Wad Ban Naqa — the Meroitic Royal City on the Bank of the Nile
On the right bank of the Nile, about 130 kilometres north-east of Khartoum and about 40 kilometres south-west of Shendi, lie the remains of Wad Ban Naqa, which studies by the Czech National Museum describe as the southernmost royal city in the Kingdom of Meroe, the kingdom that existed in ancient Sudan between about 300 BC and AD 350. The site is a Nile city standing on the river itself, and it should not be confused with Naqa, which lies inland away from the bank, for they are two different Meroitic sites, even though the same civilisation and roughly the same century brought them together.
The most famous building at the site is what is known as the Palace of Queen Amanishakhete, a huge two-storey palace of brick, uncovered by a Sudanese mission led by Thabit Hassan Thabit between 1958 and 1960, in which more than sixty well-preserved rooms were found. A geological study published by the National Museum in Prague explains the reason for building in brick: good stone suitable for building is not available in the Wad Ban Naqa area itself, and its nearest sources lie about twenty kilometres to the south-east near Naqa and Musawwarat es-Sufra, so brick became the main building material in the city.
Wad Ban Naqa was not a palace on its own, but a religious and administrative centre that included the remains of no fewer than five temples. Among the most prominent of them is the Temple of Isis, and another temple that was long known as the Typhonium until modern excavations determined that it is a temple of the goddess Mut. Reports by the Czech mission link a large part of this building programme to the reign of King Natakamani and Queen Amanitore in the first century AD, the same era in which royal building flourished at other Meroitic sites.
The Royal Prussian mission led by Richard Lepsius visited the site in 1844, and found in one of its destroyed temples three sandstone altars, the largest of which was transferred to the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, where it is still on display to this day. This artefact is a base for a sacred barque, 116 centimetres high, whose sides are decorated with images of King Natakamani and Queen Amanitore and their names inside cartouches, and it is among the most reliable surviving pictorial evidence of this Meroitic royal pair.
Organised scientific work resumed at the site in 2009, when the mission of the Czech National Museum began its excavations under a concession extending over about two kilometres by three kilometres, and its documented seasons continued in the Annals of the Museum up to the twenty-second season published in 2023, focusing on the Temple of Isis, in which it uncovered new rooms and a lion altar that was not previously known. Yet the site remains, according to the description of the researchers themselves, little explored in comparison with its importance, and entire temples in it still await those who will uncover them.
📚 Sources: Annals of the Náprstek Museum — the Czech National Museum in Prague, Reports of the Wad Ban Naqa archaeological mission (including reports of the 2011, 2021, 2022 and 2023 seasons); Journal of the National Museum in Prague — the geological study by Fatsik, Dashkova and Ondirka on the building materials of Wad Ban Naqa (2013); The Egyptian Museum in Berlin — the card of the barque base of King Natakamani and Queen Amanitore from Wad Ban Naqa — Editorial Team
