We have known about a palace of the Napatan period at Barkal since Reisner’s excavations of 1916-1920. The palace was in use from about 800 – 300 BCE and would have been the royal residence of king Piankhy, who conquered Egypt in around 720 BCE, among others. Reisner did not do a good job of disentangling the various levels of the palace in his excavations, but Tim Kendall made some significant steps in understanding the building in a series of articles from 1991 to 2012, including magnetometry and new excavation done with Pawel Wolf.
Our GPR survey in 2022 confirmed that there seemed to be a section of the palace that had never been excavated by Reisner, and this year we have cleared off a very thin surface layer to uncover a wide wall that seems to be the outer eastern wall of the palace.
This photo shows a lot! The outer wall of the palace is over 4 meters wide (there is a part that’s better defined to the left, and a part not yet so well defined to the right). There is a later re-use of the area on the left of the photo, where a row of cooking pots and a brick bench show that the area outside the palace was later used for cooking. The scale of this architecture and even the size of the bricks are quite different from what we are excavating on the East Mound–it belongs to an earlier period, but also to an elite context.
Surface cleaning of the palace walls is a first step to a longer-term project of clearing more of the palace and its surroundings. We will begin looking for funding for this project when we return from this field season!
This work has been done by Pawel Wolf and Kate Rose, with Saskia Büchner-Matthews looking at the pottery.
