Ebook: Ancient African Civilizations: Kush and Axum

The region [of Kush and Axum] is known for antiquity only from dispersed written testimonies and from archaeological remains; it is a region for which connected political narrative is impossible. For many years...Stanley Burstein has worked to bring to scholarly and public attention the little that is known about it The present volume, Ancient African Kingdoms, offers lightly annotated translations of twenty-seven texts concerned with the geography, ethnography, and history of the ancient equivalents of the modern nation-states of Sudan and Ethiopia.
It aims to be useful to a wide audience... The texts are scattered over a thousand years (from the third century B.C.E. to the eighth century C.E.)....In a deft, twenty-page introduction, the editor sketches the histories of Kush and Axum. Burstein's collection gives the most important pieces of information about Kush and Axum that are preserved in writing--apart from the hieroglyphic Egyptian inscriptions that (mainly) document the history of Kush before the third century B.C.E. Unless, or until, the Merotic language is deciphered, it includes all the basics for later Kushite history. -- Classical Bulletin vol. 75, no. 2 - 1999