#Old Dongola

[afrotumble]

Ruins of the Church of Granite Columns in Old Dongola.

[ancientoriginses]

Se ha encontrado una serie de habitaciones ocultas debajo de un monasterio medieval en Sudán que presenta un impresionante arte cristiano como nunca antes se había visto en la historia de Nubia.

[panafrocore]

The Throne Hall of Dongola (Sudan), (9th century)

Also known as the Mosque Building, is an archaeological site in Old Dongola, Sudan. It was originally built in the 9th century, serving as the richly adorned representative building of the Makurian kings. In 1317, during the period of Makurian decline, it was converted into a mosque, serving this purpose until it was closed and turned into a historic monument in 1969.

[storiearcheostorie]

1,000 year-old hidden rooms covered with Nubian wall paintings depicting unique Christian art found in Old Dongola, Sudan

#ARCHAEOLOGY #NEWS 1,000 year-old hidden rooms covered with #Nubian wall paintings depicting unique #Christian #art found in #OldDongola, #Sudan FULL STORY: @PCMA_UW

Scene with King David (photo: Adrian Chlebowski) Stunning new discovery in Old Dongola, Sudan. During excavations in houses dating from the Funj period (16th-19th century CE) located on the east bank of the Nile, more than 500 km north of Khartoum, archaeologists from the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, University of Warsaw (PCMA UW) have found a series of hidden rooms covered with…

[theologyforthelayman]

Ancient Christian paintings discovered in medieval African churches

Old Dongola, also known as Dongola, was an ancient city located in present-day Sudan, situated on the eastern bank of the Nile River. It served as the capital of the medieval kingdom of Makuria, a Christian kingdom that thrived from the 6th to the 14th centuries. At its peak, Old Dongola was a bustling city […]Ancient Christian paintings discovered in medieval African churches

[valseorcstra]

Sudan's Nubian early Christian art in Faras gallery, the gallery features a unique collection of Wall paintings and architectural from the Faras Cathedral (located in Old Dongola ancient city of Sudan). Warsaw muesem

[travel2unlimited]

Islamic Cemetery in Old Dongola The Christian kingdom of Makuria fell to the Egyptian sultan in the 1300s and eventually came to decline. However, the most interesting part of the area is the vast Islamic cemetery from the 17th century with many giant qubbas - domed tombs. They look totally surreal in the desert landscape, like giant pyramids. In between the qubbas, there are hundreds of simple sand and stone graves, perfectly preserved by the desert heat. But it’s what’s inside the qubbas that is mind-blowing - several of them are filled with thousands of small bats. You crawl through a small door, your eyes tearing from the guano smell, and you see the bats all around on the cupola and walls, in a total cacaphony of sounds. #travel2unlimited #travel #travelblog #sudan #desert #roadtrip #afrika #adventure #explore #sudanese #amazing #olddongola #kubbas #islamic #cemetery #bats (at Old Dongola) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cml7bL_jdOP/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[ancientstuff]

For once, this kind of headline might actually be true and not hyperbole.

[afranciscomiradiezblr-blog]

¿Curiosidades y lapsus temporales y o eternos?

El kurru en Sudan fue la última morada de los Faraones Negros, visitamos también un bosque petrificado, conoceremos Old Dongola y el cementerio musulman Qubba

[whencyclopedfr]

Dongola el Agouz

L'ancienne Dongola (alias Dongola el Agouz ou Old Dongola), située dans le Soudan moderne, était la capitale de l'ancien royaume nubien de Dongola (alias Makurie ou Makourra) qui prospéra du 6e au 14e siècle. Royaume chrétien pendant au moins 750 ans, puis musulman après les incursions des Mamelouks d'Égypte au début du 14e siècle, Dongola prospéra grâce à l'agriculture et aux relations commerciales avec l'Empire byzantin via l'Égypte et les royaumes africains au sud et à l'est. Aujourd'hui, les églises en pierre et le palais royal de l'ancienne Dongola, en ruines, laissent un témoignage fascinant de la richesse dont jouissait autrefois ce mystérieux royaume du désert. Il ne faut pas la confondre avec la ville soudanaise moderne de Dongola, qui se trouve à environ 160 km au nord-ouest.

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[xtruss]

These Mighty Pyramids Were Built By One of Africa’s Earliest Civilisations! The Mysterious Rulers of Nubia, in Present-day Sudan, Erected Hundreds of Tombs and Temples that Rival Cairo’s.

— By Emma Thompson | 29 December 2022 | Photographs By: Nichole Sobecki

A “haboob” (sandstorm) rolls across the Meroë pyramids in Sudan. Most of the 41 tombs here belong to the royals of the powerful Kingdom of Kush (900 B.C. to A.D. 400), which ruled large parts of the middle Nile Valley.

Powered by agriculture, ancient Sudan’s great civilisations thrived and erected mighty temples and tombs honouring their gods, kings, queens, and nobles. Their building boom left behind some 255 pyramids—more than twice the number Egypt constructed next door.

Yet few Western travellers have seen these hulking sandstone relics. That’s because Sudan’s tourism industry has been impeded by two civil wars (1956-1972 and 1983-2005) and the battle for independence that led to the creation of South Sudan in 2011.

The temple of Soleb was built in the 14th century B.C. by Pharaoh Amenhotep III, in present-day Sudan. Visitors can still view its massive columns and splendid relief carvings.

Travel to Sudan is still currently not advised due to ongoing civil unrest related to a 2021 coup. However, when tensions ease, Sudan offers a singular chance to camp beside crowd-free ancient pyramids and to learn about the mysterious reign of these little-known pharaohs. A guided road trip along the Nile Valley takes you from the splendid temple at Soleb to the UNESCO-recognized Meroë, with the world’s largest cache of pyramids.

Black Pharaohs and a Once Great City

Nubia once stretched south from Aswan, Egypt, to modern-day Khartoum, Sudan. It gave rise to one of Africa’s earliest civilisations, the Kingdom of Kush, whose kings—nicknamed the Black Pharaohs—conquered Egypt in 747 B.C. and ruled the vast territory for nearly a century.

This drama played out on the banks of the world’s longest river, the Nile. Flowing south to north from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean, the legendary waterway was considered the source of life itself because the annual flooding brought fertile soil for farming.

From the capital of Khartoum, it’s a nine-hour drive north to Soleb, Sudan’s best-preserved temple and the southernmost structure built by Amenhotep III, the Egyptian pharaoh who also commissioned the temples at Luxor. It was once guarded by the Prudhoe Lions, a pair of finely carved red granite beasts inscribed by the boy-king Tutankhamun when he visited. They are now displayed at London’s British Museum.

Top: Visitor Nadeem Abduraziq Mohammed walks through the ancient city of Kerma, Sudan, in July 2021. Kerma has been occupied for at least 8,000 to 10,000 years, reaching its peak around 1800 B.C., when it was capital of the Kingdom of Kush. Bottom: There are 41 tombs in Meroë’s north cemetery, 38 of them belonging to monarchs who ruled the region between B.C. 250 and A.D. 320.

Take a small barge from the village of Wawa to the western bank of the Nile, and you soon see the sandstone columns of Soleb’s main hall. Carved at their bases are images of Assyrians, hands chained behind their backs, whom the Black Pharaohs took as prisoners of war.

A few miles south of Soleb, set back from the tents where locals serve small glasses of tea beside the Nile, is Kerma. Established around 5,500 years ago, this ancient capital grew up around a huge adobe temple called the Western Defuffa. At its height the city had a population of 10,000; today, its mud brick ruins are inhabited only by nesting swallows. Nearby lies one of the oldest cemeteries in Africa.

Top: A fragment of an ancient carving sits near the Kerma necropolis. This area of Sudan has been inhabited since Paleolithic times. Bottom: Tahani Abdulaziz takes a photograph of family members during a visit to Kerma.

Haunting Tombs and Dazzling Murals

Just over an hour’s drive south, and slowly being swallowed by sand, is Old Dongola. Founded with a fortress in A.D. 600, it served as the capital of the medieval Nubian kingdom of Makuria and grew to include palaces, houses, and Christian churches. It was a major stop on the Darb al-Arba’in (Forty Days Road) that thousands of camel caravans followed, transporting ivory and slaves between the Sudanese town of Darfur and Egypt.

Best preserved is the Church of the Old Granite Columns, its pale pillars framing a Throne Hall that was converted into a mosque in 1317 and remained in use until 1969. Now it’s open to visitors, along with an adjacent Islamic graveyard with distinctive 17th-century domed tombs known as qubbas.

From there, the Nile loops eastward and you come to El-Kurru, a cemetery used by the royal family of the Kingdom of Kush. Unlike in Egypt, Nubian burial chambers sit below the pyramids, not inside them.

Adobe tunnels cover the entrances to the chambers, chief among them the tomb of King Tanutamun (who died around 653 B.C.). Uneven shallow steps descend into the darkness until a flashlight click reveals a duo of domed rooms, one leading onto the other. Their white gypsum walls are covered with intricate murals in colours of ochre and yellow.

On the back wall is an arresting scene depicting Tanutamun’s heart being weighed against a feather by Maat, the goddess of truth. Kushites believed this recorded a person’s good and bad deeds and determined if the king’s soul could pass into paradise.

A Sudanese family tours El Kurru, a field of pyramids built for the kings and queens of ancient Kush.

More royal tombs crop up in Nuri, further upstream. Its smaller and steeper 70-plus pyramids are now reduced to 20. The most famous tombs belong to King Taharqa, the Black Pharoah who conquered Egypt, and King Nastasen, which archaeologists have to scuba-dive to reach because of rising ground waters.

Nuri served as the royal necropolis for the adjacent town of Napata, the first capital of the Kingdom of Kush. Both the cemetery and the ruins of the settlement lie across the Nile from Jebel Barkal, a 341-foot-tall sandstone mesa. From its summit, you can see the ruins of Nuri, including rows of cracked pillars and pairs of giant stone rams, their eyes and ears worn away by time.

Top: The pyramids of Nuri, Sudan, were built between 650 and 300 B.C. The most famous tomb belongs to King Taharqa, the Black Pharaoh who conquered Egypt. Bottom: Archaeologist Gretchen Emma Zoeller excavates a burial site in Nuri. The ancient site sprawls across more than 170 acres along the Nile in northern Sudan.

On the western side of Jebel Barkal is a crumbling stone door frame leading to the Temple of Mut, wife of Amun. Spotlights illuminate its fine wall murals chronicling Taharqa’s coronation in white clay, ocher, and deep blue.

The World’s Largest Group of Pyramids

Finally, the Nile weaves past Meroë (pronounced Mero-way), the Kushite capital until the empire collapsed in A.D. 400 and site of Sudan’s best-preserved pyramids. More than 200 of them spread across the sands. Their granite and sandstone bases are etched with elephant, giraffe, and gazelle designs, proof that this was once fertile grasslands.

Sudanese tourists visit Jebel Barkal, Sudan, to climb the small butte, which has been considered sacred for thousands of years. Roughly a dozen pyramids are also scattered around the base of the mountain.

“It’s the biggest congregation of pyramids in the world,” reports archaeologist and Meroë site manager, Mahmoud Suliman. “At the time of the 2019 revolution, street signs, advertisements, and paintings all featured their images. It brought people together because the pyramids are so tied to our sense of identity.”

Mentioned in the writings of Herodotus, there’s an air of defiance about these structures that stand firm against the sands trying to swallow them. Indeed, it was an act of resistance that led to their construction in the first place. In the third century B.C., Kushite King Arakamani (Ergamenes) had grown tired of the Meroitic (Meroë-led) kingdom’s power-hungry high priests. So when they sent an order for him to commit suicide, he responded by having them all murdered instead.

Top: A group of school children approach the pyramids at Meroë. Bottom: Volunteer tour guides show a group of Sudanese school children the Meröe pyramids. During the dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir from 1989 to 2019, Sudan’s school curriculum was infused with Islamic ideology and much of its rich ancient history was glossed over, but the new government wants to change that.

The rebellion ushered in a new era of culture: the almighty Egyptian god Amun-Ra was downgraded in favour of the lion god Abedemak, the (still undeciphered) Meroitic script was created, and warrior queens, known as kandakes, ruled the army. Inside the tombs, the carvings of the kings stand taller than the gods. You won’t see that in Egypt. Here, kings controlled everything except death.

It’s a strong message and one that’s inspired a fresh wave of national pride. For just as Ancient Greece informed so much of today’s European culture, so too did Nubia shape Sudan. It is the bedrock that formed the country’s sense of self and identity. Understanding this history suggests a way forward for Sudan.

“These were very popular kings and queens,” says Aya Allam, a Sudanese martial artist based in Khartoum. “They are a reminder that we were once a great nation and could become great once again.”

A pyramid covers a tomb in Meroë, Sudan. Rulers of the Kingdom of Kush were buried here underneath the steeply pitched structures, which range in height from 30 to one hundred feet tall, far shorter than the pyramids in nearby Egypt.

— Emma Thomson is a British Travel Writer. Nichole Sobecki is a Kenya-based Photographer.

[tsudantours]

Merry Christmas 🎄 to all people who celebrate around the world This picture captured at Old Dongola capital of Makuria, One of the three Christian Kingdoms was found after Kingdom of Kush (Nubian Kingdom) collapsed. Come to explore Sudan 😍 🇸🇩 Your Local Tour Guide to Sudan Consult us 📧 info@tours.sd Follow: www.instagram.com/TSudanTours www.tiktok.com/@tsudantours 📸 Our Tour guide, Osman #sudantour #sudan #africa #visitsudan #travel #sudantours #sudantourism #history #kush #nature #desert #photography #meroe #karima #pyramids #roadtrip #camping #portsudan #diving #arkawit  #pyramidsofMeroe #archeology #snorkeling https://www.instagram.com/p/CmlUPkAsALv/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[andronetalks]

Ancient Christian paintings discovered in medieval African churches

Aleteia By Daniel Esparza – published on 05/21/23 Old Dongola, also known as Dongola, was an ancient city located in present-day Sudan, situated on the eastern bank of the Nile River. It served as the capital of the medieval kingdom of Makuria, a Christian kingdom that thrived from the 6th to the 14th centuries. At its peak, Old Dongola was a bustling city with a rich cultural and historical…

[newswireml]

Remains of ancient temple with hieroglyphic inscriptions discovered in Sudan#Remains #ancient #temple #hieroglyphic #inscriptions #discovered #Sudan

Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a temple dating back around 2,700 years, to a time when a kingdom called Kush ruled over a vast area, including what is now Sudan, Egypt and parts of the Middle East.  The temple remains were found at a medieval citadel at Old Dongola, a site located between the third and fourth cataracts of the Nile River in modern-day Sudan.  Some of the temple’s…

[danieleneandermancini]

NUOVO PROGETTO DI VALORIZZAZIONE PER LE ANTICHE MOSCHEE DEL SUDAN

Il Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology dell’Università di Varzavia si accinge a lanciare un nuovo progetto di protezione e valorizzazione del patrimonio culturale in Sudan, il “Baraka: Revitalization of the Oldest Preserved Mosque at Old Dongola” finanziato dall’Alleanza internazionale per la Protezione del Patrimonio nelle Aree di Conflitto (ALIPH ). La Vecchia Moschea di Dongola è la più…