Archaeological Sites of the Island of Meroe
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How it came to be
The sites on the Island of Meroe lie in the heartland of the Kingdom of Kush, a major power from the 8th century BC to the 4th century AD. According to UNESCO, Meroe was the seat of rulers who occupied Egypt for close to a century. It became the kings' principal residence, and from the 3rd century BC most royal burials took place here.
The property has three parts: the capital, Meroe, and the religious centres of Musawwarat es-Sufra and Naqa. More than 200 pyramids stand at Meroe in three groups, along with evidence of the production and trade of ceramics and iron. By the 3rd century BC the 23-letter Meroitic alphabet had replaced Egyptian script, but the language is still poorly understood because few bilingual texts exist.
In 24 BC the forces of Queen Amanirenas raided Roman Egypt and carried off the head of a statue of Augustus, which was buried beneath a temple staircase at Meroe. After Christianity reached the Middle Nile in the 6th century, Kushite civilisation largely disappeared. Treasure hunting by Giuseppe Ferlini in the 1830s damaged some of the pyramids. The sites were inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2011.
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