Old Dongola

Photographs by Agata Deptuła. Room U192 at Old Dongola, showing burnt seeds preserved in their excavated contexts. Complete image reproduced unchanged from figure 4, Nasreldein and colleagues (2025). CC BY 4.0. The cover shows Old Dongola, not Amara West. At Amara West, a house became two homes. Archaeologists could follow the earlier building beneath the later arrangement: house E13.3 had been divided into E13.3-N and E13.3-S. The change required new front doors and a staircase, giving the smaller dwellings their own access to the street and roof. Someone had done more than put up a partition. They had changed how people could enter, move through and use the place. Neal Spencer’s excavation account ...

Photographs by Lorenzo de Lellis. Grinding equipment at Old Dongola, reproduced unchanged from figure 7, Nasreldein and colleagues. CC BY 4.0. The most revealing object in an archaeological display is not always the most beautiful one. A grinding stone can ask a question that a royal monument cannot answer: what work did an ordinary morning require? A storage jar can bring a household into view. A floor, seemingly empty, may still preserve traces of what happened above it. ...

Landscape with graves and ruins at Old Dongola, 18 March 2017. Context photograph; it does not show Qashqash’s letter or identify the House of the Mekk. Photograph: Hans Birger Nilsen. Source · CC BY-SA 2.0. Resized and recompressed without cropping or colour changes. A king needs someone to collect a ewe and her offspring. He needs goods handed over to the right people, and he wants the matter completed promptly. Across a small sheet of paper from Old Dongola, authority appears as a chain of practical instructions: receive, give, collect, deliver. ...

Conceptual illustration generated with OpenAI for Kandaka, 2026. It juxtaposes Meroitic Karanog and medieval Old Dongola; the sites did not share this landscape or moment. Architecture and ceremonial details are imaginative, not an archaeological reconstruction. One monument lies beneath a reservoir. The other survives as a building whose name still carries a question. Karanog was a Kushite settlement in Lower Nubia, on the west bank of the Nile near Aniba and Qasr Ibrim, in what is now southern Egypt. Its cemetery yielded nearly eight hundred excavated graves, Meroitic inscriptions, painted pottery, carved stone figures, textiles, glass, bronze and woodwork. The landscape was later submerged by the reservoir created by the Aswan High Dam.1 ...