Karima is a small, quiet, green town in the middle of the desert: a few streets, a market, a railway station and a strip of palm groves and vegetable gardens following the Nile. It would have no reason to appear in any travel guide if it weren't for what lies on its outskirts: Jebel Barkal, the sacred mountain where Egyptians and Kushites placed the home of the god Amun for fifteen hundred years, and around it the greatest concentration of Nubian heritage in the country.
From here it takes minutes to reach the temples and pyramids of Barkal, a little longer to reach those of Nuri, where the pharaoh Taharqa is buried, the necropolis of El Kurru and the temple of Sanam. Four of the five components of the UNESCO site “Gebel Barkal and the Sites of the Napatan Region” are within a day's reach. That is why, for travellers who came to Sudan before 2023, Karima was the key word of the north: the place where you slept in order to see the Black Pharaohs.
This guide does not suggest a trip. Sudan has been at war since April 2023 and every foreign ministry advises against any travel to the country. What follows is an information guide: what Karima is, what surrounds it, what role it plays in the history of the Nile Valley and what is known today about the state of Sudan's heritage.
Karima is a modern town set on one of the densest historical landscapes in Africa. At its feet stood Napata, capital of the Kingdom of Kush between the 9th and 6th centuries BC, from where the so-called “Black Pharaohs” of the 25th Dynasty came to rule Egypt; the sanctuary of Amun at Jebel Barkal was, for fifteen hundred years, the religious centre of the Nile Valley south of Egypt. After the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik II sacked Napata around 593 BC, the political capital moved to Meroe, but the mountain remained a place of worship for centuries. In modern times, the town grew as the hub of the farming riverbank and as the terminus of a railway branch line laid during the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium. The construction of the Merowe Dam, at the Fourth Cataract, between 2003 and 2009 transformed the area: it doubled the country's electricity capacity, flooded a large stretch of the valley and displaced thousands of people, and it also triggered one of the most important archaeological salvage campaigns in Sudan's recent history.
Read the full history ↓The stretch of the Nile where the black pharaohs came from: the city of Kerma with its mud-brick Deffufa, Amun's sacred mountain at Jebel Barkal, the pyramids of Nuri and the Christian capital of Old Dongola.
Read the history of The Nubian north: Napata, Karima and Kerma →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Karima sits at one of the most unusual points along the Nile. Between the Fourth and Fifth Cataracts, the river stops flowing north and swings in a huge bend to the south-west before turning again. This detour of hundreds of kilometres wraps around the Bayuda Desert like a loop. Karima lies on the upper stretch of that bend, on the riverbank, where the valley widens into a fertile strip of palm groves and market gardens.
That geography had decisive historical consequences. The bend in the Nile forced caravans to choose: follow the river, which was much longer, or cut straight across the Bayuda Desert, which was shorter but much harder. For thousands of years, that choice shaped the trade routes, military campaigns and pilgrimages between southern and northern Nubia. The Karima area was the junction where the decision was made.
The irrigated strip here is also fairly wide and productive, so it could support a population density that was unusual for the Nubian desert. Date palm groves, with the barakawi variety as their flagship, and riverside farming have kept communities going without a break for thousands of years. The region was the historical homeland of the Shaigiya tribe, who are also found around Korti.
And in the middle of all this, on the outskirts of today's town, stands an isolated sandstone mesa about a hundred metres high that two civilisations believed was the earthly home of a god: Jebel Barkal.
At the foot of Jebel Barkal, in what is now the Karima area, stood Napata, one of the most important cities of ancient Africa. It began as an Egyptian foundation. Around 1450 BC, the campaigns of Thutmose III took Egypt as far as the Fourth Cataract. He set the southern border of the empire here and dedicated the mountain to Amun, calling it “the Throne of the Two Lands”. The New Kingdom pharaohs began building the great Temple of Amun, which became the most important sanctuary in the Nile Valley south of Egypt.
When Egyptian power withdrew after 1070 BC, the theology, the priesthood and the architecture stayed behind, and a new local elite took over the whole system. Napata produced the dynasty that, in the mid-8th century BC, did the unthinkable: it conquered Egypt. Kashta reached Thebes. Piye completed the conquest of the Delta around 727 BC and founded the 25th Dynasty, the so-called “Black Pharaohs”. After him came Shabaka, Shabataka, Taharqa and Tanutamani. Taharqa was the greatest builder of them all, and his kingdom stretched from the Mediterranean to present-day Khartoum.
Piye's Victory Stela, found in the Temple of Amun at Barkal, is one of the most remarkable historical documents of ancient Africa. Alongside it are Taharqa's inscriptions, Tanutamani's Dream Stela and Aspelta's Election Stela. Together they form the written record used to reconstruct the history of the Kingdom of Kush.
The empire ended with the Assyrian invasions of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal between 671 and 663 BC, which drove the Kushites out of Egypt. Taharqa died at Napata in 664 BC and was buried beneath the first pyramid at Nuri, across the river. Around 593 BC, an expedition sent by the pharaoh Psamtik II sacked the city. This hastened the move of the capital south to Meroe, around 591 BC, under King Aspelta.
Napata lost its role as the political capital but stayed the religious one. Meroitic kings kept restoring the Barkal temples for centuries, and some even chose to be buried there. In 22 BC, the Roman prefect Gaius Petronius razed the city again in response to the offensive led by the kandake Amanirenas against Roman Egypt. Napata recovered from that too.
After Meroe collapsed around AD 350, the Nubian valley reorganised into three successor kingdoms. Nobatia lay to the north. Makuria held the centre, with its capital at Old Dongola, about a hundred and fifty kilometres downstream from Karima. Alodia lay to the south, with its capital at Soba, near present-day Khartoum. All three became Christian in the 6th century. Together they formed one of Africa's longest-lasting and least-known Christian civilisations, with mud-brick churches, wall paintings of very high quality and a manuscript tradition of their own.
For centuries, Makuria held out against pressure from Muslim armies in Egypt, protected by a unique treaty, the baqt, which governed relations between Nubia and the Islamic world for hundreds of years. The kingdom fell into crisis from the 14th century, and the region gradually became Muslim between the 14th and 16th centuries, more through migration and trade than through military conquest.
From 1504, the Funj Sultanate of Sennar ruled much of the middle Nile, while tribal confederations grew strong in the north. One of these was the Shaigiya, who controlled the stretch along the great bend. The Turco-Egyptian conquest of 1821 ended that order and placed the whole region under an administration based in Khartoum.
During the Mahdiyya and the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest of 1898, armies moved through the area. In 1885, the British column that tried to relieve Gordon in Khartoum crossed the Bayuda Desert, which Karima overlooks from the north. Under the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, a narrow-gauge branch railway was built that made Karima a terminus of the Sudanese network. That network linked the north with Atbara and Port Sudan.
The event that changed the region most in the 21st century was the construction of the Merowe Dam. It was built between 2003 and 2009 at the Fourth Cataract of the Nile, a short way upstream from Karima, which is the nearest town downstream of the reservoir.
The effect on energy was huge: when the dam came into service, it doubled Sudan's electricity generating capacity. It was the country's most ambitious infrastructure project in decades, financed by Arab funds and built with Chinese and European companies.
The social effect was just as large and far more contentious. The reservoir flooded a long stretch of the valley and displaced thousands of people from the riverside communities of the Fourth Cataract, including the Manasir, Amri and Hamadab. They were resettled in desert areas with conditions very different from the fertile riverbank. The process brought protests, lawsuits and complaints, documented by human rights organisations and by publications specialising in forced displacement.
The archaeological effect gave rise to the Merowe Dam Archaeological Salvage Project, one of the largest rescue excavation campaigns in Sudan's recent history. International teams raced against the clock to record and excavate the sites in the doomed stretch before they disappeared under water. The British Sudan Archaeological Research Society played a leading part, alongside missions from several countries. The results transformed what was known about human settlement at the Fourth Cataract. Until then the area had been seen as marginal, but it turned out to have been densely populated since prehistoric times.
The episode also raised an ethical question that was openly debated in the field: what it means for archaeology to work under the umbrella of a project that is forcibly displacing the local population.
Before April 2023, Karima was an essential stop on the archaeological circuit of northern Sudan. It was a small town of about fourteen thousand people, according to the 2012 census. It had a modest market, a railway station, a site museum and a tented lodge for travellers. Everyone who passed through praised its hospitality above anything else. Decades of sanctions and a poor image abroad meant Sudan received very few international tourists. That scarcity was exactly why those who did come had Jebel Barkal, Nuri and El Kurru practically to themselves.
The war that broke out on 15 April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces changed everything. Northern State stayed fairly far from the main front lines in Khartoum, Kordofan and Darfur, and there are no reports that fighting has directly hit the Napatan monuments. But the war affects the north in other ways: people displaced from the capital have arrived, the economy is in crisis, trade has been disrupted, and tourism and research have stopped completely.
The deeper damage to heritage is the loss of institutional capacity. International archaeological missions suspended their field seasons, and the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums can no longer operate properly. Site security has weakened and maintenance has stopped. At large, open sites, that means a risk of looting and illegal digging. UNESCO described the threat to Sudan's heritage as “unprecedented”. It activated its Heritage Emergency Fund for Sudan's two World Heritage sites and publicly urged people not to buy antiquities from the country. In November 2024, there were seizures and arrests linked to the smuggling of artefacts in northern Sudan, with documented arrests in Atbara.
Throughout 2026, every foreign ministry has kept its advice against all travel to Sudan, with no regional exceptions. Karima, the quiet town at the foot of Amun's mountain, is still there, waiting.
