THE NAPATAN ROYAL TOMBS

The El-Kurru site served as necropolis well before the arrival of the Black Pharaohs. It is not well known who was buried there since the th century before our era. Probably local sovereigns who liked to surround themselves with animals in their last homes, especially horses. The successors of Taharqa, a great pharaoh of the xxv dynasty, instituted the use of the pyramid in El-Kurru which they chose as a place of eternal rest in the middle of the th century BC.

And it is Tanwetamani (or Tantamani), a nephew and direct successor of Taharqa, who welcomes you in the first of the two graves accessible to the public. For 20 SDG, the ghaffir (useless to jump to jump, you have to find it because it has the keys) takes you into a large staircase that plunges into the sands to the grave of the sovereign. Inside is described its initiation path to the beyond. Under the benevolent gaze of Amun and the two sisters Isis and Nephtys, he joins the world of the dead on the sacred solar boat, under a sky filled with stars. The blue of this sky, like the ochre of characters and the other colours used for animals and motifs, remains bright despite its age.

It is long since the host of these places left them. Perhaps he found his room too wet… indeed, we noticed that the bottom of the frescoes disappeared over a good meter. In the 1910 s, the British archaeologists'team to explore the area had the light to leave open the graves it had just discovered. The region is very dry, and even if the Nile is several hundred metres, this great river is also known for its floods. One of them came very soon after the departure of the negligent archaeologists. There are more than a dozen tombs in El-Kurru, but only two still have paintings, despite all magnificent paintings.

The second falls to the mother of Tanwetamani, Qalhata. On the walls, Horus and Anubis join the casting. Here the grave seems better preserved. Yet all that remains of Qalhata is the bases of his sarcophagus and the representation of his mummy on the wall. The quality of the paintings and the strangeness of the atmosphere relative to the surface are surprising.

If you have time, you can know that a petrified forest is also visible further in the desert. Otherwise, the edges of the Nile are always conducive to reverie.