Sedeinga. The West Necropolis

Sedeinga is a vast archaeological area located on the left bank of the Nile in Sudanese Nubia, between the second and third cataracts. It comprises many sites from different periods, which include the so-called ‘West Cemetery’, a Kushite necropolis that was fully excavated during four seasons, between 1964 and 1970, by a French-Italian team under the auspices of the University of Pisa.

The White-Levy grant, directed by Dr. Vincent Francigny, will be used for the publication of this Elite cemetery that is only known through preliminary field reports, while some of the pieces discovered there are among the most famous artifacts of Kushite art.

European traveler Frederic Cailliaud first described Sedeinga in 1826 as the ruins of a New Kingdom temple built by Amenhotep III (1391 – 1352 BC) for his great royal wife, the queen Tiye. In 1957, a team led by Michela Schiff Giorgini started to excavate the nearby temple of Soleb, dedicated to this pharaoh. In 1964, attracted by the presence of a necropolis to the west of the temple at Sedeinga, the team decided to move to the site and start another excavation, the ‘West Cemetery’, thought to contain the remains of the burials of the Egyptian priests. Instead, no Egyptian grave was ever found in the area, but only Kushite tombs, later in date. As the work continued at Soleb until 1977, the team definitively moved back to that site and never published a synthesis of the excavations carried out at Sedeinga. Later, the material of the graves was divided between Sudan and Italy, and the archives of the mission were sent to Pisa.

The publication of Sedeinga ‘West Cemetery’ will provide an archaeological context to hundreds of artifacts, some of which attesting luxury trade relationship between Nubia and Roman Egypt, and shed light on local funerary practices, particularly the transition between the kingdom of Napata and the kingdom of Meroe. All the graves of the ‘West Cemetery’ were built during the Napatan period (9th – 5th centuries BC) and surmounted by a typical pyramidal superstructure. However, long after being abandoned, the tombs were reused by Meroites (1st – 3rd centuries AD). As a unique phenomenon in the Nile valley, a second pyramid was then erected in front of the ruined Napatan monuments, afeature that led to a misunderstanding of the chronology of the site by the excavators.

Having full access to the archives of this early and unpublished excavation, an archaeological synthesis on Sedeinga ‘West Cemetery’, a long overdue contribution to Sudanese archaeology and history, will be the first book for this site.