When Greek was an African Language

t Greek temples. A good example is the so-called Lion temple, excavated and partially restored by the East Germans in the 1960's. Here in an impressive series of reliefs accompanied by texts-- based on Egyptian originals that from Philae and inscribed in hieroglyphs typical of the early Ptolemaic period--the Kushite king Arnekhamani, is depicted wearing a Ptolemaic style crown and receiving pledges of victory from the Kushite pantheon. Only now, however, the pantheon is headed now not by Amon but by the native war god Apedemak, who also wears a similar crown. By contrast, the evidence for Greek influence in Hellenistic Kush is easy to find but limited in scale and scope.

The most dramatic examples are the possible adoption of the use of war elephants and the construction in the so-called royal enclosure at Meroe of a small water sanctuary decorated with statuary modeled on Greek originals. The discovery of a set of Greek flutes—one of the few ever discovered—in a tomb at Meroe suggests that