Meroë and the pyramids of Kush

Two hundred pyramids, and a Kingdom most people have never heard of

Meroë stood on the east bank of the Nile about 200 km northeast of Khartoum, near Shendi and a group of villages called Bagrawiyah. For several centuries from around 590 BC it was the capital of the Kingdom of Kush. King Aspelta moved the seat south from Napata, possibly just after the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik II sacked Napata, and the new site lay on the edge of the summer rains, close to iron ore, hardwood and the trade routes to the Red Sea. Herodotus, in the fifth century BC, heard of it as a great city said to be the mother city of the other Ethiopians.

From the reign of Arakamani, around 280 BC, the royal burials moved here from Napata. More than two hundred pyramids in three groups now mark the site, many of them in ruins, with the steep, narrow proportions of Nubian pyramids, built over chambers whose dead were burned or buried without being mummified. The king shared his authority only with the Queen Mother, the Kandake. After Rome took Egypt, Meroë raided across the border; Publius Petronius sacked Napata in 22 BC, and a peace was signed that year between Augustus and Queen Amanirenas. A head from a statue of Augustus, looted in those raids, was buried under the steps of a temple here and is now in the British Museum.

The city's wealth rested on iron, and Archibald Sayce reportedly called it the Birmingham of Africa, a label modern scholars still debate. It traded ivory, ebony, copper and ostrich feathers, and the region was rich in gold. Meroitic, written in its own alphabet of twenty-three letters, is still not well understood. Axum destroyed the city in 350 AD by the usual account, though some read the evidence as a decline already under way around 300.

Europeans learned of the ruins from the French mineralogist Frédéric Cailliaud in 1821. In 1834 Giuseppe Ferlini dug here and came away with jewellery now in the museums of Berlin and Munich. UNESCO listed the site in 2011 together with the temple sites of Naqa and Musawwarat es-Sufra as the Island of Meroe, the semi-desert heartland of Kush between the Nile and the Atbara. In January 2024, during Sudan's civil war, airstrikes were launched on Naqa and Musawwarat es-Sufra.