The site lies 170 kilometers northeast of Khartoum and 50 kilometers east of the Nile, far enough from the river to require camels or donkeys but close enough to matter. Smaller wadis converge here and feed north into the Wadi Awateib, which joins the Nile at Wad ban Naqa. In the time of the Meroitic kings, from roughly the fourth century BC to the fourth century AD, Naqa functioned as a strategic outpost, a place where caravans traveling east toward the Red Sea or across the Butana grasslands stopped to water their animals and worship. The Kushites built temples here for six centuries. What survives is one of the largest ruined sites in modern Sudan, a testament to a civilization that western histories have persistently underestimated.

West of the Amun temple stands the Temple of Apedemak, the lion-headed warrior god specific to Kushite religion. Apedemak was sacred guardian of the royal dead, and anyone who touched the grave of a chief was said to be cursed by him. The pylons at the temple entrance show King Natakamani on one side and Queen Amanitore on the other, both smiting enemies. The queen holds a sword. The king holds an axe. Below their raised arms lions wait to devour the prisoners underfoot. On the edges of the pylons, Apedemak appears in astonishing forms: as a snake rising from a lotus flower, as a three-headed figure, as a four-armed divinity. Inside, he shares wall space with Egyptian Amun and Horus. The Kushites saw no contradiction in worshipping both pantheons. They had their lion god, their own. They also had contacts with Egypt. Why would you not honor both?

King Natakamani, who ruled around the beginning of the Common Era, founded the Amun temple at Naqa, 100 meters in length with several colossal statues of himself. A second Amun temple on the slope of Gebel Naqa, the mountain overlooking the settlement, was begun by Amanikhareqerem in the second or third century AD. It has been under excavation since 2004. Nubian chronology here is deliberately uncertain, with finds often dating differently from inscriptions, and the archaeologists who work this site talk about our understanding of Meroitic rulers the way astronomers talk about dark matter: we know it is there, we know it shapes everything, and we cannot quite see it clearly yet.

Near the main temple sits a small structure known as the Roman Kiosk, one of the stranger objects in Sudanese archaeology. Its entrance is classically Egyptian, with a lintel crowned by a row of sacred uraeus cobras. But its sides consist of columns with florid Corinthian capitals and arched Roman-style windows, and the goddess Isis who features on its walls has absorbed some characteristics of Hathor. This was the Meroitic Kingdom in its later phase, still clearly Kushite in religion but aware of, and willing to borrow from, the Roman world that had absorbed Egypt to the north. The kiosk is small enough that three or four people can stand inside it comfortably. Its style has no exact parallel anywhere.

At the foot of the sandstone cliffs of Jabal Naqa stands the temple labeled simply 500, built by Queen Shanakdakhete around 135 BC. This makes it the oldest building here, and the inscriptions on its walls are the oldest known writings in the Meroitic hieroglyphic script, a system we can read phonetically but whose vocabulary remains largely mysterious. The temple was dedicated to the Theban triad of Amun, Mut, and Khonsu, and also to Apedemak. In 1834 the Italian treasure hunter Giuseppe Ferlini reached the pyramids at nearby Meroë and destroyed several in search of gold, a piece of archaeological vandalism whose effects the site still carries. Naqa was less heavily damaged. When UNESCO listed it in 2011 as part of the Island of Meroe World Heritage Site, with Meroë and Musawwarat, the Sudanese government finally had international support for the kind of protection this place deserved, and which the current war threatens again.