Shabaka

Shabaka, son of King Kashta, succeeded his brother Piye as king of Kush and pharaoh of Egypt around 721 BCE, inheriting a kingdom whose grip over the whole of Egypt was still not fully secured, since Piye had returned to Nubia after his conquest without remaining to govern the territory directly.

Shabaka moved decisively to consolidate Kushite rule, relocating his royal residence to Memphis, the ancient Egyptian capital near modern Cairo, and adopting the additional Egyptian name Pepi, after a celebrated pharaoh of the Old Kingdom, signalling his intent to rule as a legitimate Egyptian monarch rather than a foreign occupier. He undertook extensive religious building projects, particularly at Thebes and Memphis, and revived the ancient tradition of pyramid burials for Kushite royalty, a practice that continued for centuries afterward.

Shabaka's most celebrated achievement is the Shabaka Stone, a large basalt slab he commissioned after discovering that an ancient papyrus recording Egyptian creation mythology, the Memphite Theology, had been damaged by insects almost beyond legibility. Rather than let the text be lost, Shabaka ordered it copied in full onto stone, preserving one of the oldest and most philosophically significant religious texts in ancient Egyptian history — a document historians and Egyptologists continue to study today, now held in the British Museum.