Meroe Naga and Musawwarat
Leaving Khartoum we traveled the desert highway which leads down the Nile to Atbara and then on to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. Huge semitrailers carry cement, steel, building materials and food stuffs up to the distribution centres at Khartoum most returning empty.
In the area of the sixth cataract of the Nile and the market town of Shendi is close to the site of the ancient city of Meroe and its pyramid fields, cemeteries and temples. We are some two hundred km from Khartoum and a short walk from the Nile.
The city was inhabited from around 300BC to 400 AD and the site has more than two hundred pyramids in three groups.
There is a useful wiki on Meroe at :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mero%C3%AB
We stayed in a permanent tented camp with in sight of the Northern Pyramid field .
Naga ( Naqa) also an ancient major city some fifty km from the Nile and some one hundred and seventy km from Khartoum. The importance of the city is indicated by the ruins of several notable Temples and associated buildings.
Go to : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naqa
Note the wiki entry is in the alternative Naqa city name.
Musawwarat es-Sufra is a short distance from Naga and is remarkable for the “Great Enclosure” surrounding an enigmatic Temple, out buildings and courtyards. There is an article on the Great Enclosure on the Max Planck Institute site at :
http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/research/projects/DEPT1_421Renn-Globalization2
Walking through these amazing sites it is difficult to imagine hundreds if not thousands of people living in proximity where now is desiccation and desertification.
We have included a number of Google Earth to help locate the sites we imaged. Suggest you use our Googles and run a live Google Earth side by side which can be toggled and zoomed.