Alara of Nubia

Alara of Nubia
Kushite King of Napata
The cartouche of Alara as appears on the much later stela of Nastasen
Successor	Kashta
Spouse	Kasaqa
Issue	Queen Abar, Queen Tabiry
nomen

Alara was a King of Kush who is generally regarded as the founder of the Napatan royal dynasty by his 25th Dynasty Nubian successors and was the first recorded prince of Nubia. He unified all of Upper Nubia from Meroë to the Third Cataract and is possibly attested at the Temple of Amun at Kawa. Alara also established Napata as the religious capital of Nubia. Alara himself was not a 25th dynasty Nubian king since he never controlled any region of Egypt during his reign compared to his two immediate successors: Kashta and Piye respectively. Nubian literature credits him with a substantial reign since future Nubian kings requested that they might enjoy a reign as long as Alara's. His memory was also central to the myth of the origins of the Kushite kingdom which was embellished with new elements over time. Alara was a deeply revered figure in Nubian culture and the first Nubian king whose name has come down to scholars.

Alara's existence is first documented in the Egyptian hieroglyphic stela of Queen Tabiry who was Alara's daughter by Queen Kasaqa, Alara's wife. Since Tabiry was the wife of Piye whereas Piye's direct predecessor on the throne of Kush was Kashta, Alara was most likely Kashta's predecessor in turn. While Alara was not assigned a royal title in Queen Tabiry's stela, his name was written in the form of a cartouche which confirms that he was indeed a Kushite king. Alara is also mentioned as the brother of Taharqa's grandmother in inscriptions Kawa IV lines 16f (ca. 685 BC) and VI, lines 23f. (ca. 680 BC)

One Nubian archaeologist, Timothy Kendall, has claimed that Alara is the king 'Ary' Meryamun whose Year 23 is inscribed on a now fragmented stela from the Temple of Amun at Kawa. However, the Hungarian Egyptologist László Török rejects this view in his 1997 book The Kingdom of Kush: Handbook of the Napatan-Meroitic Civilization. (Handbuch der Orientalistik 31) and believes that Ary was rather Aryamani who was a much later Kushite post-25th dynasty king who ruled from Meroë due to the text and style of his stela. Kendall's epigraphic arguments here are also not accepted by other scholars.