Sai Island — the Great Nile Island That Lived Through Kerma, the Pharaohs and the Christian Kingdoms
Sai Island lies in the Nile in northern Sudan, between the Second and Third Cataracts in Upper Nubia, about 180 kilometres south of Wadi Halfa. It is a large island measuring about 12 kilometres in length and 5.5 kilometres in width, situated at the southern end of the Batn el-Hajar region, so its location gave it conditions suited to settlement and agriculture, and at the same time made it a sensitive connecting point between north and south.
Settlement on Sai extends, according to the UNESCO file, from the Palaeolithic to the Ottoman era and up to the present day, and the island offers early evidence of human presence in this part of Africa, including evidence UNESCO has attributed to Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, and early evidence of the use of pigments. In the second millennium BC, two powers contested the region: Pharaonic Egypt in the north and the Kushite kingdom based at Kerma in the south, so Sai was a bridge between them, inhabited by a group subject to Kerma before Kerma's control over it ended at the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty.
In the New Kingdom era, a temple town in the Egyptian style was established on the island's eastern bank: a fortified settlement with an orthogonal plan, surrounded by a wall, comprising large mud-brick buildings and a sandstone temple dedicated to Amun. Foundation deposits show that the temple was founded in the reign of Thutmose III, and his deputy Nehi documented its dedication in the twenty-fifth year of his reign, while the founding of the fortified town itself is generally attributed to Ahmose or his successor Amenhotep I. Research by the AcrossBorders project estimated the town's area within the walls at about 242 metres from north to south and 118 to 120 metres from east to west.
Sai does not present a picture of purely Egyptian domination; Nubian pottery, including Kerma cooking vessels found in contexts dating to the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty inside the town, indicates that Egyptians and Nubians lived side by side from its founding, and that the indigenous Nubians adapted to the Egyptian way of life while their local culture remained alive. After the Pharaonic era, Sai remained an important royal site in the Meroitic period, evidenced by column capitals bearing the names of Queen Amanitore and King Natakamani, and burials of the X-Group were later found there in the fourth century AD.
In the medieval Christian era, Sai became the seat of a Nubian bishop, as shown by the remains of its cruciform church, known as a cathedral, and in the sixteenth century the Ottomans built their fortress over part of the walled New Kingdom town. Modern research on the island began in 1954 under the leadership of Jean Vercoutter, and continued with the mission of the French University of Lille and with the AcrossBorders project of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, led by Julia Budka, between 2013 and 2017. On 1 February 2022, UNESCO placed Sai Island on the Tentative List of World Heritage at the request of the Sudanese National Commission for Education, Science and Culture, and it is protected under the Sudanese Antiquities Protection Act of 1999.
📚 Sources: UNESCO, World Heritage Centre, Sai Island file on the Tentative List No. 6595 (submitted in 2022); Florence Doyen and Julia Budka, research on the New Kingdom town on Sai Island published in the journal Sudan & Nubia and the AcrossBorders project of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Lille. — Editorial Team
