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]] Kandake, kadake or kentake (),Kirsty Rowan, "Revising the Sound Value of Meroitic D: A Phonological Approach," Beitrage zur Sudanforschung 10 (2009). often Latinised as Candace (), was one Meroitic term for a queen or queen mother of Kingdom of Kush. It is attested for six or seven women, some were rulers others most likely just wives of a king.see: Solange Ashby: Priestess, queen, goddess, in Janell Hobson (ed.) : The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories, Routledge: Oxon, New York 2021, ISBN 9780367198374, p. 33, note. 22 In some cases, she may have been sister or close female relative of the king of Kush, and due to matrilineal succession, could play a central role in royal inheritance, making her a queen mother., pp. 213–214. She had her own court, probably acted as a landholder and held a prominent secular role as regent. A kandake who ruled in her own right bore in addition the title qore, the same title carried by male rulers. Contemporary Greek and Roman sources treated it, incorrectly, as a name. The name Candace is derived from the way the word is used in the New Testament ().
It was not until George Reisner excavated the royal cemeteries at El-Kurru and Nuri in 1917-19 that archaeological material became available for studying Kushite queenship. Additionally, a few royal tombs of Kushite women have been found at Meroe's cemetery and in Egypt at Abydos (Leahy 1994). At El Kurru, six pyramids belong to royal women of the 25th Dynasty and a pyramid for queen Qalhata of the period. At Nuri, the tombs of royal women are located on the west plateau, with more inscriptional information available at the site, linking the roles that the kings' mothers played in succession and their importance during the Kushite dynasty.
The most important event that Kushite women participated in was kingship's ensured continuity, where royal women were mentioned and represented in the royal ceremony. The lunettes of the stelae of Tantamani, Harsiotef, and Nastasen all provide iconographic and textual evidence of these kings' enthronement. In all of these Stele, the king is accompanied by a female member of his family, mother, and wife. The king's mother played an essential role in the legitimacy of her son as the king; textual evidence from Taharqo's coronation stelae represents inscriptional evidence suggesting that the king's mother traveled to her son's coronation. During the Kushite 25th Dynasty, the office that was known as God's Wife of Amun was established. The royal women in this role acted as the primary contact with the Kushite god Amun. They played a decisive role in the king's accession to the throne.
Bas-reliefs dated to about 170 B.C. reveal the kentake Shanakdakheto, dressed in armor and wielding a spear in battle. She did not rule as queen regent or queen mother, but as a fully independent ruler. Her husband was her consort. In bas-reliefs found in the ruins of building projects she commissioned, Shanakdakheto is portrayed both alone as well as with her husband and son, who would inherit the throne upon her death.
In 25 BC the Kush kandake Amanirenas, as reported by Strabo, attacked the city of Syene, today's Aswan, in territory of the Roman Empire; Emperor Augustus Caesar destroyed the city of Napata in retaliation.
Cassius Dio wrote that Kandake's army advanced as far as the Elephantine in Egypt, but Petronius defeated them and took Napata, their capital, and other cities. Dio Cassius, Histories, §54.5.4
Four African queens were known to the Greco-Roman world as the "Candaces": Amanishakheto, Amanirenas, Nawidemak, and Malegereabar.
Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, "Rise and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza." This is a desert place. And he rose and went. And there was an Aethiopia Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Aethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasure. He had come to Jerusalem to worship
He discussed with Philip the meaning of a perplexing passage from the Book of Isaiah. Philip explained the scripture to him and he was promptly baptism in some nearby water. The eunuch 'went on his way, rejoicing', and presumably therefore reported back on his conversion to the Kandake.
Ethiopia’s dynastic tradition claims a lineage stretching back to before 1000 BCE, culminating in reign of Haile Selassie, who was deposed in 1974. The official genealogy, as recorded in legendary sources, traces monarchy to Menelik I, said to be son of Solomon and Makeda, the Queen of Sheba. The following queens from the king list have " Kandake" added to their name:
Claims that twenty-one queens ruled Ethiopia as sole regents until 9th century CE are found in Ethiopian oral traditions and chronicled king lists, but are not verified in inscriptions or contemporary records from Aksumite or pre-Aksumite period.
According to historians, conquest of Meroë by King Ezana in 4th century CE may have inspired later political fictions, in which Axumite rulers retroactively claimed connections to Kushite traditions. This included adoption of Greek term “Aethiopia” (Αἰθίοψ), a classical translation of " Cush" (כּוּשׁ) from Hebrew Bible, originally used by Greco-Roman writers to describe the Kingdom of Kush and people of Nubia, whose civilization predated rise of Axum by nearly two millennia. This cultural absorption helped shape Solomonic legitimacy and Ethiopian court ideology in the medieval period.
These accounts originate from Alexander Romance by an unknown writer called Pseudo-Callisthenes, and the work is largely a fictionalized and grandiose account of Alexander's life. It is commonly quoted, but there seems to be no historical reference to this event from Alexander's time. The whole story of Alexander and Candace's encounter appears to be legendary.
John Malalas has mixed the Pseudo-Callisthenes material with other and wrote about the affair of Alexander with Kandake, adding that they got married. Malalas also wrote that Kandake was an Indian queen and Alexander met her during his Indian campaign. Malalas, Chronography, §8.194-195
The following list contains all Nubian women that were most likely ruling as a king ( qore). Only six or seven of them are attested with the title Kandake see: Solange Ashby: Priestess, queen, goddess, in Janell Hobson (ed.) : The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories, Routledge: Oxon, New York 2021, ISBN 9780367198374, p. 33, note. 22
Based on the reading of a single inscription, some lists give two later kandakes named Maloqorebar (266–283 AD) and Lahideamani (306-314 AD). A recently discovered inscription corrects this earlier reading, however, showing that neither was a woman.Claude Rilly (2017), "New Light on the Royal Lineage in the Last Decades of the Meroitic Kingdom: The inscription of the Temple of Amun at Meroe Found in 2012 by the Sudanese–Canadian Mission", Sudan and Nubia 21: 144–147 (appendix to "The Amun Temple at Meroe Revisited" by Krzysztof Grzymski).
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