ARCE PA Chapter: “Priestess, Queen, Goddess: The Divine Feminine in the Kingdom of Kush”

If you are a member of ARCE-PA, you will find a link to register in the emails that are sent out about the lecture. 

If you are not a member of ARCE-PA, please visit the website to sign up for the link HERE. or contact ARCE PA at info@arce-pa.org

Info About Lecture: 

This lecture presented by Dr. Solange Ashby will examine more closely the queens, priestesses, and mothers who formed an essential societal component in ancient Nubia. It will also explore its complex systems of goddess worship, sacred sexualities, and family lineages, both royal and non-royal. It relied on multilingual temple inscriptions found in Egypt and Nubia, the rich funerary goods found in royal burials, and temple and tomb imagery. Dr. Solange Ashby will explore how ancient Africans of the Nile Valley understood female power and presence to be an essential enlivening element in maintaining Maat, the balance of male and female energies, in order to cultivate “divine right order” in the world and in the cosmos. 

The reverence for the feminine continues in Nubian communities today. Nobiin, a living Nubian language and a direct descendant of Old Nubian (ca. 700-1500 CE), structures its kinship terms around the maternal lineage. Protestors against the current dictatorship in Sudan, ousted Omar al-Bashir in 2019, while being led by a Kandaka, the title accorded to the queen mother of Meroe in antiquity. The centrality of women in the Nubian community provides a powerful cultural rejection of the male dominant, externally imposed Arabized, Islamic culture in Sudan and has become a flash point of contention for political power in Sudan.