Pyramids of Meroë
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- The sides of the Meroë pyramids rise at about 72 degrees, far steeper than the roughly 50-degree slopes of the Egyptian pyramids at Giza.
- Ferlini's 1834 treasure hunt wrecked more than 40 pyramids, and the gold he took from Queen Amanishakheto's tomb is now divided between museums in Berlin and Munich.
- Most of the pyramids are less than 30 metres tall, and the royal ones in the oldest group average only about 18 metres along each side.
- The three cemeteries hold more than a thousand graves in all, from simple pits to royal pyramids with offering chapels.
- The earliest ruler securely identified among the royal burials is King Arakamani, known to the Greeks as Ergamenes, who reigned around 280 BC.
- Kushite queens bore the title Kandake; the New Testament mentions an official of 'Candace, queen of the Ethiopians', a reference to this royal line.
- Queens such as Amanitore, who ruled in the first century AD, shared power with the kings and were buried in pyramids of their own.
- The Prussian expedition of Karl Richard Lepsius recorded the ruins in 1844, followed by excavations of E. A. Wallis Budge in 1902 and 1905 and John Garstang from 1910.
- Besides gold and iron, Meroë exported ivory, ebony, copper, rare skins and ostrich feathers, linking the Nile valley with the Mediterranean world.
Why it is worth it
On a low ridge of sand east of the Nile, between the Fifth and Sixth Cataracts, stand more than two hundred pyramids in three clusters. They are nothing like the pyramids of Giza. The Nubian pyramids are small and steep, their sides rising at a sharp angle to a narrow point, and each once had a little temple-like chapel built against its eastern face, where offerings were made to the dead. The burial chamber lay not inside the pyramid but cut into the rock beneath it. Seen together, ranked along the dunes with the orange sand drifting against their walls, they make one of the most otherworldly skylines in Africa.
They were the royal cemeteries of Meroë, the southern capital of the Kingdom of Kush. Around 590 BC King Aspelta moved the seat of government here, and the city remained the political heart of the kingdom until about AD 350, when it fell to the armies of Aksum. Kings, queens and nobles were buried in the pyramids from roughly 300 BC to the end. Meroë's wealth came from trade along the Nile and across the Butana plain, in ivory, skins, ostrich feathers and gold, and from iron: the city was a centre of iron-working whose traces matter for understanding how metallurgy spread across Africa south of the Sahara. The Kushites also developed their own alphabet, the Meroitic script of twenty-three letters, which replaced Egyptian hieroglyphs for writing their own language and has still not been fully deciphered.
Many of the pyramids now end in jagged, broken stumps, and the story behind that is part of the place. In 1834 the Italian adventurer Giuseppe Ferlini, convinced that the tombs held treasure, tore the tops off dozens of them. In one, belonging to Queen Amanishakheto, he found a hoard of gold jewellery, which ended up in European museums; the damage to the monuments was permanent. Down by the river, the ruins of the royal city, the principal residence of the Kushite rulers, are far less visited than the cemeteries but complete the picture of a capital. In 2011 Meroë and the nearby sites of Naqa and Musawwarat es-Sufra were inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List as the Archaeological Sites of the Island of Meroë.
Come at the end of the day. When the sun drops low the pyramids throw long shadows across the dunes, the sandstone turns from beige to deep rust, and the desert silence that surrounds them is broken only by the wind.
Getting there
The pyramids lie about 6 km north-east of Kabushiya, near the town of Shendi, which is about 43 km away. Khartoum International Airport (KRT) is about 196 km to the south-west, and the site is usually reached by road from Khartoum, roughly 200 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Meroë was an ancient city on the east bank of the Nile about 6 km north-east of the Kabushiya station near Shendi, Sudan, approximately 200 km north-east of Khartoum. Near the site is a group of villages called Bagrawiyah. This city was the capital of the Kingdom of Kush for several centuries from around 590 BC, until its collapse in the 4th century AD. The Kushitic Kingdom of Meroë gave its name to the "Island of Meroë", which was the modern region of Butana, a region bounded by the Nile, the Atbarah and the Blue Nile.
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