Dows Dunham Recollections of an Egyptologist

Excavating in the Sudan
During my first winter with the Harvard-Boston Expedition in the
Sudan we concentrated principally on the excavation of the great
temple of Amon at Gebel Barkal and the two small groups of pyramids
to the south and west of the mountain. These stood out conspicuously
on high ground, many of them quite well preserved, with small chapels
built against their eastern faces. Of Meroitic date, the pyramids had
never been seriously investigated, and the location of their burial places
was unknown, for they gave every appearance of being composed of
solid masonry without interior chambers. The expedition’s meticulous
and painstaking examination of them revealed their secret. East of each
of the chapels there proved to be a cut in the rock containing a stairway
that led down to the entrance to one or more burial chambers cut out of
the natural rock beneath the pyramid. This discovery led to the excavation
of not only the burials associated with these pyramids but
eventually of the many tombs at other sites in the Sudan examined by
our expedition. (Together these cover the entire history of ancient royal
and private tombs from about 800 B.C. to the end of the Meroitic Period
in the fourth century A.D.) Thus, the method of attack in uncovering
the vast number of burials throughout the Sudan was solved at Barkal in
1916. Preliminary examination made that winter, of the early Kushite
site at El Kurru, about fifteen miles southwest of Barkal, and of the
great royal site across the Nile at Nuri, about eight miles northeast of
Barkal, confirmed our findings, although their intensive excavation had
to be postponed to subsequent seasons, for by April the weather in this
region became too hot for field work.
The Pyramids at Gebel Barkal.
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