Pyramids of Meroë

The Pyramids of Meroë are the royal and noble tombs of the Kingdom of Kush, grouped in three cemeteries on low hills near the village of Bagrawiya in Sudan, some 200 kilometres north-east of Khartoum. Built between roughly 300 BCE and 350 CE beside the Kushite capital of Meroë, they number at least 147 among more than a thousand graves. Smaller and steeper than the pyramids of Egypt, they are the most visible monuments of an African kingdom that blended Egyptian religion with its own traditions for over six centuries.

Kush ruled the middle Nile from about 800 BCE. Its early capital was Napata, far to the north, but King Aspelta moved the seat of government south to Meroë, possibly around 591 BCE, after an Egyptian army sacked Napata. The new site lay on the edge of the summer rains, close to iron ore and hardwood and to trade routes leading to the Red Sea. For centuries, however, kings were still buried near Napata. Only around 280 BCE did King Arakamani, known to Greek writers as Ergamenes, establish the royal cemetery at Meroë; his is the first pyramid there that can be securely assigned to a ruler. Nobles had been buried in the West Cemetery since much earlier, its oldest graves reaching back to the ninth century BCE.

Burial in pyramids, like belief in judgement after death before Osiris, was borrowed from Egypt. Each royal tomb had three parts: a pyramid of sandstone, later sometimes of brick; a small chapel in front of it, carved with reliefs of the dead ruler among the gods; and burial chambers cut into the rock beneath, entered from in front of the chapel rather than from within the pyramid. The Kushite pyramids rise at about 72 degrees, against roughly 54 degrees for the Egyptian ones, and stand between about 10 and 30 metres high. Most had stepped faces and flattened tops.

Royal burials moved from the South Cemetery to the North Cemetery around 250 BCE. The North Cemetery holds 41 known pyramids, belonging to thirty kings, eight ruling queens and three other people. From the reign of Natakamani in the first century CE the pyramids became much smaller, and those of the ruling queens, the kandakes, were now larger than the kings'. The grave goods also changed: instead of objects made only for burial, tombs held everyday possessions and imported luxuries from the Greek-speaking Mediterranean, such as bronze vessels and wine jars.

After Rome conquered Egypt, Kushite raids led the Roman governor Publius Petronius to invade Nubia and sack Napata in 22 BCE; peace was then agreed between Augustus and Queen Amanirenas. By the first or second century CE Kush was weakening, worn down by the conflict with Roman Egypt and by the falling-off of its long-established industries. Around 350 Meroë fell to the Kingdom of Aksum; a Greek inscription at the site is thought to belong to the Aksumite king Ezana. Some scholars take such texts as proof that Aksum destroyed Kush, while others point to archaeological signs of decline already under way around 300. The Aksumite presence was brief, and the region later passed to the kingdom of Alodia.

The French mineralogist Frédéric Cailliaud described the ruins for Europeans in 1821. In 1834 the Italian adventurer Giuseppe Ferlini, with a licence from Ali Khurshid Pasha, who governed Sudan, hunted for treasure by pulling pyramids down from the top and using explosives, wrecking more than forty. The jewellery of Queen Amanishakheto he found is now in Berlin and Munich. The Prussian expedition led by Karl Richard Lepsius recorded the cemeteries in 1844, and George Andrew Reisner excavated them systematically in the 1920s, with most of the finds going either to Khartoum or to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Because Reisner concentrated on the chambers, the pyramids themselves have never been fully studied; the German architect Friedrich Hinkel later restored several of them.

The pyramids became part of UNESCO's World Heritage site of the Archaeological Sites of Meroë in 2011. In September 2020 floods threatened them for the first time, and during the civil war that began in 2023, airstrikes in January 2024 hit Naqa and Musawwarat es-Sufra, two Meroitic sites also part of the World Heritage listing.