A Meroitic Grave Stele from Ambikol Island in the Batn al-Hajar

The scale of Meroitic settlement within the Batn al-Hajar seems to have been relatively limited, with only a few settlements between Gemai, at the south end of the Second Cataract, and the Dal cataract. The largest of these may have been at Tila island, c. 6 km south of Semna, with perhaps another one somewhere around Semna, where there were two large Meroitic cemeteries. Some 30 other Meroitic cemeteries have been identified within the region, and test excavations at most of these during the Archaeological Survey of Sudanese Nubia (ASSN) of 1963-1969. This work confirmed the presence of a small number of larger cemeteries at Gemai [Cemetery 100], Murshid [11-I-7], Semna [16-E-15, 16-J-3] and Dal East [21-V-6], the others were all quite small, with an average of no more than 20 graves (Edwards 1996). A small cluster of other Meroitic cemeteries, including one large site [21-N-15] was identified on the east bank in the Ukma/Akasha area (Maystre 1996). The large multi-period cemetery [21-N-13], mainly of post-Meroitic (X-Group) and medieval date, a cluster of early Meroitic graves, likely of similar date to examples excavated at Amir Abdallah near Abri are notable as one of the few sites of this date so far identifiable in northern Nubia (Fernandez 1983; 2018). The third site [21-N-16] comprised only a handful of robbed graves.