the Greek cultural influence that pervaded Egyptian culture following Alexander’s conquests, and were famous for allowing men and women alike to fight in battle. Kush and three other desert kingdoms were late additions to Rome 2, but having read of Kush’s victories over Ptolemaic Egypt and Augustus’s Rome, I was pretty stoked when I first heard they were playable.
Apparently learning from the Ptolemies, Kush’s desert phalanxes are as good as any other faction’s regular pike units. Fielding a strong center of pikes, I marched my armies against Egypt up the Nile, driving them into Libya before wiping them out. With Egypt gone, I turned my attention to their ally, Pergamon, who had captured much of the Seleucid's former territory. Allying with Bosporus, I drove into Syria and Turkey, wiping out the Diodochi invaders.
Not only famous for their warrior women, Kush historically also had a strong tradition of warrior queens. The above heroine was an actual historical figure, a warrior queen named Shanakdakhete. The game gives her as a recruitable general, who I happily gave a unit of elephants to trample invaders into the sand with. All in all, this has been a fun campaign, and I’m glad I decided to revive this save game. Thanks for reading, folks!
The Candaces of Meroe were the queens of the Kingdom of Kush who ruled from the city of Meroe c. 284 BCE-c. 314 CE - a number of whom ruled independently c. 170 BCE-c. 314 CE - in what is now Sudan...
“Amanirenas is best known as the queen who won favorable terms from Augustus Caesar (r. 27 BCE-14 CE) following the conflict known as the Meroitic War (27-22 BCE) between Kush and Rome. The war began in response to Kushite raiding parties making incursions into Roman Egypt. Rome had annexed Egypt as a province following the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE and it quickly became one of the new empire’s most critical territories as it supplied Rome with an abundance of grain. The Roman prefect of Egypt, Gaius Petronius responded to the raids by invading Kush around 22 BCE and destroying the city of Napata. Amanirenas was in no way cowed and retaliated with further aggression. She is depicted as a courageous queen, blind in one eye, and a skilled negotiator. Following the conflict, her control of the terms is evident in Rome’s respect in the peace talks and an increase in trade between Rome and Meroe. Amanirenas had captured a number of statues from Egypt, among them many of Augustus, which she returned following the peace; but the head of one she buried under the steps of a temple so that people would walk over Augustus in their daily visits. This is the famous Meroe Head now housed in the British Museum.”
The Nubian Queen (or Kandake) Shanakdakhete, with a prince, who touches the back of the queen’s crown - a gesture which means he is the heir to the throne. At the Nubian Museum, Aswan.
So contrary to what I thought in my post about my Iceni campaign, I do, in fact, have Queen Boudica of the Iceni as a character in my faction. No idea how she’s alive in 141 BC, but whatever. The only reason I know this is because I apparently unlocked an achievement by winning a battle with her. Here she marches to war beside her shieldmaiden girlfriends, deep into the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia (no joke!). Kudos to Creative Assembly for having the guts to include her and other real-life badass warrior queens.
Queen Teuta of Illyria is the starting leader for the Ardiaei in the Grand Campaign. She was the driving force in my conquests of Greece in my Ardiaei campaign, conquering even Athens and Sparta before she passed away from old age. Historically she was more of a pirate queen than a warrior queen, raiding all along the Adriatic Coast and as far south as Sicily. Her fleets amassed the largest pirate treasure in Mediterranean history---a particularly impressive feat, given the Med’s history of piracy. But thanks to misogynist historians, she’s still a relatively unknown figure historically, despite all this.
Nubian Queen Shanakdakhete of Kush also makes an appearance in the Grand Campaign, here perched at the head of her army with her squad of war elephants. Little is known about her from our surviving sources, but she lived during the reign of the Ptolemy Dynasty in Egypt, and likely would have butted heads with them, politically or militarily. In my campaign, she helped wipe them out after her predecessors drove them from Egypt.
Pharaoh Cleopatra VII (yes, that Cleopatra) is head of the Ptolemy faction in the Imperator Augustus campaign. Too often considered little more than a temptress to two Roman blowhards, Cleopatra led troops into battle, first against her quarrelsome relatives, later against the enemies of Rome, as their client monarch. In my campaign, she is currently Empress of Rome, controlling all of Egypt, Lepidus’s holdings in Africa, and most of Italy including Rome itself.
The Empire Divided Campaign, meanwhile, gives us Queen Zenobia at the head of the Palmyran legions. By all accounts except Emperor Aurelian’s, Zenobia was a strong war leader and savvy politician. She took advantage of Roman civil strife to conquer Syria, Egypt, and parts of Asia Minor from the Romans, battling Aurelian’s armies quite nearly to a standstill before her defeat. I’ve played two campaigns with her, sacking Rome in both of them and instating Zenobia as Empress of Rome.
A Meroitic statue at the Nubian Museum, Aswan. There’s a great explanation of the statue at the UNESCO page - I’ll quote a little: "It is attributed to Queen Shanakdakhete, the first queen who personally exercised power in the Meroë Empire. The sovereign, who reigned in the second half of the 2nd century BC, is accompanied by a prince who raises his arm and places his hand behind the Queen’s crown. This gesture is interpreted as the transmission of royal power: the prince is hereby designated as the heir to the throne.”
