Meroë: the Kushite capital, its pyramids, and a script we can read but not understand

After the kings of Kush lost Egypt in the 7th century BCE, their kingdom continued for roughly another thousand years in what is now Sudan. From around the 3rd century BCE the royal burials moved from Napata to Meroë, on the east bank of the Nile north of modern Khartoum. The pyramids The Meroë cemeteries hold around two hundred pyramids, more than are found at the famous Egyptian sites. They are smaller and steeper than the Old Kingdom pyramids at Giza, built over burial chambers, with small chapels on the east side. Many were damaged in the 1830s by the treasure hunter Giuseppe Ferlini, who decapitated several looking for gold. The site is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 2011 as the Archaeological Sites of the Island of Meroë. The kandakes Meroë is known for its ruling queens. The title kandake (Latinised as candace) appears in Greek and Roman sources, including the Acts of the Apostles and Strabo's account of a Kushite war with Rome in the 20s BCE led by a one-eyed queen. The script Meroitic was written in two scripts: a hieroglyphic form for monuments and a cursive form for everyday use. In 1909 the Egyptologist F. Ll. Griffith worked out the sound values of the signs, so Meroitic texts can be read aloud. The language itself is still only partly understood, because there is no long bilingual text and its relationship to other languages is debated. We can pronounce it and understand only scattered words and formulas. Where to go next - Make/Type, Scripts & Symbols board: for getting the glyphs right in graphics. - Ancient History: Piye's Victory Stela thread, for the dynasty before Meroë. Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mero%C3%AB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meroitic_script https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1336