My Brother the Traveler in Sudan

SUDAN (Royal City of Meroe and Royal Necropolis - excerpt)
Wednesday  April 11, 2009

Our morning  program is a visit to excavations of the ancient Meroe City. Our Italian guide Stephan has come down with malaria so his place is being taken by another Italian, Francesca, who runs this camp. Departure is at 9 AM in our five 4WD Toyotas. There are 14 of us tourists plus our tour director Ihab from Detroit and Francesca.

Some 15 minutes later we are at the ruins of the Royal City of Meroe lying on the banks of Nile. People lived here since the 8th century BC. It became prominent as the capital of the Kushite empire in 3rd century BC. The city was abandoned at about 350AD with the decline of Kushite power. Francesca is taking us through the area. The digs have been continued here for number of years and are not over yet. First stop is at the Amun Ra Temple. It was the main shrine of Meroe. Behind the temple there are two houses built to protect a Royal Bath, which still shows original colors on its walls. At 10:20 we come to a sacrificial altar. The area of the city is covered with shrubs and acacia trees, so it is difficult to judge the size of the city. Wind is blowing and there is fine sand in the air. Lenses of my cameras are covered with it. So I wonder about the pictures and video I have taken. We are leaving the city at 10:40 AM.

There is a stop near another Sun Temple at 10:50. I am taking photos and video of falling apart sand stones from which the temple was built. Plaster from the walls of the temple lies everywhere. After about half an hour we drive among sand dunes to another place with a tomb of a lady. According  to our guide, the dead in Sudan were not mummified, because it was an expensive proposition. Material for it had to be imported from Egypt.

At noon we stop at a village market. There are practically only men, both the sellers and the buyers, here, as it is a custom in this country. Only women here are selling tea and coffee. However, the material for this activity has to be bought for them by their husbands. If there is a woman among the buyers, she must be accompanied by a male relative. Though we got permission to take photographs and some villagers want us to take pictures of them, a local man says no. And that is final.

For lunch and siesta we return to our camp.

At 4:30 PM we drive to a nearby Royal Necropolis of Meroe which is Sudan’s most popular tourist attraction, though we are most likely the only tourists in the country. In several minutes our cars stop under a row of steep pyramids sticking out of sand on a ridge.

Soon we climb a sand dune to them against the evening sun. Wind is blowing, fine sand is flying and it is getting in everything. There are about 100 tombs here divided in two parts the Northern and the Southern Cemeteries. The Southern is older. People and royals were buried here from the 8th century BC until the mid of 3rd century BC. After that kings and queens were entombed in the Northern area until then 4th century AD when the Kushite empire declined.

This is a great place to take pictures and shoot video. Everybody including me is making pictures like there is no tomorrow. Though, in Khartoum we were told that for using video we must pay a fee, nobody outside that city has been interested in collecting it.

The pyramids are in various state of disrepair. Only few were reconstructed including chapels in front of them. There are two basic differences between pyramids in Sudan and those in Egypt. The Egyptian pyramids are gigantic compared to  pyramids here (the larges pyramid in Meroe is only 30m high) and the pyramids in Egypt were build most of the life of a pharaoh, while the tombs here were quickly built after the death of a king.

After an hour among the pyramids and exploring some of them, we are returning to our cars and  after 5:30 PM leaving for our camp