Qualla: Kerma culture

Kerma culture: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Iry-Hor, CC BY-SA 3.0. For most of the twentieth century, the massive adobe structures at Kerma were thought to be Egyptian. George Reisner, who excavated them in the 1910s and 1920s, saw Egyptian-style monuments and Egyptian-style grave goods, and concluded that Kerma must have been an Egyptian fortress - a colonial outpost run by Egyptian governors who eventually declared independence. It took another sixty years before Charles Bonnet and his Swiss team, working from 1977 to 2003, proved him wrong. Kerma was not Egyptian. It was Nubian. It was the capital of a sophisticated kingdom that traded with Egypt, rivaled it, and at its height controlled a stretch of the Nile as extensive as Egypt itself.

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Image: Iry-Hor | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kerma culture: Older Than the Pharaohs

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The roots of Kerma run back to the pre-Kerma culture of Upper Nubia, around 3500 BC. That earlier phase gave rise to small statelets - fewer, but larger, than the polities of the A-Group culture to the north in Lower Nubia. Kerma itself emerged around 2500 BC and flourished until...

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Image: Public domain

Kerma culture: Kingdom at the Cataracts

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lassi, CC BY-SA 4.0. Kerma controlled the Nile from the First Cataract to the Fourth - a domain as extensive as ancient Egypt's. During the Egyptian 13th Dynasty and the Second Intermediate Period, when central Egyptian authority weakened, Kerma expanded and pressed against Egypt's southern border. E...

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Image: Lassi | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kerma culture: Blue Faience, Animistic Gods

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Iry-Hor, CC BY-SA 3.0. Kerman artisans worked in blue faience - developing their own techniques, independent of Egypt's - and in glazed quartzite and architectural inlays. The daggers of bone and copper excavated from royal burials, now in the British Museum, were made between about 1750 and 1450 BC; n...

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Image: Iry-Hor | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kerma culture: Conquest and Memory

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Iry-Hor, CC BY-SA 3.0. Around 1500 BC, Pharaoh Thutmose I of Egypt's New Kingdom launched a series of campaigns south, destroying Kerma as a political center. The armies of Thutmose I took Doukki Gel. The southern frontier of Egypt was pushed to Kanisah Kurgus, south of the Fourth Cataract. Rebellions ...

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Image: Iry-Hor | CC BY-SA 3.0