Qualla: Tombos (Nubia)

Tombos (Nubia): Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Clemens Schmillen, CC BY-SA 4.0. At Tombos, a young Nubian woman was buried in an Egyptian-style chamber tomb with three amulets of the Egyptian household god Bes around her neck. Her body lay in the Nubian flexed position - on her right side, head toward the east. The pottery in her tomb was mostly Egyptian. Her ornaments mixed Egyptian amulets with Nubian ivory bracelets and earrings. Three thousand five hundred years after her death, archaeologists found her in the middle of an ongoing argument about what Egyptian rule did to Nubia during the New Kingdom. Her body, in its awkward, mixed-tradition burial, answers that argument the most honestly: it was complicated.

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Image: Clemens Schmillen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tombos (Nubia): A Node of Empire

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. Tombos sits at the Third Cataract of the Nile, on the northern edge of the Dongola Reach, not far from Kerma. It includes Tombos island and the riverbank area around it. Archaeological work has shown occupation beginning in the mid-18th Dynasty of Egypt and continuing through the...

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

Tombos (Nubia): The Viceroy's Inscription

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karl Richard Lepsius (1810-84), Public domain. One of the earliest inscriptions at Tombos was left by an Egyptian viceroy named either Inebny or Amenemnekhu, carved on the northern side of a low granite boulder near the river bank during the 20th year of Thutmose III's reign. The text records the viceroy's achievements in del...

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Image: Karl Richard Lepsius (1810-84) | Public domain

Tombos (Nubia): Who Was Buried Under the Pyramids

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Zunkir, CC BY-SA 4.0. The New Kingdom cemetery at Tombos had two kinds of tombs. Elite pyramid monuments clustered in the southwestern area; underground chamber tombs for the less wealthy clustered to the north. Three elite tombs from the mid-18th Dynasty can be linked to named individuals through fun...

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Image: Zunkir | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tombos (Nubia): Diplomacy, and the Bodies It Still Marked

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peppe64, CC BY-SA 3.0. The skeletal evidence from Tombos tells a specific story about Egyptian colonial policy. During the New Kingdom, injury rates at Tombos were lower than at nearby Kerma, where direct military conflict had been the Egyptian approach during the earlier Middle Kingdom. Egypt had shif...

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Image: Peppe64 | CC BY-SA 3.0