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Amanirenas
The one-eyed queen who marched on Rome's newest province and buried the emperor's head under her temple steps.
The rise
Amanirenas ruled the Kingdom of Kush from Meroë in the decades after Rome absorbed Egypt in 30 BC, apparently succeeding her husband Teriteqas and campaigning alongside her son Akinidad. The Greek geographer Strabo, our main source, describes her as a masculine woman blind in one eye.
What they did
In 25 BC her army struck north, sacking Syene, Elephantine and Philae and carrying off statues of Augustus; a bronze head of the emperor was buried beneath the threshold of a Meroë temple so that worshippers trod on it. After three years of war with the prefect Petronius, her envoys met Augustus at Samos in 21 BC and secured peace without tribute and a frontier pulled back to Maharraqa.
The full picture
Rome's version is the only written one: Strabo presents the war as a Roman victory, Petronius sacked the Kushite city of Napata, and the identification of Strabo's 'Candace' with the Amanirenas of Meroitic inscriptions is a scholarly inference, not a certainty. Her own stelae remain only partly readable.
Why it matters
Amanirenas is the earliest documented African ruler to face the Roman Empire and walk away with terms; the Meroë Head in the British Museum is still, quite literally, her trophy.