Kushite Kentake in Charcoal

I drew this bust of a Kentake (Queen) of ancient Kush using a charcoal pencil. I don’t normally use charcoal for artwork since it’s a very messy medium, but this ended up looking a lot better than I had anticipated. I might do more of these charcoal drawings in the future.

As an aside, while we tend to refer to the people of Kush as “Nubian” since their kingdom covered the region of the Nile Valley now called Nubia, they would have technically been a different ethnic group from modern Nubians. The primary ancestors of modern Nubian people, such as the Noba and Makorae, would have colonized the middle Nile region from further west after the kingdom of Kush collapsed in the 4th century AD (though there must have still been some intermixture between these incomers and the indigenous Kushite population).

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