Nuri is the cemetery of the Black Pharaohs. On a desert terrace overlooking the Nile, ten kilometres from the sacred mountain of Jebel Barkal, more than twenty sandstone pyramids stand in rows —out of the roughly eighty there once were— and beneath them the kings and queens of the Kingdom of Kush were buried for more than three centuries. The first and largest is that of Taharqa, the ruler who governed from the Mediterranean to present-day Khartoum and whom the Bible mentions as an enemy of Assyria.
The site has something no other pyramid field in the world has: many of its burial chambers are underwater. The water table rose over the 20th century because of agricultural irrigation, the Nile dams and climate change, and flooded the rock-cut tombs. Since 2018, the archaeological expedition led by Pearce Paul Creasman has been excavating them by diving: it is the first underwater archaeology project carried out in Sudan, with divers working several metres down beneath a 2,300-year-old pyramid.
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; access is suspended and archaeological field seasons have been halted. What follows is an informational and heritage guide to what Nuri is, who is buried there and what condition it is in.
Nuri was the royal necropolis of the Kingdom of Kush in its Napatan phase. The first to be buried here was Taharqa, the great pharaoh of Egypt's 25th Dynasty, who died in Napata in 664 BC after being driven out of Egypt by the Assyrians; his pyramid, Nuri 1, is the largest on the site, with a base about 51.75 metres per side. Until then the Kushite kings had been buried at El Kurru; the move to Nuri marked a dynastic and ritual shift. Over the next three centuries, around eighty members of the royal family —kings, royal wives and queen mothers— were buried here beneath steep-sided pyramids, arranged in rows according to rank: the royal wives to the north of Taharqa's tomb and the queen mothers to the south. The last king buried at Nuri was Nastasen, around 335-310 BC; after that, royal burial moved permanently to Meroe. George Reisner partially excavated the site in the early 20th century, and since 2018 the Nuri Archaeological Expedition has been working there, excavating by diving the chambers flooded by the rising water table. UNESCO inscribed the site in 2003 as part of the property “Gebel Barkal and the Sites of the Napatan Region”.
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 Kushite custom of burying their kings beneath pyramids did not begin at Nuri but a few kilometres downstream, at El Kurru. There, from the 9th century BC, a family of local chiefs from the Napata area began building burial mounds that gradually evolved into true pyramids, in a sequence that archaeology has been able to reconstruct with unusual clarity.
That family took over the entire religious apparatus Egypt had left in the region after Thutmose III's conquest around 1450 BC: the cult of Amun at Jebel Barkal, the priesthood, the royal titulary, hieroglyphic writing. King Alara, around 800-760 BC, appears in later tradition as the founder of the dynasty. His successor Kashta extended control north as far as Thebes and Elephantine, taking advantage of the fragmentation of Third Intermediate Period Egypt.
And then came Piye. Around 727 BC he invaded Lower Egypt, subdued the princes of the delta and founded the 25th Dynasty, the so-called “Black Pharaohs”. His Victory Stela, found in the temple of Amun at Jebel Barkal, recounts the campaign with a tone of religious superiority that reveals how the Kushites saw themselves: not as foreign conquerors but as restorers of orthodoxy against impious Egyptian rulers.
Piye was buried at El Kurru, beneath a pyramid, alongside sacrificed horses in tombs of their own, a specifically Kushite funerary feature that shows how important the horse was in that culture. After him came Shabaka and Shabataka, who were also buried there. The next king would break with tradition.
Taharqa reigned from roughly 690 to 664 BC and took the kingdom of Kush to its greatest extent: from the Nile delta to present-day Khartoum. He was a prolific builder who restored and enlarged temples throughout Egypt and Nubia, including the sanctuary of Amun at Jebel Barkal and the temple of Mut carved into the rock of the mountain. He also launched the first major pyramid-building programme since the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. In 701 BC he intervened in the Levant in support of Judah against the Assyrian siege. The Bible mentions the episode, and it made him one of the few ancient African figures remembered in the West.
His reign ended badly. The Assyrians under Esarhaddon invaded Egypt in 671 BC and took Memphis; Taharqa fled south and died at Napata in 664 BC. His successor Tanutamani attempted a reconquest, but Ashurbanipal defeated him and sacked Thebes in 663 BC.
Taharqa did something his predecessors had not: he had himself buried in a new place, on the desert terrace of Nuri, across the Nile from Jebel Barkal and some ten kilometres from the mountain. His pyramid, catalogued as Nuri 1, is the largest in the group and one of the largest Nubian pyramids known, with a base of about 51.75 metres per side and an estimated height of between 40 and 50 metres. It has also been noted that its orientation made the sun rise directly over its apex on the day of the Egyptian New Year, the date that marked the start of the Nile flood.
The reasons for the move from El Kurru are debated. Suggestions include a dynastic statement, a reorganisation of the sacred landscape around the sanctuary of Amun, ritual motives linked to astronomical orientation and practical considerations about the terrain. What is beyond dispute is the effect: for the next three centuries, Nuri was the royal necropolis of the kingdom.
Nuri was in use for more than three centuries, from roughly 670 to 310 BC. In that time some eighty funerary structures were built for kings, royal wives and queen mothers. More than twenty pyramids are still standing today. Erosion, looting and the fragility of the smaller buildings have reduced the rest to mounds.
The layout of the cemetery is a lesson in hierarchy. Taharqa's pyramid occupies the dominant position. To its north, the tombs of the kings' wives stand in parallel rows. To the south are the tombs of the queen mothers, the kandakes, who in the kingdom of Kush were not a ceremonial figure but held an institutional position with real political power. The deliberate separation between the two groups confirms that these were two distinct statuses and not simply different ranks.
The pyramids are of the Nubian type: very steep sides of between 60 and 70 degrees, small bases compared with Egyptian pyramids, blocks of local sandstone and a funerary chapel against the east face, where offerings were placed. The burial chamber itself is cut into the rock beneath the structure and is reached by a descending staircase.
The rulers buried here include the Napatan kings of the 7th to 4th centuries BC: Atlanersa, Senkamanisken, Anlamani, Aspelta (the king who moved the capital to Meroe around 591 BC after Psamtik II sacked Napata), Amanineteyerike, Harsiotef and, last in the series, Nastasen, who reigned around 335-310 BC and was the last king buried here.
After Nastasen, royal burials moved permanently to Meroe, which had already been the political capital for almost three centuries. It has been suggested that this shift also reflects the Napatan priesthood of Amun losing influence to the civil power of the new capital.
Modern archaeology came to Nuri with George Andrew Reisner, who partially excavated the site in the early 20th century during the campaigns he led in Sudan for Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Reisner also worked at El Kurru, Jebel Barkal and Meroe. That broad view let him do something no single dig could have achieved: establish the dynastic sequence of the kings of Kush.
His method relied on the typological evolution of the tombs, the relative position of each structure within the cemetery and the materials recovered. The result was an ordered list of Napatan and Meroitic rulers with their burials identified. With corrections and refinements, it is still the chronological backbone for the study of the kingdom of Kush. Much of the material he recovered was divided between Boston and Khartoum under the partage agreements in force at the time.
Reisner, however, was unable to fully excavate the burial chambers. Even in his day groundwater hampered work on the lower levels, and over the following decades the problem worsened until work there became impossible. The tombs of Nuri were left, quite literally, beyond the reach of archaeology for almost a century.
That same obstacle had an unexpected and fortunate side effect: the water protected the chambers from looters. The tomb of Nastasen in particular reached the 21st century in a relatively intact state precisely because nobody could get into it.
In 2018 something unprecedented in Sudan began at Nuri. The Nuri Archaeological Expedition, led by Pearce Paul Creasman and backed by grants from the National Geographic Society, set out to excavate the flooded chambers of King Nastasen by diving.
The approach is as simple as it is extraordinary. The archaeologists go down the tomb's original access staircase to the water level and carry on underwater. They breathe through air hoses dozens of metres long run down from the surface, because there is no room to manoeuvre with conventional tanks. They work several metres deep, in chambers cut beneath a pyramid more than two thousand three hundred years ago, with limited visibility and all the difficulties of underwater excavation on top of those of tomb archaeology.
It is the first underwater archaeology project ever carried out in Sudan. The published finds include shabtis, the funerary figurines meant to serve the ruler in the afterlife, and confirmation that the tomb is in a remarkably complete state.
The problem that made all this necessary has a modern and worrying cause. The local water table has risen over the last century because of three combined factors. One is more agricultural irrigation along the Nile banks. Another is the modern dams that regulate the river and raise its base level; the Merowe Dam at the Fourth Cataract came into service in 2009. The third is climate change. In that sense, Nuri is a case study in how present-day environmental change threatens archaeological heritage in ways nobody had foreseen.
The expedition suspended its campaigns when war broke out in April 2023.
In 2003, UNESCO inscribed the property “Gebel Barkal and the Sites of the Napatan Region” on the World Heritage List. It has five components along this stretch of the Nile: Jebel Barkal, El Kurru, Nuri, Sanam and Zuma. Together they represent two cultures of the second kingdom of Kush, the Napatan (roughly 900 to 270 BC) and the Meroitic (270 BC to AD 350). The sites include tombs with and without pyramids, temples, burial mounds, residential complexes and palaces. It was the first Sudanese site to be included on the List.
Since 15 April 2023, Sudan has been in a civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces. Northern State, where Nuri lies, has stayed relatively far from the main fronts in Khartoum, Kordofan and Darfur, and there is no record of fighting directly hitting the Napatan monuments.
That does not mean they are safe. The real damage is the collapse of the national system for protecting heritage. International archaeological missions suspended their campaigns, the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums lost much of its ability to operate, site security weakened and maintenance stopped. In an open, sprawling cemetery like Nuri, that means a risk of looting, illegal digging and deterioration that no one deals with. In the flooded chambers, it also means that water damage keeps advancing with no one documenting it.
The situation across the country is grave. 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 the provisional assessment for 2025 put losses in the culture, antiquities and tourism sector at around 110 million dollars. UNESCO called the threat to Sudanese heritage “unprecedented” and activated its Heritage Emergency Fund for the country's two World Heritage sites. After pieces appeared for sale on online platforms, it also publicly urged people not to buy antiquities from Sudan. In November 2024 there were seizures and arrests linked to this trafficking in northern Sudan, with documented arrests in Atbara.
The kings who ruled Egypt still lie beneath the sand and the water of Nuri. Whether they are protected now depends on Sudan regaining the ability to protect them.
