History

The Kerma culture emerged from the A-Group and Pre-Kerma cultures of the Nile Valley and reached urban scale by approximately 3000–2500 BC, when the city of Kerma became a substantial settlement with monumental mudbrick architecture, specialised crafts, and large-scale agricultural organisation based on the Nile flood cycle. The city was the capital of a state the Egyptians called “Kush” or “Yam” in their records; the Kerma people had no known writing system, and their own name for their kingdom is not recorded.

For most of the 20th century, Egyptologists who briefly examined the site in the early 1900s (particularly George Reisner, who excavated the Kerma cemetery for the Harvard-Boston Expedition in 1913–1916) concluded that Kerma was an Egyptian colonial outpost administered by an Egyptian governor, and that its distinctive pottery, architecture, and burial customs were debased Egyptian forms. This interpretation — which reflected the era’s assumption that sophisticated material culture in sub-Saharan Africa required an Egyptian source — persisted in standard textbooks for sixty years. Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet, who began systematic excavations at Kerma in 1977 under the auspices of the University of Geneva, demonstrated definitively that Kerma was an independent Nubian civilisation. The “Egyptian-style” objects in Kerma burials were Egyptian imports (diplomatic gifts, trade goods, loot); the Kerma material culture itself — its red-black polished ceramics, its circular domestic architecture, its distinctive funerary practices — has no Egyptian model and represents a fully autonomous tradition.

Kerma reached its political peak during the Second Intermediate Period in Egypt (c. 1650–1550 BC), when Egypt was simultaneously occupied in the north by the Hyksos. During this period the Kerma kingdom extended its control north into Upper Egypt as far as Aswan or beyond, allied with the Hyksos against the Theban Egyptian state. When the Theban pharaohs expelled the Hyksos and reunified Egypt (c. 1550 BC under Ahmose I and Thutmose I), they turned south and systematically destroyed the Kerma kingdom. The city was sacked and burnt around 1500 BC; the Egyptian New Kingdom established a colonial administration at the site thereafter.

In 2001 and 2003, Bonnet’s team made what he described as the most important find of his career: a cache of seven large black granite statues of Nubian kings, including three kings of the 25th Dynasty (the “Black Pharaohs” who later conquered and ruled all of Egypt), buried in a deliberate cache under a temple built over the ruins of the Kerma city. The cache — heads, torsos, fragments — represents the largest known group of ancient African royal statues found in a single excavation, and the cache’s location under the temple suggests a deliberate act of preservation or concealment, possibly by the statues’ owners or later devotees.