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663 BCEReputable source · 2 sourcesWell documented

Assyria Sacks Thebes and Strips Its Temples Bare

On the timeline · around 663 BCE · Foreign ConquestForeign ConquestAssyria Sacks Thebes and Strips Its Temples Bare1,000 BCE900 BCE800 BCE700 BCE600 BCE500 BCE400 BCE300 BCE

What happened

Assyrian king Ashurbanipal's forces marched south and sacked Thebes after the Kushite king Tantamani had briefly retaken Egypt and then fled back to Nubia rather than face the Assyrian army directly. Ashurbanipal's own inscriptions describe the plunder in specific terms: silver, gold, precious stones, the entire contents of the royal palace, colored vestments, fine linen, horses, and captives were carried off, along with two obelisks covered in electrum weighing 2,500 talents, pried loose along with the temple gates themselves and hauled back to Assyria. Thebes had stood for centuries as one of the ancient world's great religious and political centers, and its fall was so total that the event was still being invoked centuries later: the Hebrew Bible's Book of Nahum cites Thebes by its Egyptian name No-Amon as a warning to Nineveh, describing how the city was taken captive despite the strength of Kush, Egypt, Put, and Libya standing behind it.

Why it matters

The sack ended the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty's rule over Egypt itself. Tantamani survived and the Kushite royal line did not disappear, it retreated south to Napata and continued ruling an independent Kushite kingdom in Nubia for centuries afterward, but Kushite kings never again controlled Thebes or the rest of Egypt as pharaohs. Assyrian control over Egypt proved short-lived as well, opening the door for the native Saite kings of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty.

How we know

The primary evidence is Ashurbanipal's own royal inscriptions, cuneiform annals recorded on prisms that catalog the plunder in specific, itemized terms as a record of Assyrian military triumph. The Nahum passage is a separate, later literary reference that demonstrates how the sack was remembered as a cultural byword for total destruction, not itself an eyewitness account of the battle.

Sources

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