Dows Dunham Recollections of an Egyptologist

universities, and published by Dr. M. F. Laming Macadam. We then
went on to the government rest house not far from the excavation
carried out by our museum’s expedition at Kerma, which lay some
distance beyond the village of that name. In due course we returned by
“lorry” across the desert to Kareima, where Mrs. Burney and my wife
rejoined us. They reported that they had been very warmly received and
entertained at dinner by the district commissioner and his assistant and
had had a delightful stay. Indeed, one found that all over the Sudan,
where hotels are largely nonexistent, the local residents, whether
officials or not, offered lavish hospitality to the occasional traveler.
At Kareima we took to the train again and moved to the area of old
Meroe, some two hundred miles north of Khartoum. At Kabushiya we
left the train and moved to a houseboat on the river, and from there we
visited the ruins of the city of Meroe and the pyramids where Reisner
and I had worked from 1921 to 1923. Then again we took to overland
travel, once more by truck, and paid visits to the temples of Naga and
Mussawarat es Safra. At the former site, where there are several temples
of the Meroitic period, we spent a night in the government rest house;
at least, the three ladies slept in it, while the men set up their camp
beds in the open.
It was not a restful night, but one full of interest. For at Naga there was
one of the rare wells in this arid region, to which the nomadic shepherds
and camel herders of the area came in great numbers to water their
animals. There was a full moon and throughout the night there was a
constant coming and going of the herders, watering their flocks and
filling their waterskins from the well. These people, with their women
and children, who spent many days at a time wandering about, grazing
their animals on the sparse grass, here found the rare opportunity for
the exchange of news, for gossip, and for animated bartering and trading.
It was a fascinating sight, and it vividly brought to life a picture of
the kind of existence that must have been led by the children of Israel
in the days of their wanderings after the exodus from Egypt.
We ended our hegira in Khartoum just before Christmas 1946. Khartoum
is a modern town, the headquarters of the Sudan government,
composed largely of administrative buildings, government off ices, and
the houses of officials. The original city of Omdurman, much larger
than Khartoum itself, lies across the Nile. My wife and I stayed for
The Pyramids at Meroe, looking north.
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