History

The Napatan kingdom arose from the Nubian state of Kush, centred on the sacred mountain of Gebel Barkal near the Fourth Nile Cataract. From this base, the Kushite king Piye (Piankhy) launched a military campaign in 744 BC that swept through all of Egypt, establishing the 25th Dynasty — the Nubian pharaohs who ruled the entire Nile Valley from Khartoum to the Mediterranean. Taharqa, the most celebrated of these pharaohs, built extensively throughout Egypt and Egypt Sudan: his colonnade at Karnak rivals anything built by native Egyptian dynasties, and his pyramid at Nuri dwarfs all other post-Old-Kingdom pyramids in sheer volume and base area. After the Assyrian invasions of 671 and 663 BC drove the Nubian pharaohs back into Sudan, their descendants continued to rule the Napatan kingdom, building pyramids at Nuri for a further four centuries. The tradition of royal pyramid burial — which Egypt itself had largely abandoned by this period — was preserved and adapted by Nubian kings who saw themselves as the legitimate heirs of Egyptian civilisation. The subsidiary tombs at Nuri include queens, princes, and court officials buried in smaller pyramids surrounding the royal tombs.

The pyramids were robbed in antiquity, their burial chambers stripped of their contents before the modern era. George Reisner excavation in 1916–1923 documented the site in meticulous detail, identifying each pyramid and its probable occupant through inscribed objects and architectural parallels. The rising water table — a consequence of modern irrigation schemes and the Merowe Dam completed in 2009 — has since flooded most of the subterranean burial chambers, creating a unique and alarming archaeological challenge. The 2019 Creasman expedition demonstrated that although the chambers have been filled with water for years, the carved stonework remains structurally intact beneath the surface, awaiting proper underwater excavation.