Human Origins / Archaeology

Anthropologist William Y. Adams, a professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky and a respected world figure in Nubiology, thinks Kendall has yet to collect enough empirical evidence to fully support his "interpretation of the mountain and its symbolism." But he credits Kendall with helping to give renewed respectability to the study of ancient Nubia, which European and American scholars once treated as little more than a footnote to the study of ancient Egypt.

The ancient Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote that Nubia was the original home of the Egyptians and the fountainhead of civilization. He called them Aethiopies, "the burned-face ones," because they were said to be Earth's firstborn and thus stood closest to the sun. "The Greeks and Romans romanticized the Nubians as a people living in a pure state," Kendall says. Egyptian conquest texts, on the other hand, seldom refer to Nubia without describing it as "wretched," and when Nubians appear in tomb reliefs they are usually being led in shackles or bearing tribute to the pharaohs. Tutankhamen symbolized his hold on the detestable hinterlands by carrying ceremonial staffs and canes whose handles were fashioned in the form of Nubians, their arms bound behind their backs. He ordered that Nubian figures be embroidered on the soles of his slippers and carved on the legs of his footstools so that he could perpetually trample them.

As 19th-century archaeologists came to rely more and more on Egypt's propagandistic texts, they turned away from classical histories. "The ancient Egyptian attitude towards Nubia took root in their minds, until by the end of the century it had entirely supplanted the old notion of Nubia as the well-spring of civilization," Adams writes in Nubia: Corridor to Africa. "Something of the same attitude is conveyed in the nineteenth-century term 'Darkest Africa.' African darkness, as the Victorians conceived it, was more than a matter of skin colour; it was a darkness of the mind as well."

Kendall first visited Napata in 1982, during a tour of Nubian archaeological sites sponsored by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he worked as an assistant curator. The museum boasts one of the world's most comprehensive collections of Nubian artifacts and antiquities outside of Khartoum, Sudan's capital. Most of it came to Boston via rail and sea during the post–World War I years, when the godfather of Nubian archaeology, Harvard University Egyptologist George Reisner, excavated at Napata and other sites in Sudan. Working with his trusted excavators from Egypt and a crew of 300 local men, Reisner had laid tracks around Jebel Barkal for dump carts and moved tons of earth before turning to the more delicate work of exposing the temple ruins. For all of his discoveries, however, Reisner missed plenty.

A British expeditionary group subsequently scanned the pinnacle's summit through binoculars and made out traces of hieroglyphic inscriptions but didn't hazard a guess about how the inscriptions got there. The spot is nearly 250 feet above the desert floor, straight up. Kendall discovered how in 1987, when he enlisted a mountaineer from Boston to help him scale the monolith. On the way up, he found sockets chiseled into the back side of the spire and, directly opposite on the cliff face, a series of corresponding holes. He realized then that ancient stonemasons had erected a scaffold of wooden beams in the gap between the cliff and the pinnacle, probably hoisted into place by means of a pair of shadufs, long, counterbalanced poles that some farmers along the Nile still use to lift water to their fields. At the summit Kendall found cartouches of the black pharaoh Taharqa, as well as six panels of hieroglyphs etched in a place where no one—except the gods—could read them. Long ago, he believes, the panels were covered with gold leaf, which would have reflected the sun, creating a dazzling landmark for approaching caravans.

Kendall, now a visiting research professor at Northeastern University in Boston, has maintained Reisner's old excavating concession through two civil wars: the recently settled 20-year-long conflict in the south between Sudan's Islamic fundamentalist government and the rebels, and the ongoing genocide in the western Darfur region. Fortunately, Jebel Barkal, located some 200 miles north of Khartoum, is far from those hot spots. But the area is under a siege of a different type. "When I first came here, there were no paved roads and no telephone service," Kendall says. "Now there's an Internet café, and everybody has a cell phone."

Within a year or two, continuous pavement will extend from Khartoum to a section of the Nile just 25 miles east of Napata, where a consortium of Arab nations, Sudan, and China is building a hydroelectric dam that will approximately double Sudan's power supply and irrigate now-parched lands. The dam is not likely to directly affect the ruins at Jebel Barkal, but its reservoir will submerge ancient settlements, unexcavated graves, rock-art sites, and fortresses for a hundred miles upstream. Sudan's antiquities department has urgently enlisted teams of archaeologists from around the world to document those sites before the dam's expected completion in 2008, after which the ruins will be lost forever.

In the meantime, Kendall hopes that he's on the verge of completing his decadelong quest to uncover the lost coronation temple, perhaps as early as next spring. In 1997 he realized that he'd barely scratched the surface at Jebel Barkal when his men dug up 30 blocks inscribed with sacred vultures flying against a starry sky—part of a vaulted passage into a freestanding coronation temple built around the time of Christ to replace the rock-cut original. Then, five years ago, his search gained momentum after six sandstone building blocks of Egyptian design turned up beneath the overburden of earthquake rubble. The blocks were cemented together in a row that extended back toward the mountain's towering cliff face and pinnacle. His local diggers have since been using hand tools to crack apart massive boulders and nibble away at the debris beneath them, removing it bucketful by bucketful, a tedious process. This year they succeeded in breaking apart several car-size boulders on top of the earthquake debris—only to find more boulders below.

We can only guess what might be inside the rock-cut chamber," Kendall says. "It may contain ritual objects, statues, textiles, wall paintings, and inscriptions." But he has no doubt he is looking for it in the right place—directly beneath Jebel Barkal's pinnacle. After a short walk from the temple of Amun, Kendall and I are standing amid the ruins of a forlorn palace. In Napata's heyday, the palace had been a two-story labyrinth of some 60 rooms, but time and the elements had since reduced its crumbling mud-brick walls virtually to ground level.

In 1919 Reisner dug deep into the palace ruins and identified four or perhaps five occupation levels, one superimposed atop another. On a level dated to around 600 B.C., he encountered quantities of charred plaster and burned timbers. By that point in history, the Nubians had been expelled from Egypt but still had pretensions to the crown. To squelch their ambitions, the pharaoh Psammeticus II marched south in 593 B.C., descended on Napata, and torched the palace and the Amun temple.

Before Reisner left the palace, he took careful note of a doorway from the throne room into a corridor that led to the palace's rear exit. A fragmentary inscription on the doorjambs reads, in part, "One goes out to the Per-wer [Great House]. . . . One enters the Per-nesr [House of Flame]. . . . " He photographed the jambs but otherwise found them unremarkable.

Seven decades later, Reisner's unpublished notes and photos turned up in a storage room at the Boston museum. That turned out to be a great stroke of luck for Kendall because when he re-excavated the palace, he found that the doorjambs had collapsed, and their inscriptions were unreadable. Still, the hieroglyphic characters appeared clearly in Reisner's photographs, and Kendall concluded that they referred to the coronation in 600 B.C. of the Nubian king Aspelta."We know from a 14th-century B.C.  Egyptian coronation text that the Great House is where the king received his crown from a goddess called Weret-Hekau, whose name means 'Great of Magic,' " says Kendall. "Once she put the crown on his head, he was ushered into a temple called the House of Flame to receive the approval of the gods."

Kendall guides me down the corridor toward the palace's back door, the same path the crown prince Aspelta might have taken during the ancient and richly choreographed coronation ceremony that Kendall envisions. A priestly stand-in for Amun might have led the procession, while the prince's mother might have played the role of an attendant goddess.

They would have been following long-established Egyptian coronation rituals in which Amun, "Lord of the Thrones of Two Lands," led the prince to the Great House to receive his crown. But since the earthquake had sealed off the Egyptian rock-cut original, the Nubian rulers had rebuilt it as a freestanding temple in front of the mountain. Kendall has found remains of this temple, as well as sketchy evidence of a secret corridor at the rear of the temple that would have allowed the black pharaohs to maintain the Egyptian tradition of entering the mountain. 

"In Napatan times and later," he says, "the king first went into the Great House, just as he had done during the Egyptian era, and there received his crown. Then, using a private passage, he would have crossed over to the Mut temple. Once inside the mountain he would have united with his 'mother,' Mut, who symbolically gave birth to him as her child. At this point the king became the newborn god." After receiving the acclamation of the gods assembled in the Mut temple, the newly crowned pharaoh would have stepped outside to greet his subjects.

Many centuries later we follow in their imagined footsteps, walking down a palace corridor that is barely an outline in the sand. When Kendall and I reach the end, we turn toward the mountain and pass through the remains of a door to the outside.

"What do you see straight ahead?" Kendall asks.

The portal is aimed straight at the pinnacle.

In  his gut, Kendall knows there is a lost temple at the base of the pinnacle. If he has accomplished anything at Jebel Barkal, it is to think like an Egyptian, to see what they did in the sacred mountain.

"I would find it hard to believe that there won't be an Egyptian temple cut into the uraeus of the mountain," he says. "It would be wonderful visible proof that the Egyptian kings were being crowned at Jebel Barkal and leave less room for doubt."

In the meantime, at 60, Kendall is thinking ahead to his final challenge at Jebel Barkal: proving his theory that the Nubians worshipped the mountain long before the Egyptians even knew the mountain existed. "That's one of the missing links in Nubian archaeology," he says. "I hope to dig in front of the pinnacle and find pre-Egyptian deposits that show there was already a cult here when Thutmose arrived."