In the summer of 701 B.C. Jerusalem faced a siege from Assyrian forces that had razed countless walled cities, pillaging and looting them, dispersing the defeated populations to distant places, and torturing the leaders to death. Had the city perished, the small and fragile Hebrew society would have been severely damaged and the world denied its seminal influence. Judaism's principal offshoots--Christianity and Islam--would not have arisen. Only one monarch responded to Jerusalem's plea for help--Shebitku, the Kushite who ruled Egypt as pharoah of the twenty-fifth dynasty. He dispatched an army of Kushites, black Africans like himself, to challenge the invaders and save the Hebrew capital.