Qualla: Kerma

Kerma: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jac Strijbos8, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Western Deffufa looks, from a distance, like an enormous earthen block - a battered rectangle of mud brick rising eighteen meters above the flat plain of the Nile. It is the biggest single surviving mud-brick structure in sub-Saharan Africa, and it was built after 1750 BC, probably as the central temple of a city whose population had just passed 10,000. That city was Kerma, capital of one of Africa's first urban civilizations. Walk the grounds today and you are walking over at least 4,000 years of continuous occupation, from the first hunter-gatherers who settled here around 8350 BC to the cattle-herding kingdoms that built the Deffufa and the royal tombs beyond it.

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Image: Jac Strijbos8 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kerma: Fields That Became a City

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MustafaO, CC BY-SA 4.0. The locale was first settled around 8350 BC, during the Mesolithic. Twice the site was mostly abandoned - between 5550 and 5150 BC, and again between 4050 and 3450 BC - likely because flow in the Nile weakened during those stretches, particularly from the White Nile headwaters. A...

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Image: MustafaO | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kerma: Thirty Thousand Graves

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Iry-Hor, CC BY-SA 3.0. The cemetery at Kerma contains over 30,000 graves. It extends for kilometers south of the city, and reveals a strikingly organized social hierarchy: larger graves ringed by smaller ones, as if retainers were arrayed around their lords even in death. The four largest burial mounds...

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Image: Iry-Hor | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kerma: Reisner's Error, Bonnet's Correction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tumbler12, CC0. The early 20th-century excavations at Kerma were led by George Reisner, an American archaeologist with joint Harvard and Boston Museum of Fine Arts appointments. His Harvard-Boston expedition ran three field seasons from 1913 to 1916. Reisner established the basic chronology of K...

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Image: Tumbler12 | CC0

Kerma: The Cache at Dukki Gel

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jac Strijbos8, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 2003, at Dukki Gel less than a kilometer south of Kerma, Bonnet's team made one of the most dramatic archaeological finds of the new century: a pit containing seven deliberately smashed black granite statues of 25th Dynasty pharaohs, buried in antiquity. The statues - of Tahar...

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Image: Jac Strijbos8 | CC BY-SA 3.0