Without exaggeration, Kerma is one of the most important places in African history and one of the least known in the world. Here, on the east bank of the Nile between the Third Cataract and Dongola, a city rose some 4,500 years ago. It reached at least 10,000 inhabitants and was the capital of the first great Nubian state: the kingdom of Kerma, the first Kush. For centuries it was the rival of pharaonic Egypt, not its colony.
What remains today is an archaeological landscape of rare power. In the middle of the plain stands the Western Deffufa, a solid mud-brick mass about fifty metres long and almost twenty high. It was the city's main temple, with an internal staircase and a rooftop platform. A few kilometres away, the Eastern Cemetery holds more than thirty thousand tombs and four royal tumuli over ninety metres across. A little to the north, at Doukki Gel, one of the most spectacular finds in Nubian archaeology came to light in 2003. Seven black granite statues of the pharaohs of the 25th Dynasty, the so-called «black pharaohs», had been broken on purpose and buried in a pit.
This guide is not an invitation to travel. Sudan has been at war since April 2023, and every foreign ministry advises against any travel to the country. Access to Kerma is suspended and there are no tourist services operating. What does make sense is to explain properly what Kerma is, why it matters, what was found here and what state its heritage is in. For that we use the information currently published by UNESCO, the archaeological missions and Sudan's own antiquities authority.
Kerma was the capital of the first kingdom of Nubia and one of the earliest urban centres in Africa outside Egypt. The archaeological sequence begins with the Pre-Kerma phase (c. 3500-2500 BC). It continues with Early Kerma (2500-2050 BC), Middle Kerma (2050-1750 BC), Classic Kerma (1750-1580 BC) and Final Kerma (1580-1500 BC). At its height, around 1700 BC, the city had at least 10,000 inhabitants and a monumental mud-brick temple, the Western Deffufa. It also had bronze workshops, palaces and a necropolis with more than 30,000 tombs. It had absorbed the kingdom of Sai and was a power able to ally with the Hyksos against Egypt. Around 1500-1450 BC, the New Kingdom pharaohs conquered Kush and Kerma lost its independence, although the neighbouring site of Doukki Gel stayed occupied for centuries. For a long time, Egyptology read Kerma as an Egyptian outpost. It was Charles Bonnet's Swiss excavations, from 1977 onwards, that showed it was an African city in its own right, planned and densely populated.
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.
The story of Kerma begins long before there were any monuments. On the alluvial plain of the Nile's east bank, between the Third Cataract and present-day Dongola, archaeologists have recorded a horizon called Pre-Kerma that runs roughly from 3500 to 2500 BC. It consisted of villages of round huts, livestock pens, silos, cattle and flood-recession farming, in one of the most fertile strips of land in all of Nubia. That base of farming and herding, along an especially favourable stretch of the river, explains why the first state of ancient Sudan formed right here and not somewhere else.
Around 2500 BC begins what archaeologists call Early Kerma, contemporary with phases Ia-Ib of the Nubian C-Group. By these centuries a hierarchical community had already emerged, with differentiated burials and pottery of its own of remarkable quality. Egypt, then in its Old Kingdom, knew this region very well: pharaonic texts describe expeditions to the south in search of gold, ivory, ebony, incense, leopard skins and men for the army, and they name a territory called Kush.
The sequence specialists use today divides the site's history into successive phases: Pre-Kerma (c. 3500-2500 BC), Early Kerma (c. 2500-2050 BC), Middle Kerma (c. 2050-1750 BC), Classic Kerma (c. 1750-1580 BC), Final Kerma (c. 1580-1500 BC) and a late phase under Egyptian New Kingdom rule (c. 1500-1100 BC). That adds up to more than two millennia of continuous occupation in a single place, which is exceptional even by the standards of the Nile Valley.
We don't know for certain what the inhabitants themselves called their city. “Kerma” is the modern name of the neighbouring village, and archaeologists adopted it for both the site and the whole culture. The Egyptians called the kingdom Kush, and that is the name history remembers it by.
Between 2050 and 1580 BC, Kerma became a city in the full sense of the word. Excavations have uncovered defensive walls and bastions, a street system, clearly distinct districts, houses, workshops (including bronze-casting furnaces), circular granaries, chapels and a large oval building interpreted as a palace or administrative seat. At its peak, around 1700 BC, the population is estimated at no fewer than 10.000 people. That was a huge figure for the time and the region, and it makes Kerma the oldest urban centre in Africa outside the Egyptian valley.
The building that dominates the whole complex is the Western Deffufa, a mudbrick mass about 52,3 by 26,7 metres (150 by 100 Egyptian cubits) and nearly twenty metres high, built some four thousand years ago. For a long time it was taken for a fortress. Today it is understood as a temple and the spiritual centre of the city. It was laid out on several levels, with an internal staircase that connected the floors and led up to a rooftop platform, and with underground chambers reached through galleries. The term deffufa is used only for this type of Nubian structure and probably comes from the Nubian for “mudbrick building” or from the Arabic daffa, “heap”. Only three deffufas survive anywhere in the world, and all three are in Kerma.
About four kilometres to the east lies the Eastern Cemetery, the kingdom's necropolis, with more than thirty thousand graves. Their layout traces the social evolution of the state: large elite burials are surrounded by smaller ones, a pattern of dependence you can read at a glance. The four largest tumuli, in the southern sector, are over ninety metres in diameter and belong to the last kings of Kerma. They held inlaid wooden funerary beds, lavish grave goods and Egyptian-influenced motifs such as the falcon of Horus. Above all, they held retainer sacrifices on a large scale: hundreds of people buried alongside the ruler.
Classic Kerma pottery deserves a chapter of its own. The very thin-walled vessels are black on top and red below, with an iridescent bluish-grey band where the two colours meet, and they rank among the finest pottery of the ancient world. They were made here and travelled the length of the Nile Valley, which shows how far the kingdom's trade reached.
In its final phase, between 1700 and 1500 BC, Kerma absorbed the Sudanese kingdom of Sai and grew into a populous empire able to contest the south with Egypt. By then Egypt was in its Second Intermediate Period, divided and with the Hyksos established in the Delta, and it found itself squeezed from the north and the south at once. There are signs of diplomatic contact between the Hyksos and the kings of Kush against Theban Egypt.
The end came with the reunification of Egypt and the start of the New Kingdom. The pharaohs of the 18th Dynasty, Ahmose, Amenhotep I, Thutmose I and above all Thutmose III, pushed steadily south. Around 1500-1450 BC Kush was conquered, and the kingdom of Kerma lost its independence after nearly a millennium of autonomy. Egypt organised Nubia as a province governed by a viceroy, the “King's Son of Kush”, and filled the valley with temples and fortified towns.
But the place was not abandoned. Just over a kilometre north of the ancient city lies Doukki Gel, the Pnubs of Egyptian texts. Excavations there have revealed a fascinating overlap: Egyptian New Kingdom temples stand next to circular structures and rounded bastions of African tradition, very different from the right-angled architecture of the north. Doukki Gel stayed occupied and in religious use from the New Kingdom to the Meroitic period, more than a thousand years in all.
The discovery that put Doukki Gel in the headlines came in 2003. The team led by Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet found a pit holding a ritual deposit (a favissa, or cachette) that contained seven monumental black granite statues of Kushite rulers of the 25th Dynasty: Taharqa, Tanutamun, Senkamanisken, Anlamani and Aspelta. The statues had been deliberately broken in antiquity and then carefully buried, which, ironically, kept them in exceptional condition. The most widely accepted theory links the destruction to the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik II's military campaign against Kush in 593 BC, an act of damnatio memoriae against the Nubian kings who had once ruled Egypt.
Those rulers are the so-called “Black Pharaohs”. In the 8th century BC this Kushite dynasty came down the Nile from Napata, conquered Egypt and ruled it for some seventy years as the 25th Dynasty. That their statues turned up in Kerma, the old capital of the first Kush, closes a circle of almost two thousand years of Nubian history on the same stretch of river.
Modern archaeology reached Kerma with George Andrew Reisner, who led the joint Harvard–Museum of Fine Arts, Boston expedition there from 1913 to 1916. Reisner established the basic chronologies and excavated the great tumuli of the Eastern Cemetery, but he misread what he had in front of him. The sheer number of Egyptian-style objects convinced him that Kerma had been an Egyptian colonial outpost run by a viceroy. That reading fitted the diffusionist prejudices of his day, and it remained the consensus for decades.
The turnaround came with the Swiss archaeological mission led by Charles Bonnet, which began work at the site in 1977. By systematically excavating the city and not just the necropolis, Bonnet and his team uncovered the foundations of hundreds of houses, workshops, storerooms and palaces. They showed that by around 2000 BC Kerma was already a major African urban centre, with its own town planning, metalworking technology and architectural tradition. The Deffufa stopped being an Egyptian fortress and became the temple of a Nubian city.
The mission became the Swiss-French-Sudanese Kerma – Doukki Gel project, formalised in 2012 and run since 2022 by three co-directors, one from each partner country. Co-direction with a Sudanese counterpart is itself part of the site's recent history: a way of doing archaeology in which the national authority is more than a host.
The other major outcome of Bonnet's work was the Kerma Museum, opened in 2008 next to the site. Its building, designed by Sudanese architect Abdullah Sabbar, a native of the Nubian region, takes its inspiration from the traditional vaults of local architecture. It holds Pre-Kerma, Kerma, Napatan and Meroitic material, and its centrepiece is the seven reassembled royal statues from Doukki Gel. Before the war it welcomed more than thirty thousand visitors a year, the vast majority of them Sudanese, and it became a cultural landmark for the people of Kerma themselves: an archaeological museum that worked as a genuine community space.
On 15 April 2023, fighting broke out in Khartoum between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), and the country slid into a civil war that is still going on. The conflict has been concentrated mainly in the capital, Darfur and Kordofan. Northern State, where Kerma lies, has stayed relatively clear of the heaviest fighting, but that does not mean its heritage has escaped unharmed.
The most immediate consequence was paralysis. Foreign archaeological missions suspended their seasons, site maintenance stopped and security weakened just when it was needed most. A review published in the journal Antiquity in 2025 documents damage to excavation stores across Sudanese Nubia. The British Museum project's storehouse at Amara West was destroyed between April and May 2023, probably by groups of gold prospectors. On Sai Island, illegal mining affected the archaeological stores. And in the second year of the war, with the RSF entrenched in Khartoum North and able to launch raids northwards, the excavation house at Naqa was looted after clashes with local police.
At the other end of the country, the toll on museums has been devastating. The National Museum of Sudan in Khartoum was occupied by the RSF from June 2023 and systematically looted. When the army retook the al-Mogran area in March 2025, the director of Sudan's antiquities authority put the share of lost holdings at more than sixty per cent, and in later statements at up to ninety, including the collection of archaeological gold. The Ethnographic Museum was looted and set on fire, and the Khalifa House in Omdurman was also robbed. By September 2025, more than twenty museums had been counted as damaged, with losses of over 110 million dollars.
In response, there was protection work. UNESCO applied emergency measures at five archaeological museums: Kerma, Jebel Barkal, the Red Sea, El Damer and Sennar. Collections at risk were packed and secured, safe storerooms were set up, and about 1.700 objects were catalogued and digitised. Sudan's national authority, for its part, evacuated collections from regional museums and registered sites with the state land registry to reduce the risk of destruction. The managers of Sudan's two World Heritage sites, Jebel Barkal and Meroe, stayed in the country and coordinated protection throughout the conflict.
Today Kerma is not a destination. It is a site on hold, guarded by Sudanese professionals working in extremely difficult conditions, and an uncomfortable reminder that heritage isn't lost only to bombs. It is also lost to neglect, illegal mining and antiquities trafficking. UNESCO has explicitly warned of the risk of illicit trafficking in Sudanese cultural property and called on the international art market not to acquire pieces from the country.
