The Harvard archaeologist had offhandedly-and inaccurately-dismissed the Kushite kings as racially inferior and their accomplishments as an inheritance of older Egyptian traditions. Reisner never published the results of his work (an associate cobbled what little was documented into a report published in 1955), and for almost a century Nuri was ignored. His field notes show that many of the tombs he encountered were already inundated with groundwater percolating from the nearby Nile, making traditional dirt excavation unsafe or impossible. Reisner’s team also mapped Nuri’s funerary monuments, which include more than 80 royal Kushite burials-roughly a quarter of which are topped with their sandstone pyramids. George Reisner, a Harvard Egyptologist, visited Nuri a century ago to excavate the burial chambers beneath Taharqa’s massive pyramid.įor more information and updates on archaeology at Nuri, visit the official expedition website at. rallied his troops to the northern edges of his empire to defend Jerusalem from the Assyrians, earning him a mention in the Old Testament.

The largest and oldest pyramid at Nuri belongs to its most famous resident: the pharaoh Taharqa, a Kushite king who in the seventh century B.C.

Treasures of the pharaohs