Egypt often appointed Kushites as high officials to help run the system, and the pharaoh eventually ran Kush not as a foreign colony but as an appendage of the Egyptian state’s administrative structure,8 something that would help explain why in the eighth century BC the Kushites would see Egypt as a kindred land, not a foreign one. Indeed, as far back as the 14th century, says Stuart Tyson Smith, an archaeologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, the Kushites tended to see the Egyptians “more as neighbors and collaborators than as oppressors or competitors.”
