Candace (Title of a leader)

A hereditary title, not a personal name, carried by the ruling queens of the Kushite kingdom centered at Meroe in Nubia, comparable to "Pharaoh" for Egypt's kings. The treasury official of one such queen was converted and baptized by Philip on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza (Acts 8:27). The power of these Kushite queens is corroborated outside the Bible: Roman sources describe a war between Rome and a Kushite army led by one of them around 24 BC, and archaeologists later recovered a bronze head of Augustus that Kushite forces had looted and buried beneath the steps of a Meroe temple as an act of triumph, now held in the British Museum.