Jebel Barkal

Holy ground for three thousand years, under one rock

Jebel Barkal is a flat-topped sandstone mesa 104 metres high beside the Nile in Nubia, next to Karima in Sudan's Northern State, some 400 km north of Khartoum, and it has been holy ground for something like three and a half thousand years. The Egyptians believed their state god Amun lived inside this Holy Mountain. Today people nearby call it Gebel Wad el-Karsani, after a Muslim sheikh buried near the rock whose tomb they still visit for blessings, and the largest temples at its foot are still considered sacred.

The first people known here belonged to the Kerma culture, so far attested only by scattered potsherds, and they seem to have venerated the mesa already. Around 1450 BC the pharaoh Thutmose III took it and built a fortified settlement as the southern limit of his empire. The region came to be called Napata, and the Egyptians raised a complex of temples centred on Amun of Napata, a local, ram-headed form of the great god of Thebes. After 800 BC the kings of Kush made Jebel Barkal their capital, and the Kushites who conquered Egypt as its 25th Dynasty, among them Kashta, Piye and Taharqa, built and rebuilt here. Even after the Assyrians drove them out of Egypt in the mid-7th century BC they kept renovating its palaces and temples. In one, Temple B700, an inscription has Amun declare that he chose King Senkamanisken while he was still in his mother's womb.

The ruins include at least 13 temples built, renovated and expanded over more than 1,500 years; the chambers of the Temple of Mut keep their carved and painted walls. After 270 BC royal burials moved to Meroë, but in the 1st century BC and 1st century AD eight royal pyramids went up at Jebel Barkal instead, for reasons no one is sure of, and most still stand at their original shape and height. The city lived on into medieval Christian Nubia.

European explorers began drawing the temples in the 1820s: Frédéric Cailliaud and Linant de Bellefonds in 1821, Karl Richard Lepsius in 1844, recording details since lost. Scientific excavation began only in 1916, when George Reisner led a joint expedition of Harvard University and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and teams from the University of Rome La Sapienza and Boston followed from the 1970s. Napata's town itself is still largely unexcavated.

In 2003 UNESCO listed Gebel Barkal with four more sites of the Napatan region, Kurru, Nuri, Sanam and Zuma, together stretching more than 60 km along the Nile. The Jebel Barkal Museum stands at the site.