Amanirenas

Who is Amanirenas?

Amanirenas was a Kandake, or ruling queen, of the Kingdom of Kush, centered at Meroe in what is now Sudan, during the late first century BC. She came to power at a time when Rome, having recently annexed Egypt, was pressing south toward Kush's northern border. Around 25 BC the Roman prefect of Egypt, Gaius Petronius, led an army south and sacked the Kushite town of Napata. Amanirenas responded by gathering an army and leading a multi-year campaign against the Roman forces occupying the border region, a war described by the Greek geographer Strabo, a contemporary source, who wrote of a fierce "one-eyed" Kushite queen commanding the resistance; modern historians generally identify this queen with Amanirenas based on Meroitic inscriptions from the same period. During the fighting her son and co-ruler, Prince Akinidad, was killed, and she herself is said to have lost an eye. Despite these losses, Amanirenas's campaign forced Rome to the negotiating table, and around 21-20 BC a peace treaty was concluded directly with Emperor Augustus on terms favorable to Kush, fixing the frontier well south of Egypt's earlier claims. The episode halted further Roman expansion into Sudan and is remembered as one of the few instances of a Roman emperor negotiating peace as an equal with an African ruler.

Sources: Strabo, Geography, Book XVII (contemporary Greco-Roman account of the Meroitic-Roman war) · Laszlo Torok, The Kingdom of Kush: Handbook of the Napatan-Meroitic Civilization · British Museum, notes on Meroitic queens (kandakes) of Kush