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Portrait sculpture of the 25th Dynasty pharaoh Taharqa (r. 690-664 BCE). Taharqa is the best-known and most thoroughly documented of the 25th ("Nubian") Dynasty pharaohs, all of whom came from the Kingdom of Kush in present-day Sudan. It is possible, although disputed, that Taharqa was the son of Piye, the Kushite king who first conquered Egypt.

Taharqa's reign was initially successful, marked by economic growth, lavish donations to temples (particularly that of Amun in Thebes), and firm control over the Nile from the Delta to Nubia. However, he eventually came to blows with the aggressively expansionist Assyrian Empire. By 668, Taharqa had lost control of Lower Egypt, which was ruled by Assyrian vassals who became the 26th (Saite) Dynasty. His death in 664, and the sack of Thebes the next year by the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, marked the de facto end of the 25th Dynasty.

It is partly through Taharqa's conflict with Assyria that we know so much about him. He appears in the Hebrew Bible as Tirhaqa (תִּרְהָקָה = Θαρακὰ in the Septuagint): according to the author of 2 Kings 19, "Tirhaqa" marched against the Assyrian king Sennacherib while the latter was besieging Jerusalem. (If this is correct, Taharqa would have been a general but not yet a king; the siege of Jerusalem occurred in 701 BCE, a decade before his accession.) The Greek geographer Strabo, meanwhile, refers to the monarch as Tearco (Τεαρκὼ) "the Ethiopian" and credits him with conquests that reached as far as the Pillars of Heracles (=Gibraltar).