The Cult of Amun

In the epic rivalry between ancient Egypt and Nubia, one god had enduring appeal

By Daniel Weiss

In its 3,000-year history as a state, ancient Egypt had a complicated, constantly changing set of relations with neighboring powers. With the Libyans to the west and the Babylonians, Hittites, Assyrians, and Persians to the northeast, Egypt by turns waged war, forged treaties, and engaged in mutually beneficial trade. But Egypt’s most important and enduring relationship was, arguably, with its neighbor to the south, Nubia, which occupied a region that is now in Sudan. The two cultures were connected by the Nile River, whose annual flooding made civilization possible in an otherwise harsh desert environment. Through their shared history, Egyptians and Nubians also came to worship the same chief god, Amun, who was closely allied with kingship and played an important role as the two civilizations vied for supremacy.

During its Middle and New Kingdoms, which spanned the second millennium B.C., Egypt pushed its way into Nubia, ultimately conquering and making it a colonial province. The Egyptians were drawn by the land’s rich store of natural resources, including ebony, ivory, animal skins, and, most importantly, gold. As they expanded their control of Nubia, the Egyptians built a number of temples to Amun, the largest of which stood at the foot of a holy mountain called Jebel Barkal. This the Egyptians declared to be the god’s southern home, thereby conceptualizing Egypt and Nubia as a unified whole and justifying their rule of both. After Egypt’s New Kingdom collapsed around 1069 B.C., the kingdom of Kush rose in Nubia, with its court based in Napata, the town adjacent to Jebel Barkal. The Egyptian colonizers may have been gone, but their religious legacy lived on, as the Kushite rulers were by this time fervently devoted to Amun. Just as the Egyptians had used the god to validate their conquest of Nubia, the Kushites now returned the favor. During a period of discord in Egypt, the Kushite king Piye first secured Amun’s northern home, in Karnak, Egypt. Then, claiming to act on the god’s behalf to restore unified control of Nubia and Egypt, he conquered the rest of Egypt and, in 728 B.C., became the first in a line of Kushite pharaohs who ruled Egypt for around 70 years.

'Evil Eye' Box and Other Ancient Treasures Found in Nile River Cemetery

By Owen Jarus, Live Science Contributor   |   August 12, 2014

A 2,000-year-old cemetery with several underground tombs has been discovered near the Nile River in Sudan.

Archaeologists excavated several of the underground tombs, finding artifacts such as a silver ring, engraved with an image of a god, and a faience box, decorated with large eyes, which a researcher believes protected against the evil eye.

Credit: © Berber-Abidiya Archaeological Project

Villagers discovered the cemetery accidently in 2002 while digging a ditch near the modern-day village of Dangeil, and archaeological excavations have been ongoing since then. The finds were reported recently in a new book.

The cemetery dates back to a time when a kingdom called Kush flourished in Sudan. Based in the ancient city of Meroe (just south of Dangeil) Kush controlled a vast territory; its northern border stretched to Roman-controlled Egypt. At times, it was ruled by a queen.

Although the Kushites built hundreds of pyramids, this particular cemetery contains no structures on the surface; the tombs are underground.

"As of now, we don't know exactly the size of the cemetery," Mahmoud Suliman Bashir, an archaeologist with Sudan's National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums (NCAM), said in an interview with Live Science.

Knowing Nubia

Ancient African Kingdoms on the Nile: Nubia; Edited by Marjorie Fisher, Peter Lacovara, Salima Ikram and Sue D’Auria; ‫Cairo‬: AUC PRESS, 2012. Reviewed by Gamal Nkrumah

For a long time, the very notion of Nubia, the “Land of Gold” as the ancient Egyptians called it, was an eccentric Egyptologist’s pipe dream. Nubiology as a separate academic discipline, independent of Egyptology was unknown. The very notion of Nubiology was frowned upon. Nubia was an Egyptian appendage at best.

New hypotheses, though, attest to Nubian civilizations being the origin of ancient Egypt. In other words, the ancient Nubians were the progenitors, and their cattle-based culture, the precursor of the Egyptian civilization. 

The designation Nubiology was coined by the Polish archeologist and Egyptologist Kazimierz Michalowski who is also acknowledged and internationally acclaimed as the founder of Nubian studies as an academic discipline in its own right.

On a visit to Meroe last year I was astounded by the beauty of the ancient Nubian pyramids. Most are much smaller in size than their Egyptian counterparts, and especially when compared to the Giza pyramids. Yet, two facets of ancient Nubian pyramids stood out. First, was the fact that there were far more pyramid in Sudan than in Egypt. There are 300 pyramids in Sudan, while there are only 100 pyramids in Egypt. Second, and even more startling is that there are almost as many pyramids constructed specifically for ancient Nubian queens, or rather queen-mothers, as for kings.

It is reasonable to presume that the status of royal women in ancient Nubia was far more significant than in ancient Egypt. The royal consorts were not particularly powerful in ancient Nubia. The Queen-Mother, being the king’s biological mother, his maternal aunt or sister often assumed that role. Moreover, many royal women ruled as queens in their own right and were socially accepted as such.

Miniature Pyramids of Sudan

Archaeologists excavating on the banks of the Nile have uncovered a necropolis where hundreds of small pyramids once stood

By ERIC A. POWELL

Nearly two thousand years after the Egyptian pharaoh Khufu marshaled armies of workers to build his 480-foot-tall Great Pyramid of Giza, the armies of Nubia (a region that is now in Sudan) invaded and occupied Egypt. It was 730 B.C. and, by then, the Egyptian pharaohs had long since abandoned the practice of erecting massive tombs. It was expensive to do so, and it had nearly bankrupted them. But the pyramids clearly fascinated the Nubian kings. They ruled Egypt during the 25th Dynasty, until they were ejected in 656 B.C., but Egypt’s influence on their own cultural practices was long-lasting. As ongoing archaeological work shows, the inhabitants of Nubia, particularly those in the kingdom of Meroe, found a way to imitate Egypt’s monuments. At the Meroitic royal cemetery, 80 radically downsized pyramids were constructed over the tombs of kings and queens. And now, new excavations at Sedeinga, a necropolis of the same era but 450 miles from Meroe, tell us that the practice of building diminutive pyramids trickled down from royals to the wealthy elite much more extensively than previously believed. Sedeinga contains a dense field of small pyramids, one just 30 inches across. “It is a crazy site,” says Vincent Francigny, a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History and codirector of the excavations at Sedeinga. “I’ve never seen a cemetery like this, with so many small monuments packed so closely together.”

Newly found Sudan pyramids show 'democratization'

March 30, 2013 11:03 AM

By Ian Timberlake

KHARTOUM: People power may have come to modern-day Egypt and not Sudan, but the unearthing of ancient pyramids in Egypt's southern neighbour shows that greater social equality existed there 2,000 years ago, a French archeologist says.

Three years of digging by a French team at Sedeinga, about 200 kilometres (120 miles) from the Egyptian border, has unearthed 35 pyramids that emphasise the contrast between the two ancient cultures, said Claude Rilly, director of the mission.

"Pyramids were so fashionable that everybody that could afford to build one, did," said Rilly, referring to the latter part of the Meroe kingdom, around 100-200 AD.

"So we have really a kind of inflation, what I call a democratisation of the pyramid which is without equivalent anywhere, especially in Egypt."

Sudan's remote and relatively undiscovered pyramids contrast with their grander and better-known cousins to the north.

Egyptian pyramids, built far earlier than those in Sudan, held the tombs of kings, the royal family and nobles -- but never the middle class, Rilly said.

Sudanese royalty also got their pyramids, but later so did many other lesser souls, said the 53-year-old archeologist, who began studying hieroglyphics when he was only seven.

"It reached layers of the population which have never been concerned by building of pyramids in Egypt," Rilly said. "This is really something new, which we didn't expect."

That is why there is such a large number. Sometimes they were built so close together, typically in a circular pattern, that there isn't enough room to squeeze between them.

A walk among Sudan’s Nubian pyramids

Does Sudan have more pyramids than Egypt? In this series, we explore the splendours of the ancient Kingdom of Kush and the legacy it left behind in the land of the Black Pharaohs

by Mohammed Elrazzaz, Monday 21 Jan 2013

The Island of Meroe

Following the Nile as it flows north, some 200 kilometres from Khartoum, one comes close to the last capital of the Kushite Kingdom, one of ancient Africa’s most prominent cultures. The site, known as the Island of Meroe, is no island at all, but rather an expanse of land that stretches between the Nile and the Atbara River. One of two UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Sudan, the archaeological sites of Meroe includes Meroe itself, Naga and Musawwarat es-Sufra.

Visitors to these isolated sites will find pyramids, temples, relics of residential buildings and irrigation infrastructure dating from as far back in time as the eighth century BC.

The Kingdom of Kush, which was heavily influenced by Ancient Egyptian culture, built its own pyramids, over two hundred of them. Whether at Meroe, El-Kurru or Nuri, the unique architecture of these pyramids is self-evident.

Unlike their Egyptian counterparts, the Nubian pyramids are much smaller in size (a base no broader than eight metres), very steep (an angle of seventy degrees) and rather elongated (no higher than thirty metres). Before delving into more details, we start with the first site.

Ancient Carving Shows Stylishly Plump African Princess

by Owen Jarus


A 2,000-year-old relief carved with an image of what appears to be a, stylishly overweight, princess has been discovered in an "extremely fragile" palace in the ancient city of Meroë, in Sudan, archaeologists say.

At the time the relief was made, Meroë was the center of a kingdom named Kush, its borders stretching as far north as the southern edge of Egypt. It wasn't unusual for queens (sometimes referred to as "Candaces") to rule, facing down the armies of an expanding Rome.

Image courtesy Krzysztof Grzymski

The sandstone relief shows a woman smiling, her hair carefully dressed and an earring on her left ear. She appears to have a second chin and a bit of fat on her neck, something considered stylish, at the time, among royal women from Kush.

Team leader Krzysztof Grzymski presented the relief, among other finds from the palace at Meroë, at an Egyptology symposium held recently at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

Researchers don't know the identity of the woman being depicted, but based on the artistic style the relief appears to date back around 2,000 years and show someone royal. "It's similar to other images of princesses," Grzymski told LiveScience in an interview. He said that the headdress hasn't survived and it cannot be ruled out that it actually depicts a queen.