Sanam,Sudan

The Temple of Sanam, located in northern Sudan, was built in the 7th Century BCE by the Kushite king Taharqo. Taharqo, a native Nubian who also ruled over Egypt, constructed the temple in an Egyptian style and dedicated it to the god Amun; nevertheless, many traces of the king’s distinctive Kushite culture are still to be found at the site. 

The project is investigating not only how the temple was used by Kushite kings but what this monument might have meant to the local Nubian population living around it. The pandemic and the political situation in Sudan has prevented fieldwork from taking place for the past two years, but as soon as we can return we are planning to conduct geophysical survey to ascertain the extent of the early first millennium BCE monumental mud brick building uncovered by the project to the north of the temple in 2018-2019. We are hoping that this will provide further insight into Nubian occupation at the site in the period before the temple was built, a comparative “dark age” in Sudanese archaeology that could provide exciting new data on Kushite state formation.