Tanyidamani was a Kushite king of

Meroë Meroë (; also spelled ''Meroe''; Meroitic: ; and ; ) was an ancient city on the east bank of the Nile about 6 km north-east of the Kabushiya station near Shendi, Sudan, approximately 200 km north-east of Khartoum. Near the site is ...

who ruled in the second half of the 2nd century BCE. He was most likely the son of king Adikhalamani and Queen

Nahirqo Nahirqo is the name attributed to a Kushite queen regnant buried in pyramid Beg N. 11 in Meroë. Nahirqo is the earliest known woman to have ruled the Kingdom of Kush, reigning in the middle second century BC. Prior to her own reign, Nahirqo is bel ...

.Kuckertz, Josefine, 2021,
Meroe and Egypt
'. In

Wolfram Grajetzki Wolfram Grajetzki (born 1960, in Berlin) is a German Egyptologist. He studied at Free University of Berlin and made his Doctor of Philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He performed excavations in Egypt, but also in Pakistan ...

Solange Ashby Solange Ashby is an African studies, Africanist and Archaeology, archaeologist whose expertise focuses on language, religion and the role of women in ancient Egypt and Nubia. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languag ...

, and

Willeke Wendrich Willemina Zwanida "Willeke" Wendrich (born 13 September 1961, Haarlem) is a Dutch-American Egyptologist and archaeologist. She is Professor and Joan Silsbee Chair of African Cultural Archaeology in the Near Eastern Language & Cultures Department ...

(eds.), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, Los Angeles. . pp. 5, 13. Tanyidamani is known by some objects, the most remarkable among these is a large stele from

Jebel Barkal Jebel Barkal or Gebel Barkal () is a mesa or large rock outcrop located 400 km north of Khartoum, next to Karima in Northern State in Sudan, on the Nile River, in the region that is sometimes called Nubia. The jebel is 104 m tall, has a f ...

: it is the first long-known text in

Meroitic alphabet The Meroitic script consists of two alphasyllabic scripts developed to write the Meroitic language at the beginning of the Meroitic Period (3rd century BC) of the Kingdom of Kush. The two scripts are Meroitic Cursive, derived from Demotic Egypt ...

. Another smaller, red

siltstone Siltstone, also known as aleurolite, is a clastic sedimentary rock that is composed mostly of silt. It is a form of mudrock with a low clay mineral content, which can be distinguished from shale by its lack of fissility. Although its permeabil ...

stele was found in the temple of

Apedemak Apedemak or Apademak (originally, due to the absence of the /p/ phoneme in Meroitic, it was probably pronounced 'abademak' (Father king) ) was a major deity in the ancient Nubian and Kushite pantheon. Often depicted as a figure with a male ...

at Meroë, and is now at the

Walters Art Museum The Walters Art Museum is a public art museum located in the Mount Vernon, Baltimore, Mount Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland. Founded and opened in 1934, it holds collections from the mid-19th century that were amassed substantially ...

. On a

bronze Bronze is an alloy consisting primarily of copper, commonly with about 12–12.5% tin and often with the addition of other metals (including aluminium, manganese, nickel, or zinc) and sometimes non-metals (such as phosphorus) or metalloid ...

cylinder A cylinder () has traditionally been a three-dimensional solid, one of the most basic of curvilinear geometric shapes. In elementary geometry, it is considered a prism with a circle as its base. A cylinder may also be defined as an infinite ...

found at Jebel Barkal both his

throne name A regnal name, regnant name, or reign name is the name used by monarchs and popes during their reigns and subsequently, historically. Since ancient times, some monarchs have chosen to use a different name from their original name when they accede ...

and

personal name A personal name, full name or prosoponym (from Ancient Greek ''prósōpon'' – person, and ''onoma'' –name) is the set of names by which an individual person or animal is known. When taken together as a word-group, they all relate to that on ...

are given in

Hieroglyphics Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs ( ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters.I ...

, but these are identical: ''Tanyidamani''. The Meroitic inscriptions only mention one name and it seems that the original Egyptian royal titulary composed of five names was apparently abandoned with the introduction of the

Meroitic language The Meroitic language () was a language of uncertain linguistic affiliation spoken in Meroë (in present-day Sudan) during the Meroitic period (attested from 300 BC) and became extinct about 400 AD. It was written in two forms of the Meroitic al ...

and alphabet. The only term used in this simplified titulary is ''Qore'' which probably means "king". No

pyramid A pyramid () is a structure whose visible surfaces are triangular in broad outline and converge toward the top, making the appearance roughly a pyramid in the geometric sense. The base of a pyramid can be of any polygon shape, such as trian ...

can be securely attributed to Tanyidamani, Török, László, in: ''Fontes Historiae Nubiorum, Vol. II'', Bergen 1996, pp. 662–672, . though he has been proposed to have been buried in Beg. N 12, which is from the generation immediately after Beg. N 11 (Nahirqo's burial). The chronologically next known Kushite king is Pakhedateqo, who is thus placed as Tanyidamani's potantial successor.

References

2nd-century BC monarchs of Kush 1st-century BC monarchs of Kush {{Africa-royal-stub