Say pyramids and everyone pictures Egypt, but the country with the most of them lies to its south: Sudan holds well over two hundred pyramids, roughly twice Egypt’s tally, though they are smaller, steeper and far less visited

Ask most people to picture a pyramid and you get Giza: the broad golden slopes, the camels and the Sphinx. What you almost never get is Sudan, which sits directly to Egypt’s south and contains one of the greatest concentrations of pyramids anywhere on Earth.

The exact totals depend on what researchers count and how badly a structure has deteriorated. A survey by archaeologist Friedrich Hinkel found evidence for more than 220 pyramid structures in Sudan’s six major Kushite royal cemeteries alone, without including other structures such as mastabas.

Egypt’s total is harder to pin down. Egyptologist David Lightbody told Live Science that the often-cited figure of 118 was “probably in the right ballpark,” although scholars differ over which structures should count as pyramids.

That makes the familiar comparison broadly true: Sudan has substantially more ancient pyramids than Egypt, even if the precise ratio is less certain than the headlines suggest. Mahmoud Suliman, the archaeologist and site manager at Meroë, described the complex to National Geographic as “the biggest congregation of pyramids in the world.”

Who actually built them

The Sudanese pyramids were not built by Egyptian colonists. They belong to the Kingdom of Kush, a Nubian civilization centred along the middle Nile. The Kushite state existed in different forms for centuries, while Meroë became the heartland of a kingdom that flourished from roughly the eighth century BC to the fourth century AD.

Kush was no minor state lingering at Egypt’s edge. During the eighth century BC, its rulers expanded north into Egypt. Kushite control began in Upper Egypt and eventually extended across the country. The British Museum notes that they conquered Egypt in the eighth century BC and ruled it for more than a century.

They are sometimes called the Black Pharaohs, but the Kushite takeover of Egypt should not be imagined as a single conquest neatly completed in 747 BC. Piye, whose reign is conventionally dated to about 747–716 BC, brought much of Egypt under Kushite control. After his death, his successor Shabaka reconquered Egypt and established himself as ruler of the entire country. 

What strikes me most is the timing. Egypt’s great age of royal pyramid construction had passed long before this: the Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that Egyptian pyramid building reached its height during the early Fourth Dynasty, around the middle of the third millennium BC. By the New Kingdom, beginning around 1550 BC, pharaohs were being buried in enormous rock-cut tombs, including those associated with the Valley of the Kings.

Centuries later, Kushite rulers returned to Nubia for burial in pyramid-shaped tombs. Piye was buried beneath a pyramid at El-Kurru around 716 BC, and the British Museum records that his successors continued to be buried beneath small, steep-sided pyramids at El-Kurru, Nuri, Jebel Barkal and Meroë until the fourth century AD.

Steeper, smaller, stranger

If you stood in front of a Meroitic pyramid, the difference from Giza would be immediate. The Sudanese structures have narrow bases and sides that climb sharply toward the top. A study of the Meroë pyramids found that their inclination ranges from about 68 to 81 degrees, compared with less than 52 degrees for the best-known Egyptian pyramids.

That visual signature is hard to miss. They resemble narrow blades rising from the desert rather than the broad geometric mountains most people carry in their heads.

They are also much smaller. The same study gives typical Meroitic pyramid heights of about 10 to 30 metres, with bases approximately 4.5 to 17.5 metres across. The Great Pyramid of Giza originally stood about 147 metres high on a base measuring roughly 230 metres on each side.

What Sudan has instead of size is number. The royal cemeteries at Meroë consist of three main necropolises containing more than 1,000 graves. According to the German Archaeological Institute, about 150 of those graves have pyramid monuments. Other Kushite pyramids stand at Nuri, El-Kurru, Jebel Barkal and several smaller sites.

The Meroë complex itself forms part of the Archaeological Sites of the Island of Meroë, which UNESCO added to the World Heritage List in 2011. The listed property includes the Kushite royal city and its extensive pyramid cemeteries, together with the religious centres of Naqa and Musawwarat es-Sufra.

Why almost nobody goes

Giza became one of the most heavily visited archaeological landscapes in the world. Sudan’s pyramid fields received only a fraction of that attention even before the country’s present war. Their relative obscurity has modern causes: limited tourism infrastructure, political isolation, repeated conflict and the difficulty of travelling through remote stretches of the Sudanese desert.

The civil war has made the situation far worse. The British government currently advises against all travel to Sudan because of the ongoing military conflict.

The damage did not begin with the current war. Many Kushite pyramids were vulnerable because they were constructed with outer courses of stone surrounding cores of rubble and earth. Once their casing was breached, upper sections could collapse. Wind erosion, drifting sand, stone removal and treasure hunting caused further losses over centuries.

At Nuri, Hinkel recorded 57 royal pyramids built for Kushite kings and queens. Many now survive only as heavily eroded or partially collapsed ruins. Taharqo’s pyramid, probably once about 50 metres high, was the largest pyramid built in Sudan.

One of the most notorious episodes occurred in 1834, when the Italian adventurer Giuseppe Ferlini searched the Meroë cemeteries for treasure. He partly demolished several monuments and discovered gold jewellery associated with Queen Amanishakheto. UNESCO describes his activities as “very deleterious to some of the pyramids in the Meroe cemeteries.”

What fame actually tracks

I keep coming back to how little our mental map of the ancient world has to do with quantity, or even political importance. Sudan contains well over two hundred recorded Kushite pyramids, built by a civilization whose rulers once controlled Egypt, and yet Kush barely registers in the popular imagination.

The gap is probably not just about what was built. It is partly about access: which monuments European travellers photographed and wrote about, which countries developed mass tourism and which archaeological sites remained difficult or dangerous to reach. Egypt’s monuments became global icons while Sudan’s stood beyond the routes followed by most visitors.