Step aside, Cleopatra. This queen actually defeated the ancient Romans.
"If you want war, you are going to need them."
Hi everyone,
My debut book Unruly Figures: Twenty Tales of Rebels, Rulebreakers, and Revolutionaries book comes out in ONE MONTH! I’m so excited to share this book with you all. The publishing process can feel so long but also so quick, and in a way I sort of can’t believe that the release date is finally here!
This book really exists because of the community on Substack. Y’all shared early episodes of the podcast generously enough that my editor at PA Press took notice. Since the early days when I first announced the book to behind-the-scenes peeks at the process, y’all have been the biggest supporters of the book. So of course I wanted y’all to be the first to get an excerpt of the book!
Also: I’m going to be doing at least a couple of readings and signings in the coming months. I’ll have more details about those soon.
Like this excerpt? Preorder Unruly Figures out March 5 wherever books are sold!
In this chapter, I’m telling the story of Queen Amanirenas of ancient Kush (modern Sudan). She rose to prominence sometime around the year 30 BCE, and ended up tangling with some very famous Roman leaders who had already invaded Egypt…
Kandake Amanirenas herself led a Kushite military expedition of thirty thousand men north to Egypt. The Egyptians referred to Kush as the Land of the Bow, and we can assume that many of the soldiers Amanirenas took with her were archers. It was a perfect moment for a preemptive strike: a large portion of the fifteen thousand Roman troops stationed on Egypt’s southern border had been pulled away by Aelius Gallus […] to conquer Arabia.1
Amanirenas’s men invaded Thebes, “ravaging everything they encountered,” and attacked the Roman garrison at Syene.2 They took Syene, Elephantina, and Philae, where they “enslaved the inhabitants, and threw down the statues of Caesar.”3 As proof of their victory, they removed the head of Caesar Augustus from one of his many statues and carried it back to their capital at Napata along with their captives. A contemporary carving depicts Amanirenas holding two swords and feeding her Roman captors to her pet lion.4
However, Augustus’s new prefect of Egypt, Gaius Petronius, mustered up a force of ten thousand infantry and gave chase. He reclaimed the cities and sent an army to Napata, crushing the capital and killing hundreds of people. “This place was razed to the ground,” according to Dio.5 Several thousand Kushites were captured and sold into slavery; about a thousand were sent directly to Caesar, probably for sacrifice in the bloody Roman games.6 The fate of Prince Akinidad is not clear; it’s possible he died during the invasion.
Amanirenas and her army were not there in Napata, however; they had already retreated to the city of Pselchis. But what must have been a devastating loss for her did not frighten her into surrender.
What happened next is a matter of historical debate. Some say Petronius pursued Amanirenas to Pselchis; others say he withdrew after crushing Napata, and Amanirenas’s army pursued him back into Egypt. Nevertheless, the armies engaged again, each sustaining losses. Some accounts say that Amanirenas rode trained war elephants into subsequent battles. Others say that during these battles Amanirenas was severely injured and lost one of her eyes.
Tracing the exact movements of these battles—which came to be known as the Meroitic-Roman War—is challenging because the records containing the Meroitic perspective haven’t been deciphered. There are probably several skirmishes we don’t know about and won’t until we unlock the Meroitic language. The records we do have are invested in making the Romans look good. Strabo’s version of the story is a prime example of this; he frames the outcome of these battles as a Roman victory.
But other Roman records undermine his version. According to Cassius Dio, Petronius couldn’t continue fighting “on account of the sand and the heat.” The further south the Romans tried to penetrate, the more their supply lines were stretched and the more the heat of the equatorial region made fighting difficult. It’s possible that Augustus, fighting several wars at the same time, wasn’t willing to send more resources to Petronius to ease this war for him. After a few years of fighting like this, Petronius “compelled” Amanirenas to begin peace negotiations.7
Strabo’s less biased version of the story suggests that Amanirenas’s troops trapped the Roman army in Premnis, a hilltop city that the Romans had fortified as a military outpost. The Romans’ canons could fire “deadly darts over long distances” and made any “assault by Queen Amanirenas nearly impossible.”8
Yet Petronius was surrounded. He could neither escape nor fight. He was outnumbered and running out of supplies; he had amassed only four hundred men and two years’ provisions in Premnis.9 Again he compelled Amanirenas to begin peace negotiations. In this retelling, the Meroë warriors joke that they can’t negotiate because they don’t know who Caesar is or where to find him. Petronius gave them escorts to Augustus’s palace on the Greek island of Samos so they could meet with Caesar.
Amanirenas didn’t go to Samos herself. Instead, she sent envoys with a gift: “a bundle of golden arrows, and, according to legend, this aggressive message: ‘The Candace [kandake] sends you these arrows. If you want peace they are a token of her friendship and warmth. If you want war, you are going to need them.’”10
Whew, what a woman Amanirenas was! She was one of my favorite people to research for this book, and I can’t wait to share the whole story with you all.
Preorders are so important for authors—especially first-time authors!—because they tell bookstores that people are interested in a book that’s coming out. So if you’re thinking about buying Unruly Figures, I would be really honored if you took a minute to preorder your copy today!
Bibliography
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Ashby, Solange. “Calling Out to Isis: The Enduring Nubian Presence at Philae.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2016.https://doi.org/10.6082/M1X34VDG.
Dio, Cassius. Roman History, Volume 6. Accessed January 18, 2023.https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cassius_Dio/53*.html.
Francis, David. “The Meroë Head of Augustus: Statue Decapitation as Political Propaganda.” British Museum, December 11, 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20141231192911/https://blog.britishmuseum.org/2014/12/11/the-meroe-head-of-augustus-statue-decapitation-as-political-propaganda/.
Kamrin, Janice, and Adela Oppenheim. “The Land of Nubia.” Metropolitan Museum of Art. Accessed January 18, 2023. https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/collection-areas/egyptian-art/temple-of-dendur-50/nubia.
Magak, Adhiambo Edith. “The One-Eyed African Queen Who Defeated the Roman Empire.” Narratively, September 23, 2021. https://narratively.com/the-one-eyed-african-queen-who-defeated-the-roman-empire/.
Mark, Joshua J. “The Kingdom of Kush.” World History Encyclopedia, February 26, 2018. https://www.worldhistory.org/Kush/.
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O’Grady, Selina. And Man Created God: Kings, Cults and Conquests at the Time of Jesus. London: Atlantic Books, 2012.https://www.perlego.com/book/117500/and-man-created-god-kings-cults-and-conquests-at-the-time-of-jesus-pdf.
O’Keefe Aptowicz, Cristin. “Could You Stomach the Horrors of ‘Halftime’ in Ancient Rome?” livescience.com, February 4, 2016.https://www.livescience.com/53615-horrors-of-the-colosseum.html.
Porath, Jason. “Amanirenas: The One-Eyed Queen Who Fought Rome Tooth and Nail.” Rejected Princesses, 2020. https://www.rejectedprincesses.com/princesses/amanirenas.
Stela. First century BCE.sandstone, 93 × 40 in.(236 × 101 cm.)| British Museum. Accessed January 18, 2023.https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA1650.
Strabo. The Geography of Strabo. Trans. H.C. Hamilton and W. Falconer. London: G. Bell & Sons, 1903.
Török, László. The Kingdom of Kush: Handbook of the Napatan-Meroitic Civilization. Leiden: Brill, 1997. https://books.google.com/books?id=i54rPFeGKewC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ViewAPI#v=onepage&q&f=false
Adhiambo Edith Magak, “The One-Eyed African Queen Who Defeated the Roman Empire,” Narratively, September 23, 2021, https://narratively.com/the-one-eyed-african-queen-who-defeated-the-roman-empire/.
Cassius Dio, Roman History, vol. 6, book 53, section 23, accessed January 18, 2023, https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cassius_Dio/53*.html.
Strabo, The Geography of Strabo, trans. H. C. Hamilton and W. Falconer, vol. 3 (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1903), book 17, chapter 1, section 54. Google Play Books. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=lfMrAAAAYAAJ&rdid=book-lfMrAAAAYAAJ&rdot=1&pli=1.
Jason Porath, “Amanirenas: The One-Eyed Queen Who Fought Rome Tooth and Nail,” Rejected Princesses, 2020, https://www.rejectedprincesses.com/princesses/amanirenas.
Dio, Roman History, vol. 6, book 54, section 5.
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, “Could You Stomach the Horrors of ‘Halftime’ in Ancient Rome?” livescience.com, February 4, 2016. https://www.livescience.com/53615-horrors-of-the-colosseum.html.
Dio, Roman History, vol. 6, book 54, section 5.
Magak, “One-Eyed African Queen.”
Strabo, Geography of Strabo, 17.1.54
Selina O’Grady, And Man Created God: Kings, Cults and Conquests at the Time of Jesus (London: Atlantic Books, 2012), “The African Goddess-Queen,” Perlego. https://www.perlego.com/book/117500/and-man-created-god-kings-cults-and-conquests-at-the-time-of-jesus-pdf.