The place in fact was a sort of appanage of the priests of Amen at Thebes, and when the last priest-king evacuated Thebes, leaving it to the Bubastites of the XXIId Dynasty, it was to distant Napata that he retired.  Here a priestly dynasty continued to reign until, two centuries later, the troubles and misfortunes of Egypt seemed to afford an opportunity for the reassertion of the exiled Theban power.  Piankhi Mera-men returned to Egypt in triumph as its rightful sovereign, but his successors, Shabak, Shabatak, and Tirha-kah, had to contend constantly with the Assyrians.  Finally ITrdamaneh, Tirhakah’s successor, returned to Nubia, leaving Egypt, in the decadence of the Assyrian might, free to lead a quiet existence under Psametik I and the succeeding monarchs of the XXVIth Dynasty.  When Cambyses conquered Egypt he aspired to conquer Nubia also, but his army was routed and destroyed by the Napatan king, who tells us in an inscription how he defeated “the man Kambasauden,” who had attacked him.  At Napata the Nubian monarchs, one of the greatest of whom in Ptolemaic times was Ergam-enes, a contemporary of Ptolemy Philopator, continued to reign.  But the first Roman governor of Egypt, AElius Gallus, destroyed Napata, and the Nubians removed their capital to Meroe, where the Candaces reigned.

The monuments of this Nubian kingdom, the temples of Jebel Barkal, the pyramids of Nure close by, the pyramids of Bagarawiya, the temples of Wadi Ben Naga, Mesawwarat en-Naga, and Mesawwarat es-Sufra ("Mesawwarat” proper), were originally investigated by Cailliaud and afterwards by Lepsius.  During the last few years they and the pyramids excavated by Dr. E. A. Wallis-Budge, of the British Museum, for the Sudan government, have been again explored.  As the results of his work are not yet fully published, it is possible at present only to quote the following description from Cook’s Handbook for Egypt and the Sudan (by Dr. Budge), p. 6, of work on the pyramids of Jebel Barkal:  “the writer excavated the shafts of one of the pyramids here in 1897, and at the depth of about twenty-five cubits found a group of three chambers, in one of which were a number of bones of the sheep which was sacrificed there about two thousand years ago, and also portions of a broken amphora which had held Rho-dian wine.  A second shaft, which led to the mummy-chamber, was partly emptied, but at a further depth of twenty cubits water was found.  The high-water mark of the reservoir when full is ------ and, as there were no visible means for pumping it out, the mummy-chamber could not be entered.”  With regard to the Bagarawiya pyramids, Dr. Budge writes, on p. 700 of the same work, a propos of the story of the Italian Ferlini that he found Roman jewelry in one of these pyramids:  “In 1903 the writer excavated a number of the pyramids of Meroe for the Governor-General of the Sudan, Sir F. R. Wingate, and he is convinced that the statements made by Ferlini are the result of misapprehension on his part.  The pyramids are solid throughout, and the bodies are buried under them.  When the details are complete the proofs for this will be published.”  Dr. Budge has also written upon the subject of the orientation of the Jebel Barkal and Nure pyramids.