Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

The remains at Sanam represent a royal town site of the mid-first millennium BCE, an important center of the Early and Middle Napatan Period Kushite kings (defined here as encompassing the reigns of the kings Piankhy to Aspelta, c. 750 BCE – 580 BCE). Comprising a temple, royal administrative buildings (often called the “Treasury”), and a cemetery, Sanam is a valuable source of occupational and non-royal data in Nubian archaeology, a field in which royal cemeteries have been over-represented in the record. Nevertheless, the site’s importance has not often been recognized thanks to its early, poorly-recorded, and poorly-published excavation by Francis Llewellyn Griffith in 1912. Recent excavations and new analyses of Griffith’s archival data demonstrate Sanam’s potential to reveal the importance of Kush’s position in the wider Iron Age Mediterranean world, and to intervene in debates on cultural entanglement and hybridity.