Qualla: Buhen

Buhen: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit EditorfromMars, CC BY-SA 4.0. The horse was the surprise. When the British Egyptologist Walter Bryan Emery was excavating the Middle Kingdom fortress at Buhen in 1958 and 1959, his team uncovered a skeleton that changed what we thought we knew about the ancient Near East. A horse, buried carefully under what had been a stable in the fortress compound, and dated to somewhere before 1650 BCE, before the Hyksos were supposed to have introduced horses to Egypt. The Buhen Horse is now on loan from the Khartoum Museum to the Department of Egyptology at University College London. It is the oldest horse skeleton found in Egypt or Sudan, and it sat inside the walls of a fortress that had already been old for hundreds of years when someone dug its grave.

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Image: EditorfromMars | CC BY-SA 4.0

Buhen: A Copper Town Before It Was a Fort

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rex Keating, CC BY-SA 3.0 igo. Long before the fortress, Buhen was a colonial Egyptian town built for copper production. In the Old Kingdom, roughly between 2686 and 2181 BCE, Egyptian workers under pharaohs of the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties came here to smelt copper at what archaeologists describe as an ancie...

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Image: Rex Keating | CC BY-SA 3.0 igo

Buhen: A Chain of Signal Forts

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Map created from DEMIS Mapserver, which are public domain. Koba-chan, CC BY-SA 3.0. Around 1850 BCE, during the Middle Kingdom, pharaoh Senusret III conducted four campaigns into Kush and built a line of fortresses along the Second Cataract of the Nile. Each fort was placed within signaling distance of the next. Buhen was the northernmost. Heading south, the cha...

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Image: Map created from DEMIS Mapserver, which are public domain. Koba-chan | CC BY-SA 3.0

Buhen: Captured and Recaptured

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ahmed Al.Badawy from Cairo, Egypt, CC BY-SA 2.0. Egypt did not hold Buhen forever. During the Thirteenth Dynasty, when Egyptian central power collapsed into the Second Intermediate Period, the Kushites captured the fortress and held it as part of their own kingdom. Buhen became a Kushite garrison, and Nubian leaders like Nedjeh...

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Image: Ahmed Al.Badawy from Cairo, Egypt | CC BY-SA 2.0

Buhen: Workers and Metal

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada, CC BY 2.0. The most striking thing about Buhen is how much it tells us about ancient labor. In the Middle Kingdom, the people occupying the fort were mostly Egyptians directed south from Lower Egypt on rotating assignments. They cycled through rather than settling permanently. But they need...

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Image: David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Buhen: Under Lake Nubia

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Einsamer Schütze, CC BY-SA 3.0. Buhen is now underwater. The Aswan High Dam, completed in 1970, flooded the entire Second Cataract region and all of Lower Nubia along with it. The fortress that had guarded Egypt's southern frontier for nearly two thousand years, that had been captured by Kushites and recaptured...

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Image: Einsamer Schütze | CC BY-SA 3.0