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Pyramids from the Northern Cemetery at Meroë,
3rd c. B.C. to 4th c. A.D. By the 4th c. B.C., the Kushite kings
had moved south to the Sudanese savannah and built a capitol at
Meroë.
The actual capital of Kush was established at Meroe quite early
even though its rulers built pyramids near Napata until about
300 B.C. {Timothy Kendall in Meroitic Nubia } Meroe became a
great city of large industrial complexes and great temples, with
an inner city that contained palaces, a shrine with a large pool
and columns that spouted water, and even an observatory.
Numerous important centers were founded in the Isle of Meroe,
and great temple complexes dedicated to gods with both Egyptian
and Meroitic names. The most important Meroitic deity was
Apedemak, usually shown with a lion's head, who became one of
the greatest state gods. The outstanding Meroitic industry known
to us is iron. The site of Meroe still contains large heaps of
slag, and recent excavations have unearthed parts of the
furnaces used to smelt the metal .
In the north, Meroitic policy had been to assist revolts in
Upper Egypt against foreign rulers, such as Persians, the
Macedonian Ptolemies, and Romans. After an agreement with Rome
just after 23 B.C., Meroitic settlers were able to live close to
Aswan, beginning a new era of prosperity in Lower Nubia. Wealth
derived from trade made possible some of Nubia's most delightful
achievements in arts and crafts. The culture, like that of
Kush's main center at Meroe, was pharaonic, and the
representations on pottery and small objects were made in
accordance with the what was considered proper in that
tradition. These Meroites of Lower Nubia also constructed small
brick pyramids, and equipped their chapels with stone sculptures
and inscribed monuments
Meroe seems to have been a flourishing town at least as early as
the eighth century BC. It was situated at the junction of
several main river and caravan routes, connecting central
Africa, via the Blue and White Niles, with Egypt, and the Upper
Nile region itself with Kordofan, the Red Sea and the Ethiopian
highlands. Since it lay within the rainbelt, the land about it
was seasonally more productive than the region of Napata, and it
was thus a somewhat more pleasant place to live. By the third
century BC it was only one of several large towns that had
arisen in the same region. Bounded to the west by the Nile, the
north by the River Atbara and to the south by the Blue Nile,
this area, now known as the Butana, was the heartland of the
later Kushite kingdom, and came to be known in classical
literature as "the Island of Meroe."
Our historical knowledge of Meroitic history is scant. When the
kings ceased writing in Egyptian and began writing in their own
Meroitic language, we suddenly cease being able to understand
their official inscriptions. Meroitic, unfortunately, has not
yet been deciphered; the key has never yet been found. All our
knowledge of Meroitic history is thus based on the few surviving
Greek and Roman reports, and on data recovered archaeologically.
The rulers of the Meroitic Period were contemporaries with the
Ptolemies of Egypt and the Romans. In the third century BC, they
maintained friendly relations with the Ptolemies, since the
kings of the two neighboring Nile states collaborated in
renovating the temples of Lower Nubia, sacred to both Kush and
Egypt. Agents of the Ptolemies also traveled up the Nile as
explorers and emissaries, some perhaps traveling to Meroe to
haggle with the Kushite ruler over the price of war elephants
which they sought to purchase for the armies of Egypt. The Roman
historian Pliny preserves the names of several Greeks who
actually resided at Meroe. One, named Simonides, was said to
have lived there five years and to have written a book about his
adventures. There was obviously a brusque trade between Meroe
and Egypt and even beyond, since numerous Greek and Roman object
have been found at Meroe: a wine jar from one of the royal
tombs, in fact, is stamped with a mark indicating it had come
from a region of Algeria. By the first century AD some of the
Meroitic gods had even taken on aspects of some of the Olympian
deities, and some temples were built using Greek measurement,
and incorporated on Hellenistic features and ornament.
Scanty, but certainly accurate accounts of the capital Meroe
have come down to us in the works of Pliny and Strabo, both of
whom had at their disposal the reports of the team of explorers
sent to Meroe by Nero about 60 AD to seek the source of the
Nile. Pliny stated that Meroe was in an area where the grass
became greener where scrub forest first began to appear and
where elephants and rhinoceros could be seen in small numbers.
The buildings in the town, at that time, he said, "were few in
number," but there were temples to "Jupiter Hammon" (Amun),
besides "smaller shrines erected in his honor throughout all the
country." Strabo had noted further that the palace at Meroe had
a garden full of fruit trees, and that the houses of the common
folk were constructed of bricks or "interwoven pieces of split
palm wood."
Today Meroe is the largest archaeological site in the Sudan.
Lying about a half a mile from the river, the city ruins alone
cover about a square mile in area. Today they lie in an acacia
scrub forest. Most prominent among the ruins is the huge stone
walled enclosure containing the rubble remains of the palace and
government buildings, several small temples (one with painted
frescoes), and a so-called "Roman bath" or nymphaeum.
Immediately behind it sprawls another walled com-pound enclosing
the Amun Temple, a near copy of the one at Gebel Barkal. The
remains of several other major sanctuaries lie nearby among the
trees. Between these and the palace compound there are the
extensive unexcavated mounds of the settlement, and on the east
end of the city, on the edge of the desert, there are great slag
heaps which have suggested that Meroe was an important iron
working center. While cattle raising and the farming of millet
and barley seem to have been the major occupations of the people
at large, the city prospered by its river and overland trade.
According to Strabo this trade probably involved the procurement
and transshipment of salt, copper, iron, gold, various kinds of
precious stones, valuable woods and animal products such as
ivory and the skins of lion and leopard. Oddly enough, unlike
the principalities within the Graeco-Roman sphere, Meroe never
made use of coinage, instead doing all business only in barter.
Behind the city in the eastern desert lie its vast cemeteries.
Those nearest the town were reserved for the common people.
Those about a mile and a half distant bear the small masonry
pyramids of the nobles and lesser members of the royal family,
and finally, about three miles away, lining the tops of two
ridges, are the towering pyra-mids of the rulers, of which over
forty can be counted.
If Meroe was the major city of the kingdom, it was not the only
one. The Butana Steppe is dotted with other Meroitic remains.
Some up to sixty miles east of the Nile. Other settlements have
been identified further south along the Blue and White Niles,
and many Meroitic settlements arose in Lower Nubia, some barely
a hundred miles south of Aswan. Apart from the capital, the most
monumental sites are three, which lie between forty and fifty
miles south of Meroe. At Wad Ban Naga, on the east bank of the
Nile, there may be seen the remains of an enormous palace,
together with two temples and a town. This was apparently a
river port leading to the two great inland centers Naga and
Musawwarat es-Sufra, built on the plain some twelve to eighteen
miles inland. The first of these was clearly an important
religious center, for it possesses the ruins of seven stone
temples, a town, and a cemetery. On-going excavations here have
revealed that the town was also surrounded by numerous manor
houses with plantations.
The latter site, ten miles to the north,
was also a cult center and perhaps, too, a caravanserai. The most spectacular site in
the Butana, Musawwarat contains the sprawling ruin known as the
"Great Enclosure", a labyrinth of stone buildings, temples,
corridors, ramps, and courtyards. Tremendous stone walls
partition the complex into no less than twenty separate
compounds, which have recently been found to be protected
gardens of fruit trees, all brought, together with their
appropriate soil, from the banks of the Nile and watered by an
elaborate underground pipe system. The function of the complex
is not really known. Some have suggested that it was a seasonal
palace; others, a pilgrimage center; and others, a royal hunting
pavilion. While both the sites of Naga and Musawwarat now be in
virtual desert, careful management of somewhat greater rainfall
in ancient times made the area much more fertile than it is
today. Huge hafirs (catch-basins) were constructed at each site
to collect the annual rainwater and keep it until needed. The
largest hafir at Musawwarat is 800 ft. across and 20 ft.. Stone
statues of guardian lions and frogs ringed many of these
artificial lakes magically protecting their contents.
The major god of the region of Meroe was a divinity of local
origin, called Apede-mak. He was perhaps a lion form of Amun and
was often identified with the moon. He normally took the form of
a powerful lion-headed man, dressed in armor. He usually
appeared in the reliefs of his temple in a warlike aspect,
standing or seated on a throne or on an elephant, grasping
prisoners and weapons of war, or holding elephants and lions on
leashes. Magnificent temples in his honor were built at every
major site in the Butana. The finest surviving examples being
those at Naga and Musawwarat. The Apedemak Temple at Naga is
adorned with reliefs depicting the imposing figures of its
builders, King Natakamani and Queen Amanitore doing homage to
the lion god. (This royal pair, who lived at about the time of
Christ, seem to have presided over a Meroitic "Golden Age," as
the remains of numerous buildings bear their names.) In the
decorative scheme of this temple the figure of the queen appears
just as prominently as that of her husband, providing a clear
indication of the unusual status accorded women in the Meroitic
monarchy. Judging by the many large pyramids of queens and the
remains of buildings bearing their names exclusively, Meroe
after the third century BC seems to have been ruled by many
queens in their own right. Classical writers were so impressed
with this fact that they often assumed that Meroe was ruled only
by women, who, they thought always bore the name "Candace." This
name, the origin of our modern female name, was in fact a
Meroitic queenly title, which may have meant "Queen regent".
In 24 BC, soon after Rome had wrested Egypt
from Anthony and
Cleopatra, the Kushites invaded Lower Nubia, attacking and
plundering even Aswan to test the new northern power. This is
virtually the only incident in which Meroe appears directly on
the stage of Roman history. Following this challenge to
Augustus' authority, the Roman general Petronius was immediately
dispatched into Nubia. He met and defeated a Meroitic army and
drove on to Napata, which was said to have been captured and
destroyed by him, and its inhabitants enslaved. The Meroites and
Romans ultimately made a peace treaty, which endured for three
centuries. Curiously, in the Roman account it was noted that the
Merotic queen was "a very masculine sort of woman and blind in
one eye." This strange description is given substance by the
even stranger portrayals of these ladies that appear in reliefs
in their tomb chapels and temples. The successive Candaces
Amanishakheto and Amanitore, for example, both of whom are
nearly contemporary with Petronius' campaign, are depicted as
massive, powerful figures, enormously fat, covered with jewels
and ornament and elaborate fringed and tasseled robes. Their
huge frames tower over their diminutive enemies, whom they are
shown grasping brutally by the hair with one hand and dealing
the coup de grace with the other. The social and aesthetic
implications expressed by these reliefs are very different from
those of Egypt, where women preferred to be portrayed as lithe
and slim. This attribute, together with the facial scars worn by
both the kings and queens of the Meroitic period, were the marks
of physical beauty, common to central Africa, and suggest how
much more southern oriented the kingdom had become since the
days of the 25th Dynasty. Doubtless, over the centuries, the
Meroitic ruling house had been infused many times with new
ethnic strains and tribal affiliations
During the Meroitic Period over forty kings and queens were
buried at Meroe. Their pyramids, which are better preserved than
those at Nuri, continued the same basic royal tomb form. Of all
the tombs, not one was found unplundered. There is even reason
to suppose that in some cases the robbers were the very men who
were employed in cutting the tombs. From reliefs preserved in
the tomb chapels it is clear that the royal mummies were laid in
wooden anthropoid coffins; these were placed in the inner-most
chambers of the tombs on raised masonry benches carved with
divine figures. The bodies were evidently weighted down with
jewelry. The larger tombs contained remnants of weapons, bows,
quivers of arrows, archer's thumb rings, horse trappings, wooden
boxes and furniture, colored glass vessels and bottles. fine and
coarse pottery, bronze lamps, elegant bronze and silver vessels
and other utensils, many of them imported from Egypt and the
Greek and Roman worlds.
Many of the tombs at Meroe contained multiple human skeletons,
again reminding us of the Kerma burials in which people were
sacrificed to accompany the dead. Writing in the first century
BC, the Greek writer Diodorus remarked of the Meroites that it
was "customary for the comrades of the kings even to die with
them of their own accord and that such a death is an honorable
one and proof of true friendship." He added also that "it was
for that reason that a conspiracy against the king is not easily
raised among the Ethiopians, all his friends being concerned
both for his safety and for their own." Excavations have
revealed that it was not only the kings who took others with
them in death. Many tombs of lesser importance contained small
groups of subsidiary skeletons and it was clear that most
wealthy persons were buried with servants. For the royal tombs,
animals too were slaughtered, usually on the landings of the
deep stairways, just outside the sealed entrances to the burial
chamber. Here were found the remains of yoked horses, oxen, or
even camels and dogs, and bodies of attendants.
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