The Nubian Pyramids of Meroë and the Treasure Hunter Who Destroyed Them

Egypt’s pyramids are the more famous silhouette, but Sudan holds far more of them. Between the royal burial sites of the ancient Kingdom of Kush, chiefly at El-Kurru, Nuri, and above all Meroë, archaeologists count somewhere in the range of 200 to 255 pyramids, more than double Egypt’s total of roughly 118 to 120. At Meroë alone, on the east bank of the Nile in modern Sudan, excavators have documented at least 147 pyramids across three royal cemeteries, built as tombs for Kushite monarchs, queens, and high officials between roughly 300 BCE and 300 CE, after the kingdom’s political center shifted south from Napata to Meroë. They are smaller and steeper than Egypt’s Old Kingdom pyramids, built of sandstone blocks over burial chambers cut beneath the structure, but no less a monumental building tradition in their own right: one that went largely unrecognized by outside observers who assumed, wrongly, that Nubia’s rulers must have simply copied Egyptian models rather than developed a distinct royal architecture.

That obscurity made Meroë vulnerable in the 19th century. In 1834, an Italian former army surgeon and adventurer named Giuseppe Ferlini organized an expedition to the site while working in the service of the Egyptian military administration then controlling Sudan. Because Kushite pyramids, unlike Egyptian ones, generally lack internal passages leading to a burial chamber, Ferlini could not tunnel in looking for grave goods. Instead he had the pyramids dismantled from the apex downward, using manual labor and explosives to tear through the masonry in search of treasure. His main target, pyramid N6, belonged to Queen Amanishakheto, and near its top he found a genuinely remarkable cache: dozens of pieces of gold and silver jewelry that had lain undisturbed since her burial. Ferlini is generally credited with directly demolishing five or six pyramids in this manner, most severely Amanishakheto’s, though accounts of the total damage at Meroë vary.

The larger toll came from what followed. News of Ferlini’s find spread quickly, and it set off a wave of copycat treasure-hunting at Meroë by others hoping to strike a similar cache, including subsequent Egyptian expeditions: cumulative destruction that left more than 40 of the site’s pyramids damaged or destroyed over the following decades. Ferlini’s own treasure fared little better on the way to recognition: when he tried to sell the jewelry in Paris and London, experts dismissed the pieces as too sophisticated to be authentically African and declared them fakes. He eventually sold parts of the collection in Germany; King Ludwig I of Bavaria acquired a portion now held in Munich’s State Museum of Egyptian Art, with the remainder in Berlin’s Egyptian Museum. Meroë itself was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2011, its surviving pyramids now protected as one of the largest concentrations of ancient monuments on the continent.