The pyramids of Meroe and Dr. Ferlini
Dr. Giuseppe Ferlini was that italian-doctor who, having arrived in Meroe following a group of Egyptian soldiers in 1830, set about the frenzied, systematic dismantled and subsequent destruct the Pyramids and the necropolis. He sought to seize fabulous treasures that he believed should have been hidden there. Not only did he not find what he was looking for, but he also had to return to Italy on the run due to the violent protests of the local population.
The tradition of the immense treasures of the kingdom of Kush, the Ethiopian king who started the Nubian dynasty is well known, but it refers to the wealth of the country, which at the time had gold mines, precious metals and valuable timber. Precisely because of the exploitation of these natural assets, relations between Egyptians and Nubians were, from as early as 1,000 B.C. quite tense, with constant clashes. It was only in the New Kingdom that Egypt was able to annex Nubia and the city of Napata developed. Later, in the Late Kingdom, the situation was reversed and, with the XXV dynasty of the "Ethiopian Pharaohs" (which it would be more correct to call Nubians), Napata became, from 751 to 656 B.C., the capital of Egypt.
Then, with the Assyrian invasion and all the infighting that plagued Egypt, Nubia became independent again, and the capital of the kingdom, around 400 B.C., was moved further south, precisely to Meroe, just north of Khartoum, in the middle of the desert (one wonders, even today, the reasons for this choice! Still today, to reach the city, one has to use an off-road vehicle).
In this period, Egyptian culture, partly because of the important presence of priests who fled from Thebes and brought first to Napata and then to Meroe the cult of Ammon, merged with the local culture. A statue, dedicated to the Kushite god Apemedek, who has three heads and four arms while being worshiped by the royal family, can still be seen in the Meroe necropolis.
The Meroitic kingdom, surviving the Roman invasion of Egypt, lasted until about A.D. 350, and a queen, Shanadakhete (ca. 160 A.D.), stood out among its rulers.
The pyramids of Meroe - called "tarabil" by the locals - are about fifty, of which about twenty are still in good condition, scattered throughout an area that also numbers a number of other relics, such as temples, statues, etc. These pyramids, much smaller than the Egyptian ones and of different proportions between base and height, are, in this case, really funerary monuments and tower above a hypogeum in which the king's tomb is located. In some of them, as in No. 11, and in the ruins of the temples, inscriptions in Egyptian hieroglyphic can be seen.
The Meroitic kingdom came to an end when it was invaded by the Ethiopians from Axum, and the mixing of the different idioms gave rise to the Coptic language. Knowledge of this was crucial for Champollion who, on its basis-as well as on the Rosetta Stone-was finally able to decipher hieroglyphic.
