Nubia and the Kingdom of Kush: The Black Pharaohs of Sudan

Sudan has more pyramids than Egypt. Nearly 250 of them, most within a two-hour drive of the capital Khartoum. They are smaller, steeper, and later than the Egyptian ones — and they were built by a civilisation that most travellers have never heard of, even though it once ruled Egypt itself.

The Kingdom of Kush was Egypt’s southern neighbour, rival, coloniser, and, for one dazzling century, its conqueror. Its capital at Meroë was still going after Rome had fallen. Here is the story. For the broader Egyptian context see our complete history of ancient Egypt.

Nubia: the land beyond Egypt

Ancient Nubia occupied what is now northern Sudan and southern Egypt — everything south of the First Cataract of the Nile at Aswan. Egyptians called it Ta-Seti (“Land of the Bow”, after the archery skills of its people) and later Kush. It was rich in gold, ivory, ebony, incense and leopard skins. The word “Nubia” itself may come from the ancient Egyptian word for gold (nub).

Nubia was not a colony of Egypt. It had its own kingdoms going back at least 5,000 years, sometimes trading with Egypt, sometimes ruled by it, sometimes ruling it back. The relationship was closer to England and Scotland than to England and India.

Kerma: the first great Nubian kingdom

The first identifiable Nubian state is Kerma, which flourished from about 2500 to 1500 BC. Its capital lay near the Third Cataract in modern Sudan and was, in its day, one of the largest cities in Africa outside Egypt. Its royal tombs — massive circular tumuli — held human sacrifices in the hundreds, a striking indication of royal power.

Kerma controlled the Nubian gold trade and became rich enough to occasionally threaten Egypt. In the Second Intermediate Period (around 1650 BC), while Egypt was busy fighting the Hyksos in the north, Kerma raided as far as Egyptian Luxor. Then the New Kingdom pharaohs regrouped, marched south, and by around 1500 BC had conquered all of Nubia as far as the Fourth Cataract, deep in modern Sudan.

Egyptian Nubia and the temple builders

For the next 400 years Nubia was an Egyptian imperial province, run by a governor called the Viceroy of Kush. Egypt built enormous temples there, most spectacularly Ramses II’s two rock-cut temples at Abu Simbel, aligned so that on two mornings a year the rising sun penetrates 60 metres into the mountain to light up the statues of the pharaoh and three gods in the inner sanctuary.

When Egyptian central authority collapsed around 1069 BC and the New Kingdom ended, the Egyptian occupation of Nubia ended with it. And here is where the story gets really interesting: the Nubians did not celebrate their liberation by rejecting Egyptian culture. They absorbed it. Nubian rulers began worshipping Amun, building temples in Egyptian style, writing in hieroglyphs, and eventually claiming the title of pharaoh themselves.

The black pharaohs: the Kushite conquest of Egypt

Around 750 BC, an Egyptian political crisis gave the Kushite king Piye his chance. Egypt had fragmented into rival principalities. Piye marched north out of his Nubian capital at Napata, defeated one Egyptian prince after another, sailed his fleet up the Nile, and had himself crowned pharaoh in Thebes. His victory stele — a tall inscribed stone slab now in the Grand Egyptian Museum — is one of the great narrative documents of the ancient world.

Piye and his successors formed Egypt’s 25th Dynasty (c. 747-656 BC) and ruled the united country for about a century. They saw themselves as restorers of traditional Egyptian religion (which had gone soft under Libyan rule) and were patrons of a huge cultural revival. They built new temples, restored old ones, revived Old Kingdom art styles, and were buried in classic Egyptian style — including pyramids, first at their old capital El-Kurru near Napata and later at Nuri.

The dynasty ended when the Assyrians invaded Egypt in 671 BC and eventually pushed the Kushites back south of the border. But Kush was not finished — far from it.

Meroë: the empire in the desert

Around 300 BC, Kush shifted its capital south to Meroë, deeper into what is now central Sudan. Meroë was safer from Egyptian attack, richer in resources (iron ore was mined there on an industrial scale — Meroë has been called “the Birmingham of Africa”), and more culturally independent. Its rulers stopped bothering with hieroglyphs and developed their own alphabetic script called Meroitic. We can read the letters — the alphabet was decoded by Francis Griffith in 1909 — but we still cannot understand most of what they say. Meroitic remains one of the great unsolved languages of the ancient world.

The Meroë-era pyramids are the ones most tourists see: 200-plus small, steep pyramids in three clusters, most of them royal tombs from between 300 BC and 350 AD. They are dramatically photogenic — narrow, densely clustered, isolated in the desert. Most were badly damaged in the 1830s by an Italian treasure hunter named Giuseppe Ferlini, who blew the tops off dozens looking for gold. Ongoing restoration has stabilised the survivors.

Meroë also produced a series of powerful female rulers, some of whom appear in Roman sources as “Candace” (a title, not a name — meaning “queen mother” or “ruling queen”). Amanirenas defeated a Roman invasion around 25 BC and negotiated a peace treaty that recognised Kush’s southern border. It is one of the few times a Roman army was fought to a stalemate by an African power.

The end of Kush

Kush declined in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, weakened by shifts in trade patterns and rising powers to its south. Around 350 AD the Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum finally invaded and sacked Meroë. The city was abandoned. Kush’s successor kingdoms — Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia — converted to Christianity in the 6th century and lasted until Islamic conquests in the medieval period.

Visiting today

Sudan is currently affected by civil conflict; conditions change frequently and travel is not advised at the time of writing. But when the country reopens, the pyramid fields to visit are:

• Meroë: the largest cluster, most photogenic, 200 km north of Khartoum
• Nuri: tombs of the 25th Dynasty pharaohs including Taharqa, near Karima
• El-Kurru: earliest royal Kushite cemetery, with painted tomb chambers
• Jebel Barkal: a sacred mountain considered the southern home of Amun, with pyramids and temples at its foot

Nubian art and inscriptions are also displayed at the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and at the Sudan National Museum in Khartoum (partially damaged in the current conflict). For neighbouring Egypt see the Egypt travel guide and best time to visit Egypt.

Frequently asked questions