Jebel Barkal: Center of Ancient Napatan Kingdom

Tea lady at Shendi's Souq es-Shabi

Yummy grilled chicken with rice

After exploring the ruins of the kingdom of Meroë around Shendi I headed further north to a small town called Karima.

First I had to get a bus from Shendi to Atbara where I would spend a day. The reason for staying in Atbara had more to do with work than roving. I had to log on from an internet café and work on some reports for the previous month’s financial closing. With Karima being a small town with possibly no internet connection, Atbara was a safe bet as a base for a day.

Roadside eatery

The new road from Atbara to Karima cutting
through the Nubian  Desert

At the bus stop in Shendi, while I had my customary tea at one of the stalls run by women from Nuba, I met a guy who was also going to Atbara but from there he was to go into the Nubian Desert in search of gold. He was an amateur gold digger looking to strike it big.

Stopping on the way for tea at a nomad's camp

Good spot for mobile connection

The land of Nubia has been a source of gold since the times of the early Egyptians kings who often ventured here to fuel their appetite for gold but this particular gold rush seems like a recent event as there was no mention of it in my guidebook. As I write this blog, there are reportedly more than 200,000 Sudanese mining the yellow metal in the barren expanse of the Nubian Desert.

Juhayna kids carrying water on their donkeys

Date palm cultivation

The industry is currently unregulated but surely the Sudanese government would be more than happy to have a system to channel the revenue from this precious metal now that a vast chunk of their oil revenue has disappeared with the cessation of South Sudan. For a moment I wondered how cool it would be to tag along with the gold digger for a few days but I quickly came to the conclusion that it was an outlandish idea and nothing more. I had neither the time, nor the permit to go there.

Napatan Pyramids as seen from Jebel Barkal

Floor plan of Temple of Amun

On the bus ride from Shendi to Atbara I sat beside a man who pointed out the Pyramids of Meroë and called them Haram.

Although I don’t understand Arabic it was clear than he was not pointing to them with pride but rather belittling them. The pyramids are often called as al-Haram in the Arab world presumably because they are symbols of ancient Egyptian religion which is considered as sinful under their Islamic laws. I wonder what he thinks of us visitors who come to Sudan just to visit these places.

View of temple & Nile from
Jebel Barkal

Ruins of Temple of Amun

Jebel Barkal



Relief of Goddess Mut with cow shaped ears
at temple at Jebel Barkal

An uneventful day and half in Atbara and I was ready to leave it behind as soon as possible; alteast I was free of work responsibilities for the rest of my time in Sudan. My entire journey in Sudan up until that point had been along the Nile but the new sealed road from Atbara to Karima cut straight through the barren Bayuda Desert sporadically dotted with basic shelters of hardy dark skinned Arab nomads.

A few hours later, the monotony of the desert sands gave way to fronds of carefully lined palms trees which signaled that we had crossed the desert and caught up with the Nile once again. This meant one thing…we were near Karima.

Napatan Pyramids at Jebel Barkal

Quirky shot of pyramid

Pyramids at Nuri

Today, Karima is a small town belying its ancient significance during another Nubian civilization that lived in the land we today call Sudan. The region around Karima, then called as Napata was the center of the Nubian Kingdom of Kush that flourished between from 1100–300 BC. Central to Napata (Karima) was a flat topped mountain called Jebel Barkal that rises incongruously out of the surrounding desert plains. Perhaps it was the location of the mountain near a bend in the Nile or the significance of a freestanding pinnacle that led to this site being a holy one during the Napatan as well as the Egyptians Pharaonic times.

Tomb of Tawetamani

Fleet of stairs to the tomb's burial chamber

Weathered pyramid at Nuri

Painting inside the tomb

The New Kingdom Egyptians Pharaohs’ (1550 - 1069 BC) occupied and colonized Napata and the site is associated with Egyptian pharaohs like Thutmose III and even Ramses II the Great but after 300 years their power waned. In the vacuum created after the downfall of the New Kingdom, a local power heavily influenced by Egyptian culture and religion rose which would ultimately go on to conquer and rule Egypt…these were the oft forgotten 25th Dynasty Black Pharaohs that the National Geographic magazine had covered.

Jebel Barkal was easy to scramble up and had fantastic views of the ruined Temple of Amun that sits at the base of the mountain. Later, walking around in the ruins of the temple I could see several blocks of Egyptian hieroglyphs lying scattered all over. Having seen reconstructed temples in Egypt before I got to Sudan, I tried to envision the splendor of this temple in its heydays.

Almost all the temples I visited in Egypt were reconstructed, i.e. they were diligently put together by Egyptologists back to their original design using original blocks and filler material for sections that were lost forever. If one sees dated pictures of Egyptian temples from the 19th century, they would be hardly recognizable to the ones standing today. The temple of Amun at Jebel Barkal was no doubt in ruins but to me that in itself was the allure of the place. The temple lay there just as the Egyptian temples would have probably been during the days of early explorers.

Depiction of a mummfied Pharaoh

On the other side of Jebel Barkal were several pyramids some of which were dilapidated while others were extremely well preserved...perhaps the best preserved of all Kushitic pyramids.

As awesome as the whole sight around Jebel Barkal was, there were no tourists except for a handful of locals walking around oblivious to the significance of the site. There were no signboard for the place and although there is supposed to be a guard on duty to collect fees for entrance there was no fence and the guard was absent when I visited indicating just how rarely the place is visited.

The Pharaoh being judged for his deed

The next morning, I visited the royal cemetery at Nuri a few kilometers upstream of Karima where lay the pyramids of some of the most famous Nubian pharaohs of the 25th Dynasty. Perhaps the most famous of them all was Taharqa (690 BC to 664 BC), who at the height of his powers controlled a region from Sudan all the way to Lebanon in the Middle East. In Egypt, I had seen his legacy in the form of a column at the Temple at Karnak. After his death he was brought back to Nubia and buried at Nuri where his pyramid although the largest lies in a state of ruin.

Painting of Horus

All the pyramids at Nuri are degenerating and the desert sands are reclaiming them making the site all the more fascinating. The final stop in this region was the site of El-Kurru which was the royal cemetery before Taharqa moved it to Nuri. Only two of the tombs were open for visitors but since they were locked up we had to find the ghaffir (guard). I waited at the site while the driver went into the village to return back 20 minutes later with the ghaffir.

The tombs were accessible down a flight of stair cut into the rock. The first tomb belonged to King Tawetamani who was the successor of Taharqa and the second was for his mother Qalhata; both the tombs had Egyptian styled wall painting and although not as fine or well preserved as the ones on the west bank of Luxor they were attractive in their own regard.

Karima served as my base for a day and a half for visiting the sites of the ancient Napatan Kingdom at Jebel Barkal, Nuri and El-Kurru but it was time to move on. After having checked off the sites of the Meroitic Kingdom and the Napatan Kingdom, it was time to go further back in time and deeper into Nubia to explore the remains of the Kingdom of Kerma.