Tombos (Nubia)

Tombos or Tumbus is an archaeological site and an island in northern Sudan. The village and the island are located at the third cataract of the Nile, not far from Kerma near the present Karmah.

Tombos

Unfinished statue of a Kushite king, likely Atlanersa, in the quarries near Tombos
Shown within Sudan
Location	Sudan
Region	Nubia
Type	Settlement
Site notes
Condition	In ruins
Website	tombos.org

Drawing of Horus and Maat

Stela of Merymose adoring the cartouche of Amenhotep III

A large range of pharaonic and private rock inscriptions were carved at Tombos during the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt when the site marked an important boundary between Nubian and Egyptian interaction.[1][2][3]

An important black granite quarry was located at Tombos in the pharaonic era. Its stone was used mostly to build statues and buildings between the river delta and the southern regions of the kingdom. Its most prominent feature is a statue of a pharaoh of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty of Egypt, abandoned for over 2700 years.[4]

In 1991 a survey of the University of Khartoum revealed the remains of an important Egyptian colonial cemetery of New Kingdom date. In 2000, Stuart Tyson Smith of the University of California, Santa Barbara and his team excavated the remains of a pyramid more than 3,500 years old, and the buried remains of an Egyptian colonial administrator named Siamun and his mother, Weren. The two intact mummies were buried with ushabti figurines, a boomerang, and painted Mycenaean terracotta.[5] The burial chamber includes a series of rooms, some plundered by thieves, while others were undisturbed in whole or in part. Also, an epigraphic survey by the British Museum uncovered pharaonic rock-inscriptions.