Nuri — the Necropolis of the Kings of Napata and the Pyramids of Taharqa on the Nile
Nuri lies in northern Sudan near the Fourth Cataract, about ten kilometres from Jebel Barkal and about fifteen kilometres north of Sanam. It was the royal necropolis of the city of Napata, the first capital of the Kingdom of Kush, and the kings of the Napatan period, their queens and members of their families were buried in it, after the older necropolis of el-Kurru had become too crowded to receive more royal tombs.
UNESCO documentation at the site counted 82 tombs, most of them with a pyramidal structure above the burial chambers. The first known burial there dates back to 664 BC, and the last to about 310 BC, meaning that building continued for more than three centuries. At its peak the site had more than eighty pyramids, and only slightly more than twenty pyramids remain standing today, many of them damaged by time and ancient looting.
The oldest and largest of Nuri's pyramids is Pyramid No. 1, the pyramid of King Taharqa, the last of the prominent kings of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, who reigned between 690 and 664 BC. The side of its base measures 51.75 metres in length, and its original height was between forty and fifty metres, making it thereby the largest known pyramid of a Kushite king. Researchers have noted that its position was chosen so that the sun, when viewed from Jebel Barkal on the morning of the Egyptian New Year and the beginning of the Nile flood, is seen rising directly above its summit, in a deliberate link between kingship, the flood and the renewal of life.
The pyramids were built on two separate plateaus: Taharqa's pyramid occupied the highest point of the western plateau, and the tombs of the queens and the kings' mothers were distributed around it, while the pyramids of the later kings stood in other groups, among them Aspelta and Aramatelqo, down to Nastasen, the last king buried in Nuri, around 315 BC. Unlike the pyramids of Egypt, Kushite burial took place in chambers carved beneath the pyramid, not inside it, an architectural detail that distinguishes Napatan funerary architecture.
George Reisner excavated Nuri in systematic excavations between 1916 and 1918 within the expedition of Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and documented its tombs, and his successor Dows Dunham published its results in 1955 in the volume "The Royal Cemeteries of Kush: Nuri". Among its treasures preserved in Boston are Taharqa's shabti statues and Aspelta's stone sarcophagus. Since 2018 a new mission led by Pearce Paul Creasman has returned to work at the site, and was forced to dive inside the tomb of Nastasen after it was flooded by groundwater connected to the Nile, making it the first underwater excavation work beneath a pyramid in Sudan. UNESCO inscribed Nuri in 2003 within the site "Gebel Barkal and the Sites of the Napatan Region" on the World Heritage List, together with el-Kurru, Sanam, Zuma and Jebel Barkal itself.
📚 Sources: UNESCO, World Heritage Centre — file "Gebel Barkal and the Sites of the Napatan Region" (inscribed 2003) and ICOMOS evaluation No. 1073; Dows Dunham, "The Royal Cemeteries of Kush — Part II: Nuri", Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1955; National Geographic — reports of the Nuri Pyramids Mission led by Pearce Paul Creasman on the underwater excavation in the tomb of Nastasen (2019–2022) — Editorial Team
