Sedeinga — Cemetery of the Small Pyramids and the Largest Meroitic Archive Ever Discovered

On the west bank of the Nile in northern Sudan, about one hundred kilometres north of the Third Cataract, lies the archaeological site of Sedeinga. The site first became known for the temple of Queen Tiye, the royal wife of Pharaoh Amenhotep III, which stood in the second half of the fourteenth century BC when Nubia was under Egyptian rule in the era of the Eighteenth Dynasty. But Sedeinga's greater fame does not come from the temple alone, but from a vast necropolis that arose around it centuries later.

The Sedeinga necropolis extends over more than twenty-five hectares, and includes the remains of no fewer than eighty brick pyramids and more than one hundred tombs, dating to the kingdoms of Napata and Meroe between the seventh century BC and the fourth century AD, which together are the civilisation that the ancient Egyptians called the Kingdom of Kush. Research by the French mission showed that most of the pyramids and tombs are buildings of Napatan origin that the Meroites modified some five centuries later, adding to them brick chapels and sandstone blocks on the western side of the pyramids dedicated to the cult of the dead, in a practice that shows their reverence for the remains of the past, unlike their Egyptian neighbours.

Scientific excavation at the site began in 1963, then resumed in 2009 with a French mission working within the French section of Sudan's National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums, under the joint direction of Claude Rilly, a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and a specialist in the Meroitic language, and Vincent Francigny. Research programmes since 2009 have focused on establishing a chronology for the construction of the necropolis, a difficult task because the surviving historical information about this civilisation is scarce in the first place, so the tombs themselves became the primary document.

A campaign in late 2017 brought out stelae, lintels and decorated door frames that formed, according to the statement of the French National Centre for Scientific Research and Sorbonne University, the largest collection of Meroitic texts discovered to date, and Meroitic is among the oldest known written languages in Africa south of the Sahara, written in letters borrowed from ancient Egyptian and only partially deciphered until now. Among the most prominent pieces is the stela of the lady Maliwarase, sister of two high priests of Amun and mother of one of her sons who took over the rule of Faras, the great city at the Second Cataract, and a lintel inscribed with four lines describing the owner of the tomb, the lady Adatalabe, descended from a prestigious lineage that included a royal prince from the ruling family in Meroe. The statement notes that these two ladies are not an isolated case in Sedeinga: in Meroitic society, women were the ones who embodied the status of the family and transmitted its legacy.

Among the rarest finds of the necropolis is a funerary chapel lintel from the second century AD depicting Maat, the goddess of order, justice and peace among the ancient Egyptians, with African features, which is the first known surviving representation of this goddess with these features, and a stela that retained its blue pigment despite the centuries, a rare thing for pieces of this type that usually lose their colours. Sedeinga thus summarises the story of a civilisation born from the cultural mixing between Egypt and Africa, the same mixing that still marks Sudan to this day, as the mission's statement concludes.

📚 Sources: The French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Sorbonne University — statement of the French Sedeinga archaeological mission on the discoveries of the Sedeinga necropolis (2018); Smithsonian Magazine — report on the discovery of the largest collection of Meroitic inscriptions at Sedeinga (April 2018); Archaeology magazine, published by the Archaeological Institute of America — news of the discovery of the Meroitic texts at Sedeinga (2018) — Editorial Team