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Long gone and virtually forgotten, the
Kingdom of Kush left behind some of the most
st riking archeological treasures in the world
karkadé, a juice made from hibiscus blossom.
Th is dialogue between African and Middle
Eastern cultures is nothing new: Sudan’s history
has long been entwined with that of Egypt.
Th eir alliances, rivalries and cultural ties
stretch back to antiquity, and the time when
Sudan, then known as the Kingdom of Kush,
was a superpower, a military and economic rival
to the emperors in Rome and the pharaohs of
Egypt (indeed, Kushite kings ruled Egypt for a
century, before being routed by the Assyrians).
Long gone and virtually forgotten, this kingdom
left behind some of the most striking
archeological treasures in the world – including
more pyramids than Egypt – which lie in the
desert unheralded and largely unvisited by
tourists. It was this Sudan I had come to see.
I headed north out of Khartoum with a guide
and a 4x4, and we were soon in the immensity of
the Nubian Desert. Since the south seceded in
2011, Sudan may only be half the country it used
to be, but the distances are still vast. We drove for
300 miles through an empty landscape baking
under the desert sun, great waves of sand blowing
across the road in the ferocious wind, the horizon
broken occasionally by a huddle of squat mud
houses, or the occasional train of ghostly pale
Sudanese camels.
After several hours of this yellow and
brown world, the horizon to the right fi lled
with a mirage-like strip of dark green, which
came closer as our path converged once more
with the Nile. We left the road and drove
towards groves of date palms and suddenly, like
Oz after Kansas, we entered a new world of
colour: a lush, benign place with villages of
people, and fi elds of sorghum grass being
worked by emaciated-looking cattle.
On a small hill on the east bank of the Nile,
we came to a phalanx of mud-brick coned
tombs, 50ft tall. Behind them were the ruins of
Old Dongola, once a medieval boomtown and
capital of the Christian kingdom of Makuria
from the seventh century until 1323, when
Islam arrived and converted the Coptic churches
to mosques. Today it is slowly returning to dust,
a collection of crumbling walls and marble
columns sticking carcass-like out of the sand.
Th e ground was strewn with bleached sheep
bones and clay pots, many intact, some of which
may have been up to a millennium old.
Th at night we camped in the desert, driving
away from the road for 15 miles, across golden
dunes and then a barren rocky landscape that
resembled images of the moon.
Next to the Nile’s Th ird Cataract, we
stopped to see Paleolithic drawings carved into
the soft sandstone – exquisite hunting scenes,
anywhere up to 40,000 years old, with
Lowryesque fi gures chasing giraff es, lions and
tigers – evidence that the Nubian Desert wasn’t
always so barren. We climbed a high hill to a
ruined Ottoman fort to look down on the Nile,
a muddy ribbon with a green ruffl e, cutting its
way through one of the most unforgiving
Seventy-Four
landscapes on earth. Th is was the erstwhile
superhighway of those seeking riches, adventure
and blood: the pharaohs, Romans and slave
traders; Gordon, Kitchener and Burton.
Th e Th ird Cataract was as far north as we
would go. From here we doubled back, driving
south for the next week and clinging to the river’s
serpentine course. In Tombos, we saw 14thcentury
BC stellae carved with hieroglyphics and
pharaonic granite statuary, lying lonely in the
sand. We journeyed on to the market town of
Kerma, the seat of the fi rst Kingdom of Kush,
where we climbed the ruins of one of two giant
deff ufas (a Nubian word meaning ‘mud-brick
building’); dating from 1500BC, they are possibly
the oldest man-made structures in sub-Saharan
Africa. In Karima, alongside the hulks of the now
redundant Victorian Nile steamer fl eet, gently
rotting on the banks, we ate a lunch of fuul,