When I first became co-director of an archaeological project at Jebel Barkal in northern Sudan in 2018, I was amazed by the site’s pyramids, temples and palaces. It had been an urban center in the ancient empire of Kush, which dominated the Nile Valley off and on for over 2,000 years, from 2000 B.C.E. to 350 C.E.
I was far from alone in admiring the ruins – European and American travelers have visited and archaeologists had documented the site for the past two centuries. More recently, Jebel Barkal was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2003.
But researchers still know so little about the ancient city and its residents, particularly compared with other ancient cities of Egypt, Assyria, Greece and Rome. Where did nonroyal people live? What did they eat? We don’t even know how they got their water, since the site is about a mile away from where the Nile flows today. Could there have been a nearby channel of the Nile that has since filled in? What was this landscape like when Jebel Barkal was a major urban center? More broadly, how did changes in climate over the past 4,000 years affect the growth of the city?
Some of these questions can be studied by a field called geomorphology, the study of how the Earth’s surface changes, especially by erosion. To learn more about how the landscape around Jebel Barkal had changed over millennia, I invited two Dutch geomorphologists, Jan Peeters and Tim Winkels, who had previously worked on Nile landscapes in Egypt, to come to Sudan to design a study.
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