Kawa — the Kushite City of Gematon and the Temples of Amun on the Nile
On the eastern bank of the Nile, between the Third and Fourth Cataracts and opposite Dongola, lies Kawa, about seven kilometres south of the Dongola Bridge according to Derek Welsby's published survey of the site. The city was known in ancient Egyptian texts as Gematon, meaning that Aten is perceived or appears. Scholars infer from this name that it was founded in the reign of Akhenaten in the fourteenth century BC, although the earliest known built evidence in it so far is a temple erected in the reign of Tutankhamun.
Kawa was not a lone temple, but a complete city extending over about forty hectares, and to its east, a few hundred metres away, lie its cemeteries. Several temples to the god Amun stood in it, built by Egyptian kings including Amenhotep III, Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, and then the kings of Kush continued building and restoring in it. With this position on the Nile in the northern Dongola region, Kawa became a major urban and religious centre linking Pharaonic Egypt and the rising Kingdom of Kush in the south.
The city's most famous chapter came in the seventh century BC, when the Kushite king Taharqa, who ruled between 690 and 664 BC, began building his large stone temple to Amun-Ra in 683 BC, known today as Temple T. Inside this temple was erected the famous Shrine of Taharqa, which was built around 684 BC from 236 blocks of sandstone in a square building measuring approximately four metres by four metres, and its walls were inscribed with images of the king presenting offerings to the gods of Thebes on one side and to the local gods of Gematon on the other.
From the same temple came statues of Amun in the form of a ram protecting King Taharqa standing between his front legs, granite statues found by Francis Llewellyn Griffith in his excavations in 1930 and 1931 at the western entrance of the temple. The three known copies today are distributed between the British Museum in London, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and the courtyard of the Sudan National Museum in Khartoum, so these rams became among the most famous material evidence of Kawa in museums around the world.
Extensive excavations at the site began in November 1930 with the University of Oxford mission led by Griffith, and the Shrine of Taharqa was transferred in 1936 with the permission of the Sudanese government to the Ashmolean Museum, where it is described today as the only free-standing Pharaonic building in Britain. The Sudan Archaeological Research Society then resumed work in the city and its cemetery between 1997 and 2018 led by Welsby, and documented its neighbourhoods, stores and industrial quarter in the Gematon volumes published by the Society. As for the ancient city itself, it was probably abandoned in the fourth century AD, and its mound and the spoil heap of the 1930s excavations remain as witnesses to it to this day.
📚 Sources: Derek Welsby — Kawa: The Pharaonic and Kushite City of Gematon, and the volumes 'Gematon: Living and Dying in a Kushite Town on the Nile' published by the Sudan Archaeological Research Society and Archaeopress on the 1997–2018 excavations; The British Museum in London — the card of the statue of Amun in ram form protecting King Taharqa from Kawa; The Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford — the card of the Taharqa shrine from Kawa — Editorial Team
