Naqa is Sudan's most surprising archaeological site, not because of its size but because of what it reveals. In the middle of the Butana steppe, fifty kilometres from the Nile, with nothing around but a few low hills and some acacias, stands a group of Meroitic temples that sums up in stone what the Kingdom of Kush was: an African civilisation that talked with Egypt, traded with the Roman Mediterranean and worshipped its own gods.
The heart of the site is the Temple of Apedemak, the lion god of war and fertility, a purely Kushite deity with no Egyptian equivalent. On its outer walls, King Natakamani and Kandake Amanitore face each other, one on either side of the doorway, crushing their enemies with lions at their feet. On the back wall, Apedemak appears as a god with three heads and four arms, an image with no parallel in the art of the Nile Valley. A few metres away, the so-called «Roman Kiosk» mixes Corinthian capitals, round arches and Egyptian cornices in a tiny building that was probably dedicated to Hathor.
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. Naqa is not only out of reach: it suffered documented damage during the conflict and is now surrounded by military camps and minefields. What follows is an informational and heritage guide, with the best information available on what this place is and what state it is in.
Naqa was a religious centre and caravan stop of the Kingdom of Meroe in the interior of the Butana, halfway between the Nile and the eastern routes. Its buildings span the 4th century BC to the 4th century AD, but its great moment was the joint reign of Natakamani and Kandake Amanitore, around the turn of the era. That was when the great Temple of Amun (about a hundred metres long, with an avenue of rams and a hypostyle hall) and the Temple of Apedemak, the local lion god, were built or enlarged. Next to the latter stands the so-called «Roman Kiosk», a small building where Egyptian, Graeco-Roman and Kushite elements sit side by side, probably dedicated to Hathor. Abandoned when Meroe collapsed in the 4th century AD, Naqa lay half-buried in sand until modern archaeology brought it back to light: since 1995 a German-Polish mission led by Dietrich Wildung has worked there. UNESCO inscribed it in 2011 as part of the «Archaeological Sites of the Island of Meroe».
Read the full history ↓The Butana steppe holds more than two hundred pyramids, a temple to the lion god and a maze of courtyards and elephants: the heart of the kingdom that smelted iron and wrote in an alphabet we still cannot translate.
Read the history of The kingdom of Kush: the pyramids of Meroe →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Naqa sits where there should be nothing at all: fifty kilometres from the Nile, deep in the Butana steppe. This is the great semi-arid expanse enclosed by the Nile, the Atbara and the Blue Nile, which classical geographers called “the island of Meroe” because the three rivers surround it as if it were a river island.
The Butana is not true desert. Unlike northern Nubia, it gets summer monsoon rain between July and September. There isn't much of it and it's irregular, but it's enough for grass to grow and for the wadis to become seasonal streams for a few weeks. That band of rain was one reason the kingdom of Kush moved its capital south to Meroe around 591 BC: it gave the kingdom a base for farming and herding that Napata, hemmed in by the desert, could not offer.
Rain alone isn't enough to sustain a city, though. It took a technology: the hafir, a large artificial reservoir dug into the ground with an embankment around it, which collects the summer runoff and stores it for the whole year. Hafirs are one of the most distinctive technical contributions of the Meroitic kingdom, and they are what made permanent settlement in the interior of the Butana possible. Naqa has its own. The one at Musawwarat es-Sufra, about twenty-five kilometres away, is one of the largest known.
Then there is trade geography. Naqa lies where several smaller wadis flow into the Wadi Awateib, on the route that linked the Nile valley with the lands to the east and the Red Sea ports. It was a caravan stop, a crossroads. That explains its prosperity and, above all, why its architecture speaks so many languages at once.
Naqa belongs to the Meroitic period of the kingdom of Kush, the state that dominated central Sudan for more than a thousand years. Kush began at Napata, at the foot of the sacred mountain of Jebel Barkal, and went on to conquer Egypt in the 8th century BC. The so-called “Black Pharaohs” of the 25th Dynasty (Piye, Shabaka, Shabataka, Taharqa and Tanutamani) ruled from the Mediterranean to present-day Khartoum until the Assyrian invasions of 671-663 BC drove them back south.
Around 591 BC, under King Aspelta and after the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik II sacked Napata, the court moved to Meroe for good. This began a period of growing Africanisation. The Egyptian gods remained, Amun above all, but they sat alongside local deities such as Apedemak. Around the 3rd century BC the kingdom created its own script, Meroitic, with twenty-three signs. Royal imagery also developed an unmistakable visual language, with kings in caps with tassels and queens with full, ample figures.
One feature of the kingdom's institutions stands out: the kandakes, the queen mothers, held real political power, not ceremonial power. Several ruled with full authority and appear in reliefs with exactly the same attributes as kings. The most famous is Amanirenas, who around 25 BC led an offensive against Roman Egypt, sacked Aswan and toppled imperial statues. After a counter-offensive by the prefect Petronius, who razed Napata in 22 BC, the conflict ended in a treaty on terms favourable to Meroe, followed by almost three centuries of peace.
This prosperous, secure kingdom, connected to the Mediterranean, is the setting in which Naqa should be understood.
The remains at Naqa span the 4th century BC to the 4th century AD. The site as we know it today, however, is largely the work of one couple: King Natakamani and the kandake Amanitore, who ruled together around the turn of the era, roughly AD 1 to 20.
Their reign was the largest building programme in Meroitic history. They built or enlarged temples at Naqa, Meroe, Wad Ban Naqa, Amara and other sites across the kingdom. At Naqa they founded the great Temple of Amun, a sandstone building about a hundred metres long. It has an outer court, an avenue of ram-headed figures and a hypostyle hall leading to the sanctuary, following the classic Egyptian plan but with Meroitic proportions and details.
They also built the Temple of Apedemak, the building that makes Naqa unique. Apedemak was the lion god of war, victory and fertility, a Kushite deity with no Egyptian equivalent. His oldest known temple is the one King Arnekhamani built at Musawwarat es-Sufra in the 3rd century BC. At Naqa, the outer walls show Natakamani on one side of the doorway and Amanitore on the other, in perfectly symmetrical scenes, each striking down enemies with lions at their feet. It is joint rule set in stone, with neither ranked above the other. On the back wall, Apedemak appears in his most extraordinary form, with three heads and four arms, receiving the royal offerings.
Recent excavation seasons have also identified a second Temple of Amun attributed to King Amanikhareqerem. This shows that Naqa stayed an active religious centre after the great couple, and it considerably extends the site's known chronology.
A few metres from the Temple of Apedemak stands a small building that has become the intellectual emblem of Meroe: the so-called “Roman Kiosk”. It is tiny next to the neighbouring temples, but its walls pack in an architectural vocabulary that shouldn't fit together.
Its main doorway has the cavetto cornice and winged sun disc typical of Egyptian architecture. Its columns are topped with Corinthian capitals of acanthus leaves, an unmistakably Graeco-Roman feature. Its windows are round arches, a building technique that came to the Nile valley from the Roman world. And the building as a whole follows a type, the kiosk or mammisi, that is typical of sanctuaries in Ptolemaic Egypt. It is thought to have been dedicated to the cult of Hathor.
This mix of styles is neither an anomaly nor a clumsy imitation. It is Meroe's signature. The kingdom traded with Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt and received embassies, craftsmen and goods from the Mediterranean, while keeping its own theology and script. The “Kiosk” is neither Roman nor Egyptian. It is a Meroitic building that uses an international vocabulary quite naturally, just as Meroe used Egyptian hieroglyphs and later invented its own alphabet.
Few places in the world let you read the dialogue between Africa, Egypt and the Mediterranean so directly in stone. That is why, when UNESCO inscribed the “Archaeological Sites of the Island of Meroe” in June 2011, Naqa was included as a component in its own right, alongside the capital and Musawwarat es-Sufra.
Naqa faded along with the kingdom that built it. From the 2nd century AD, Meroe went into a long decline. It faced trade competition from Aksum and the Red Sea routes, environmental damage from centuries of iron smelting and pressure from desert peoples. Around the middle of the 4th century, the Aksumite king Ezana recorded his campaigns against Kush on a trilingual stela, and the last royal burials at Meroe date from that time. The temple city of the Butana was abandoned and the sand slowly covered it.
Europeans rediscovered it in the 19th century, in the same wave of exploration that brought Meroe to light. Frédéric Cailliaud travelled through the region in 1821, and Richard Lepsius documented the Nubian monuments on his great expedition of the 1840s. Naqa appeared in plates and publications, but for more than a century it was barely excavated.
Systematic archaeology began in 1995 with a German-Polish mission led by the Egyptologist Dietrich Wildung, with support from the German Research Foundation and Polish archaeologists from Poznań. From 1999, the excavation and restoration of the great Temple of Amun made sense again of a building that had been largely buried. Later seasons identified new buildings, including Amanikhareqerem's Temple of Amun, and showed that the settlement was much larger than the visible group of monuments.
In June 2011, UNESCO inscribed the “Archaeological Sites of the Island of Meroe” on the World Heritage List, with Naqa as one of its three components.
On 15 April 2023, war broke out in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces. The fighting started in the capital but spread across much of the country and reached the archaeological sites of the Butana too.
Available reports record vandalism, destruction, looting and theft at Naqa and Musawwarat es-Sufra. On 14 January 2024, Sudanese air force bombing of both Meroitic sites was documented, following incursions by paramilitary forces in the area. This needs to be stated precisely: both sites, which are on the World Heritage List, ended up inside a theatre of military operations.
The damage that followed is long-term. Both sites are now surrounded by military camps and minefields. This keeps out visitors and also stops any work to document, assess and conserve them. International archaeological missions have suspended their seasons. There is currently no full, independent assessment of the state of Naqa's monuments.
All this is part of a heritage disaster across the whole country. The National Museum of Sudan in Khartoum was occupied and looted, with estimated losses of 60 % to 90 % of its collections. More than twenty museums in the country were damaged or looted, and a provisional assessment in 2025 put losses in the culture, antiquities and tourism sector at about 110 million dollars. UNESCO described the threat as “unprecedented”. It activated its Heritage Emergency Fund for Sudan's two World Heritage sites, the Island of Meroe and the Napatan region, and publicly urged people not to buy antiquities from Sudan after pieces turned up for sale on online platforms. In November 2024 there were seizures and arrests linked to this trafficking in the north of the country.
Naqa has stood in the middle of nowhere for two thousand years. Whether it survives now depends on the country regaining the ability to protect it.
