Publication of F. Ll. Griffith's Excavations at Sanam Temple, 1912

his grant will fund the much-needed publication of the temple of Sanam in Sudan. Dating to the mid-first millennium BC, the temple was excavated by Francis Llewellyn Griffith in 1912 and is located near the modern town of Karima at the fourth cataract of the Nile. The larger site of Sanam (ancient Napata), of which the temple forms part, was the religious and administrative center of the Nubian state in the mid-first millennium BC. The temple is especially significant among Nubian monuments of this period because of the evidence it offers for the non-Egyptian structure of the Napatan state and economy, and because of its central location in close proximity to other royal monuments. This project will utilize objects from Sanam Temple now in the Ashmolean Museum, the excavation archives at the Griffith Institute in Oxford, and data from a planned field season that will re-document the temple to modern standards in order to fully publish and contextualize this important site. Publication will allow scholars to fully access evidence from Sanam Temple, and will be of great significance to current discussion in Nubian Studies about the degree and meaning of Egyptianization in Nubian culture.

The publication project is directed by Dr. Kathryn Howley, Lady Wallis Budge Junior Research Fellow in Egyptology at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge.