There are more pyramids in Sudan than in Egypt, and most of them are here. In the royal necropolis of Meroe, two hundred kilometres northeast of Khartoum, more than two hundred pyramids rise from a sea of golden dunes in three separate cemeteries. They look nothing like the ones at Giza: they are much smaller and much steeper, with sides angled between 60 and 70 degrees that make them look like spires, and a funerary chapel attached to the east face where the deceased received offerings. The image — rows of sharp pyramids on the sand, without a single soul around — is Sudan's most iconic postcard.
Meroe was the southern capital of the Kingdom of Kush for almost a thousand years, from when King Aspelta moved the court there around 591 BC until the city collapsed in the 4th century AD. It was a powerful and original African state: it created its own script, Meroitic, which can still be read today but is not fully understood; it produced iron on a scale that earned it the nickname “the Birmingham of Africa”; it was ruled by queens with power of their own, the kandakes; and it stood up to the Roman Empire in the 1st century BC under Queen Amanirenas.
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 to the site is suspended. What follows is an informational and heritage guide: what Meroe is, what you can see in each of its sectors, what history it tells and what state it is in today, with the available and verifiable information on the damage suffered by Sudan's heritage.
Meroe was the second great capital of the Kingdom of Kush. Around 591 BC, after the Egyptian sack of Napata, King Aspelta moved the centre of power some four hundred kilometres south, to a spot between the fifth and sixth cataracts that combined three decisive advantages: summer rains reached it, iron ore and hardwood were plentiful, and it lay on the route to the Red Sea. There the kingdom flourished for almost a thousand years, developed its own script, produced iron on an industrial scale and was ruled by kings and by queens with power of their own, the kandakes. Under Amanirenas, around 25-22 BC, the Kushites attacked Roman Egypt and went as far as sacking Aswan; the prefect Petronius struck back and razed Napata, but the conflict ended in a treaty on terms favourable to Meroe that secured almost three centuries of peace. The city went into decline from the 3rd century AD and collapsed around AD 350, in a process that involved a campaign by the Aksumite king Ezana, although it is now debated whether that was a cause or a consequence of the decline. Its pyramids were rediscovered by Europeans in the 19th century and plundered in 1834 by Giuseppe Ferlini, who dismantled dozens of tops looking for treasure.
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.
The story of Meroe begins long before Meroe existed. Around 2500 BC, in Upper Nubia, the kingdom of Kerma flourished. It was the first great state in Sudan, with a capital of tens of thousands of people and huge mud-brick buildings called deffufas. Kerma became a rival to Egypt and controlled the Nile valley between the cataracts, until the pharaohs of the New Kingdom conquered it around 1500 BC and annexed Nubia under a viceroy, the “King's Son of Kush”.
When Egyptian power fell apart after 1070 BC, Nubia won back its independence and a new kingdom arose around Napata, at the foot of the sacred mountain of Jebel Barkal, believed to be the home of the god Amun. That kingdom did something extraordinary: in the 8th century BC it reversed the course of history and conquered Egypt. Kashta reached Thebes, and his successor Piye completed the conquest of the Delta around 727 BC, founding the 25th Dynasty, the so-called “Black Pharaohs”. Piye, Shabaka, Shabataka, Taharqa and Tanutamani ruled an empire that stretched from the Mediterranean to present-day Khartoum.
The empire lasted little more than half a century. The Assyrians under Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal invaded Egypt between 671 and 663 BC, took Memphis, sacked Thebes and drove the Kushites south. Taharqa died at Napata in 664 BC and was buried beneath the first pyramid at Nuri. The Kushite kings went on ruling their own kingdom, which looked more and more to the south and to the African interior.
The final blow to Napata came around 593 BC, when an expedition sent by the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik II sacked the city. Shortly afterwards, under King Aspelta and around 591 BC, the kingdom's centre of gravity moved for good some four hundred kilometres south, to Meroe.
The move to Meroe was not a retreat. It was an excellent strategic decision. The new site lay between the Fifth and Sixth Cataracts of the Nile, on the edge of the Butana steppe, and it offered three advantages that Napata lacked.
The first was rain. Meroe lies far enough south to get the summer monsoon rains, which allowed rain-fed farming and large-scale herding beyond the narrow irrigated strip along the Nile. That greatly widened the kingdom's economic base and made it partly independent of the flood.
The second was iron ore and hardwood. The region had iron deposits and acacia woodland that supplied the charcoal needed to smelt it. Meroe became a major metalworking centre: the slag heaps around the city led the archaeologist A. H. Sayce to call it “the Birmingham of Africa”. Iron provided weapons, farming tools and a trade good for export.
The third was its position for trade. Meroe sat at the start of the routes that crossed the Butana towards the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa, and it also controlled the Nile. Ivory, ebony, exotic skins, ostrich feathers, gold, copper and cattle all passed through it. On top of this trade came cotton textile production, which peaked around 400 BC.
The result was a state that survived for almost a thousand years and became steadily more African in character. Egyptian gods lived alongside local deities such as Apedemak, the lion-headed war god; the Kushite language replaced Egyptian in writing; and royal imagery developed a visual language of its own, with kings in caps with tassels and full-figured queens that look like nothing Egyptian.
Around the 3rd century BC, Meroe took a decisive step: it stopped writing in Egyptian hieroglyphs and created its own writing system. Meroitic has twenty-three signs and comes in two forms, a hieroglyphic one for monuments and a cursive one for administration and funerary texts. It is the oldest indigenous writing system in sub-Saharan Africa. Francis Llewellyn Griffith worked out the sound values of the signs in the early 20th century, so the texts can now be read aloud. But the language they record has no clear link to any well-documented language family and, without a long bilingual text, it remains largely untranslated. The oldest known Meroitic inscription dates to between 180 and 170 BC, in the temple of Queen Shanakdakhete.
That queen brings us to another distinctive feature of the kingdom: the political role of women. The title kandake referred to the queen mother, and it was more than an honour. Several women ruled with full authority and appear in reliefs with the same symbols of power as kings, striking down enemies and receiving divine protection. Shanakdakhete, Amanirenas, Amanishakheto and Amanitore are the best known.
The kingdom's most famous episode is its clash with Rome. After Rome annexed Egypt in 30 BC, tension rose along the southern frontier. Around 25 BC, while the legions were busy in Arabia, a Kushite army led by the kandake Amanirenas attacked the Thebaid, sacked Aswan and pulled down the imperial statues at Philae. One of them gave us the famous bronze head of Augustus, which the Kushites carried off and buried beneath the steps of a temple at Meroe so that anyone entering would tread on the emperor. Wallis Budge excavated it in the early 20th century, and today it is in the British Museum.
Rome responded through the prefect Gaius Petronius, who sailed up the Nile and razed Napata in 22 BC. But the war ended at the negotiating table: a Kushite embassy reached Augustus on Samos, and a treaty was signed on surprisingly favourable terms for Meroe, with Rome withdrawing from part of the occupied territory and waiving tribute. The peace that followed lasted around three centuries. In AD 61, Nero sent a scouting expedition that reached Meroe and carried on south until it ran into the swamps of the Sudd. It was the furthest south Rome ever reached in Africa.
Nubian pyramids are not small copies of Egyptian ones. They are an architectural type of their own. Their sides rise at angles of between 60 and 70 degrees, compared with about 51 degrees at Giza, which gives them a sharp, almost needle-like profile. Their bases usually measure between 6 and 30 metres per side, and they rarely stand more than 30 metres high. They are built from blocks of local sandstone and, in the later examples, from faced brick.
Each pyramid had a funerary chapel attached to its east face, with a pylon at the entrance, where offerings to the dead were left. These chapels hold the reliefs that are the kingdom's main source of imagery: offering scenes, processions, Meroitic texts, and depictions of the rulers and of the lion god Apedemak. The burial chamber itself was cut into the rock beneath the structure and reached by a staircase. It held cremated or buried remains together with grave goods.
The Meroe necropolis is divided into three cemeteries. The South Cemetery is the oldest, with the tombs of the first rulers buried in the new capital. The North Cemetery, the most spectacular, holds the kings and queens of the classic and late Meroitic period, lined up along a ridge of sand; it is the image everyone associates with Sudan. The West Cemetery contains hundreds of tombs of non-ruling members of the royal family and the elite, and it is the one that best documents the kingdom's social hierarchy.
Across the three cemeteries there are more than two hundred pyramids in total, built over some six and a half centuries, roughly between 300 BC and AD 350. Adding up all of Sudan's pyramid fields (El Kurru, Nuri, Jebel Barkal, Sanam, Zuma and Meroe), the country has far more pyramids than Egypt: there are more pyramids in Sudan than anywhere else in the world.
Meroe began to decline from the 2nd century AD. The causes are many and still debated: trade competition from Aksum and the Red Sea routes, which shifted the axis of commerce; soil exhaustion and the deforestation caused by centuries of iron smelting; climate changes that affected the summer rains; and pressure from desert peoples. By around AD 300 the archaeological evidence already shows clear impoverishment. The last pyramids and royal burials date to the mid-4th century.
Around AD 340–350, the Aksumite emperor Ezana left a trilingual stela recording expeditions against Kush and against the Noba. For a long time this text was read as the destruction of Meroe by Aksum. Today scholars debate whether Ezana destroyed a living state or simply intervened in ruins that were already falling apart. Either way, the Aksumite occupation was short. From the remains of the Meroitic world rose the kingdoms of Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia, which would become Christian in the 6th century.
European rediscovery began with the French mineralogist Frédéric Cailliaud, who reached the site in 1821 and published the first drawings that brought Meroe to the attention of European scholars. Thirteen years later came disaster: in 1834 the Italian doctor Giuseppe Ferlini dismantled the tops of dozens of pyramids in search of hidden chambers, and in pyramid N6 he found the treasure of the kandake Amanishakheto, an exceptional collection of gold jewellery with fused glass. When he offered it for sale in Europe nobody believed it was genuine. Richard Lepsius authenticated it in 1844 after visiting Meroe. Berlin bought most of the treasure and Ludwig I of Bavaria a smaller part. The truncated tops you see on many pyramids today are Ferlini's work.
Scientific archaeology came later. E. A. Wallis Budge excavated between 1902 and 1905; John Garstang led the University of Liverpool's excavations from 1910 and uncovered the palace and temples of the Royal City; and George Reisner worked in the royal cemeteries for Harvard and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. UNESCO added the “Archaeological Sites of the Island of Meroe”, which include Meroe, Naqa and Musawwarat es-Sufra, to the World Heritage List in June 2011.
The 21st century brought new threats to Meroe. In September 2020, the biggest Nile flood recorded in more than a century (the Blue Nile broke the records of 1946 and 1988) brought water close to the necropolis, which normally lies several hundred metres from the river. Teams from the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums built sandbag walls and pumped out water to hold it back. The head of the French archaeological unit at the Sudanese antiquities service warned at the time that, if the water kept rising, these measures might not be enough. It was the first time in recorded history that flooding had directly threatened the site.
Three years later came war. Since 15 April 2023, the conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces has devastated the country and its heritage. Meroe was relatively lucky: it lay far from the main front lines and was not directly hit by the fighting. The documented damage is of a different kind. The collapse of guarding and maintenance left the site unsupervised, and there have been reports of graffiti on the walls and of blocks dislodged by visitors climbing the structures.
The other two parts of the same UNESCO site fared worse. Naqa and Musawwarat es-Sufra were hit by documented bombardments in January 2024 after armed incursions into the area. Both are now surrounded by military camps and minefields that make conservation and research impossible. Across the country, the 2025 assessment counted more than twenty museums damaged or looted and around 110 million dollars in losses to the culture, antiquities and tourism sector, the worst being the looting of the National Museum of Sudan in Khartoum.
UNESCO described the threat to Sudan's heritage as “unprecedented”. It activated its Heritage Emergency Fund for the country's two World Heritage sites and publicly urged people not to buy antiquities from Sudan after pieces appeared for sale on online platforms. In November 2024 there were seizures and arrests in northern Sudan: figurines, pottery and antique weapons were intercepted at border crossings and people were arrested in Atbara, which confirmed that an active trafficking network exists.
Meroe is still standing, as it has for two thousand three hundred years. But its future now depends on the country regaining the ability to protect it, and that means ending a war that was still unresolved in 2026.
