Nubia — the land of the middle Nile in what is now southern Egypt and northern Sudan — was one of Africa's oldest centers of power, supplying gold, ivory, and soldiers to the wider ancient world. Across three thousand years its cultures ran from the early A-Group through the C-Group to the powerful kingdom of Kerma, trading, warring, and intermarrying with Egypt to the north, before the kingdom of Kush (covered in its own entry) grew to rule Egypt itself.
The Egyptian word for gold was nbw, and many scholars have linked it to the land just upriver where so much of that gold was mined. The connection is debated, but the instinct behind it is sound. For three thousand years Egypt looked south to Nubia for the metal that funded its temples, the ivory and ebony that filled its treasuries, and the famed archers it recruited into its armies. Egypt built forts to control this neighbor, carved temples into its cliffs, married into its royal houses, and for about a century was ruled by Nubian kings from the south. The two civilizations are so entangled that you cannot tell the story of one without the other. Yet Nubia is usually remembered, if at all, as a footnote to Egypt. It was nothing of the kind.