Work of the Sudanese Team at El Kurru

We are fortunate to be working at El Kurru with a group of 5 professors of archaeology from the University of Dongola at Karima. Led by Prof. Abbas Sidahmed Mohamed-Ali, with funding from the Qatar-Sudan Archaeological Project, they are working to restore and protect portions of the royal cemetery excavated by George Reisner nearly 100 years ago, with the eventual goal of presenting the site more clearly for visitors. But the process of cleaning and in some cases re-excavating these burials is providing some new information about the royal burials of the Dynasty of Napata.

The field director for the project is Prof. Jamaal Jaffar Abbas, and I will hope to show his work in a future post. For now, I am posting a photo of Prof. Jamaal Babikir el-Ghali, who supervised the re-excavation of the tomb of Shabaqo, one of the powerful kings of Kush who also ruled Egypt in the years around 700 BC. I will leave detailed description of the new findings for a publication by the Sudanese team. But for now, visitors to the site can see these tombs clean as they have not been since 1919.