The pyramids not many tourist have seen( a good morning in Sahara)

  Sahara a good place for tourist

Waking up with the sun hot on my face and trying to open my eyes, I glanced across the rough Sahara Desert to see if anyone was looking. I was travelling with a group of friends, and we had spent the night sleeping under the stars with only the soft and dusty sand for a mattress. 

With everyone still sleeping, I climbed up a large dune alone to get a better view of what we have come here to find. There, several kilometers away, hundreds of magnificent pyramids rose out of the desert – a site that few travelers have seen before.

The disappearing pyramids of Sudan

From 2600 BC until 300 AD, this area was known as ancient Nubia and was ruled by the Kushites, who were enemies and friends of the Egyptians (at different times) and followed many of their rituals, such as burying their kings and queens in pyramid tombs. There are over 250 pyramids along the Nile in Sudan, far more than their Egyptian cousins.

A journey over time

We had been convinced to go to Sudan by a friend who had spent three years teaching English in a school in Khartoum and was full of amazing anecdotes about exploring ancient Nubia, cooking over campfires among sand dunes and meeting archaeologists who have discovered artifacts left behind by 5,000-year-old civilizations. We decided to visit him and take a journey back in time, driving along the Nile from Khartoum to Dongola, exploring the pyramids and other ruins along the way.

A Sudanese roadside stop

Sudan is not a usual tourist destination, and it is by no means an easy place to travel. Visas to enter the country require huge piles of paper work and phone reception is not easy to come by.

  But these are small prices to pay for the wealth of ancient history in a country with amazing friendly and hospitable people.

In Khartoum, we hired a car with a local driver to help us negotiate the slow, bumpy roads and numerous police checkpoints (terrorism is a constant threat in Sudan). As it can take several hours to go just 100km, roadside breaks were a must. At popup stalls in villages along the way, we were warmly greeted with cups of sweet tea and offered beds that were laid out for people to rest from their long journeys.

The remains of an ancient pyramid

Along the road going north out of Khartoum, our first major stop were the pyramids at Meroe, the capital of the Kushite kingdom from 300 BC (previous capitals included Kerma and Napata). Standing alone in the Sudanese desert for over 2,000 years or more, they were built after the Egyptian pyramids and served as tombs for Meroe’s kings and queens. They are located close to the Nile, an important source of water and a trade road to Egypt, connecting many of the ancient ruins found in present day Sudan.

Not Egypt’s pyramids

Thus, Egypt’s Pyramids of Giza, most of Meroe‘s pyramids are slightly smaller, with steeper sides, narrower bases and adjoining offering temples. They lie in varying states of ruin due to the plundering of treasure hunters in the 1800s: some stand tall in good condition; others are unrecognizable piles of rubble. Their distinctively darker color is due to the higher iron content in the rocks.

The pyramids at Meroe were listed as a Unesco World Heritage site in 2011, but owing to its location in northeastern Sudan – a place that conjures up images of war and economic crisis –  very few visitors, usually no more than 10 a day.

The pyramids very few visitors see

A lonely man greeted us at the entrance to the World Heritage site. We then headed over to the first group of about nine pyramids in the South Cemetery. (Meroe has three cemeteries – South, North and West – within a few kilometers of each other).

Walking among the pyramids, I felt dwarfed by the scale of the surrounding antiquity. I touched the side of a sand blasted rock and it felt warm as its dark color absorbed the hot desert sun.

Carvings in the stone

We were able to walk into some of the offering temples that had not been taken over by sand. They were small spaces, only a few meters by a few meters,  inside, there were amazing wall carvings showing various scenes of life in the Kushite kingdom – including Queens presiding over their subjects and people worshiping Egyptian gods. In one temple, a carving revealed evidence that the royal buried inside the pyramid was mummified, covered with jewelry and laid to rest in a wooden case.

A visit from indigenes

We had been exploring for about an hour when we saw a small child running towards us,  followed by a few more. News of our arrival had obviously spread through the nearby village of Kabushiya. The children brought handmade models of the pyramids carved out of local sandstone, and asked us – in a mix of broken English and Arabic – about where we were from.

Soon their parents arrived with camels to take us from one group of pyramids to the next, and we welcomed the alternative to trudging through the sand in the midday sun.

An archaeologist’s dream

The pyramids at Meroe are Sudan’s best-preserved pyramids; they have the highest numbers of tombs and are the most extensively excavated by archaeologists. However, as you drive along the Nile, it not uncommon to spot other groups of pyramids or ancient ruins in the distance.

Driving several kilometers up to the river towards the city of Dongola, we visited the renowned archaeological site at Kerma, home to the Kingdom of Kerma over 5,000 years and more. Although they were influenced by the Egyptians, the people of Kerma were a civilization in their own right, ruling over ancient Nubia before the Kushites arrived and built the pyramids. At Kerma today, you can see the oldest mud brick building in Africa, a mountainous tomb surrounded by smaller burial sites.

A carved pharaoh left behind

In 2003, more than 40 large granite statues of pharaohs, thought to have been rulers of the Kushite empire, were found scattered through the desert near Kerma. Most of these statues were collected and put into museums – but some have remained in the desert for travelers to uncover.