Our team wanted to understand how the ancient city interacted with the Nile and how that relationship developed through time as climate and the local environment shifted. Our recent study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at how the Nile channel and floodplain and Jebel Barkal evolved over centuries.

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The cores our team drilled show that the city grew during a time of abundant rains and productive, predictable Nile flooding that provided fertile soil for agriculture. It doesn’t look like local climate change is the reason Jebel Barkal eventually went into decline. Our results show, first of all, that there had been an ancient Nile channel close to Jebel Barkal, but more like 10,000 years ago – millennia before the people of Kush built their city here. By the time the site was first occupied around 2000 B.C.E., that channel had long since filled in. So we still don’t know for sure how the people of Jebel Barkal got their water, but it’s clear that the Nile wasn’t running right next to the city.

Our scientific results lend new weight to an inscription of the ancient Kushite king Taharqo, who ruled over both Nubia and Egypt from about 690-664 BCE. It records a gentle and particularly abundant flood in the sixth year of his reign.

“When the time for the rising of the Inundation came, it continued rising greatly each day and it passed many days rising at the rate of one cubit every day.

"It penetrated the hills of South-land, it overtopped the mounds of North-land, and the land was (again) Primeval Waters, an inert (expanse), without land being distinguishable from river.

"Every man of Nubia was inundated with an abundance of everything, Egypt was in beautiful festival, and they thanked the god Amun for His Majesty.” This research has been particularly satisfying for me because it helps build a richer picture of life in ancient Sudan, comparable in depth and detail to what we know about other ancient civilizations.