Kerma

Start with the ground under your feet. It is soft, pale, and gritty, a mix of sand and crumbled mud-brick that shifts with every step. The light here is strong and white, and the air carries a dry, dusty warmth. Somewhere to the east, beyond the palms, the Nile runs north toward Egypt. Ahead of you, a great brown mass of mud-brick rises out of the flat plain. It looks like a hill shaped by hands, and that is exactly what it is.

This is Kerma, in the Northern State of Sudan, close to the Third Cataract of the Nile. A cataract is a stretch of rapids, where granite breaks through the riverbed and boats struggle to pass. More than four thousand years ago, a powerful African kingdom grew up here. Its people built one of the earliest true cities in Africa outside Egypt. The Egyptians knew this kingdom by the name Kush, and for centuries they treated it as a serious rival.

The mound in front of you is called the Western Deffufa. The word deffufa is a local Nubian term, used for large ancient mud-brick buildings. This one was the religious heart of the old city. It is solid for most of its bulk, with narrow passages and stairways inside. Think of it as a temple built like a mountain. Many centuries of rain, wind, and sand have worn its edges, but its basic shape still stands several storeys above the plain.

Here is the first thing many visitors miss. This building is not made of stone. It is sun-dried mud-brick, the same humble material that villagers along this stretch of the Nile have used for houses for thousands of years. That such a simple material has survived so long tells you something about the dry climate. It also tells you something about the skill of the builders, who knew how to layer, repair, and enlarge the structure over generations.

Around the deffufa, archaeologists have traced the outlines of a whole city. There were houses, workshops, storerooms, and a royal audience hall. Thick defensive walls and ditches once ringed the settlement. Some of the foundations you can see today are low ridges of brick, restored so that visitors can read the plan. Walk slowly and look down. The city is written on the ground in lines, corners, and doorways.

The story of how this place was understood is a story of changing minds. In the early twentieth century, the American archaeologist George Reisner excavated here for Harvard and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He found Egyptian objects and assumed Kerma was an Egyptian trading outpost. Later research overturned that view. Kerma was not a colony of Egypt. It was the capital of an independent African state with its own rulers, gods, and traditions.

Much of that later research came from a Swiss team led by the archaeologist Charles Bonnet. Beginning in the 1970s, his team worked at Kerma season after season for decades. Patient digging showed the city's long growth, its temples, and its links with other peoples of the Nile valley and the lands to the south. Bonnet's work helped place Kerma firmly on the map of world history, as a centre of power in its own right.

Now turn your attention east, a few kilometres away, toward the great cemetery. This is where the kings of Kerma were buried. Their tombs were huge circular mounds, called tumuli, some of them very wide. Close to the cemetery stands a second, smaller mud-brick building, the Eastern Deffufa. It served as a funerary chapel, a place of offerings for the dead. Traces of painted decoration were found inside.

The royal burials hold one of the most sobering discoveries at Kerma. Excavators found that some kings were buried with large numbers of other people, who appear to have died at the time of the funeral. Archaeologists generally interpret these as sacrificial burials. It is a hard fact to hear while standing in the quiet heat. But it is part of an honest picture of power in this ancient kingdom.

Cattle mattered deeply to the people of Kerma. Around some graves, excavators found rows of cattle skulls, sometimes hundreds of them, laid out in arcs. Cattle were wealth, food, and status. Even today, herding remains part of life in parts of Sudan. Standing here, you can imagine the long processions, the smell of animals and smoke, and the sound of a crowd gathered for a royal funeral.

If you have seen Kerma pottery in a museum, you may remember it. The finest pieces are remarkably thin, polished red with a glossy black rim. Some cups flare outward like an open flower. Potters made these by hand, without a wheel, and the walls can be as delicate as eggshell. In the soil around the site, small pottery fragments still appear. Look at them where they lie, and leave them there.

The kingdom did not last forever. Around 1500 BCE, Egyptian armies pushed south and conquered Kerma. Yet the story of Kush continued. Later Kushite kings, centred further upstream, would even rule Egypt itself. Here comes the second surprise. In 2003, Bonnet's team found a buried cache of granite statues of those later kings at the nearby site of Dokki Gel. Those statues are now displayed in the small Kerma Museum, close to the Western Deffufa.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment and look back at the deffufa. Notice how its colour changes as the sun moves, from pale tan to warm brown. Listen for the wind, a donkey cart on the road, perhaps voices from the village. People have lived beside this river, on this same plain, for thousands of years. As you walk away, the soft ground under your feet is the same ground the builders of this ancient city once walked.