A pile of broken beads, shells, and burnt workshop waste can reveal something much bigger than how ancient craftspeople worked. At Sanam Temple, it points to how a kingdom organized power—and who was allowed to share in it. Sanam Temple stood at the heart of Napata, the capital of the Kushite Empire.

Excavations there revealed a faience-production workshop from the middle of the seventh century BCE, with firing pits, mudbrick basins, beads, shells, and manufacturing waste. That evidence offers insight not only into how these objects were made and who could obtain them, but also into state control in Napatan Nubia.

The problem was that little was known about how the Napatan state organized production, or what role temples played in Nubia’s economy. The Sanam excavation identified a securely dated workshop and offered insight into Kushite state production and the temple’s economic role. Before this discovery, faience production at Sanam had been suggested by moulds, beads, and the local character of objects from the Napatan period, but the evidence was incomplete.

The workshop now provides conclusive evidence that faience was manufactured at Sanam, giving a glimpse of the making process and of how the Napatan state functioned. The workshop lay immediately outside the sandstone temple. The archaeological setting suggests that the temple controlled production, and that some objects were intended for exclusive royal consumption.

Its equipment included three circular firing pits connected with two mudbrick basins. The firing pits were connected with two mudbrick basins. As excavation expanded, the archaeologists uncovered more of the structures, including two additional firing pits and another basin.

A further extension exposed the entirety of the second basin. Around and inside the firing pits, production remains were embedded in layers of ash. The excavation recovered failed pieces, hundreds of blue, green, and white disk beads, and fragments of faience vessels.

Thousands of small shells were found with production waste and grinding stones; the shells could supply calcium carbonate for producing lime. You can see the contrast between a substantial jar rim and the tiny, varied beads, vessel pieces, and failed objects scattered below it.

Together, the evidence identifies Sanam Temple as a faience production centre and the first securely identified workshop for Kushite Nubia. Linking the new workshop with earlier finds helps clarify a political economy that included state-controlled production and restricted consumption of objects such as shabtis.

The Sanam evidence points to direct state control over obtaining raw materials, developing a local recipe, and manufacturing faience through temples. Some products made at Sanam were consumed exclusively by royalty, who established and maintained the temple.

That does not mean every faience object came from a state workshop. Evidence from Egypt shows that state and household workshops could exist together, and a household-linked workshop was also identified at Napatan Kerma. Non-state workshops likely supplied unrestricted objects to wider groups, while the Sanam Temple workshop focused on royal funerary production, as indicated by shabti manufacture.

The Sanam workshop suggests that royal institutions controlled materials, production, and access to some finished objects, turning craft into a way to separate social groups and strengthen central power. But household workshops may also have served wider communities.