What can a pile of shells, failed beads, and a workshop beside a temple reveal about an ancient state? At Sanam, these ordinary production remains point to royal power, restricted consumption, and long-distance resource control. Sanam Temple lay in the heart of Napata, the capital of the Kushite Empire in the first millennium BCE.

Excavations from twenty eighteen to twenty twenty revealed a mid-seventh-century BCE faience-production workshop with three firing pits, two mudbrick basins, faience objects, beads, shells, and wasters in compacted ashy layers. That evidence provides insight into manufacturing techniques, restricted access to goods, and aspects of state control in Napatan Nubia.

In ancient Egypt, temples played a central role in state administration by receiving tax and managing land and other resources. Temples directly controlled workshops that manufactured items for use within the temple and for sale. Workshops manufacturing objects from various materials were also widespread within settlements, with New Kingdom sites such as Amarna and Piramesse offering some of the most complete evidence for urban production activities.

In Nubia, little was known about how the Napatan state organised production activities or what role temples played in the Nubian economy. The excavations at Sanam Temple broaden knowledge of the Napatan state and support comparative approaches to statecraft and political economy in ancient north-east Africa.

The temple contained the first securely identified faience-production workshop dating from the Middle Napatan Period, around seven hundred eighty to six hundred fifty-six BCE, offering insight into Kushite state production and the temple’s economic role in Nubia. Sanam Temple was built by King Taharqo at Napata, the capital of the Kushite Empire of the Napatan Period, in the Fourth Cataract area of the Nile in Sudan.

Earlier in the Napatan Period, King Piankhy had conquered Egypt, marking the commencement of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty. Taharqo, the penultimate Kushite king to rule both Egypt and Nubia, carried out a large programme of monumental building projects from the Nile delta in Egypt to Napata city in Sudan, with special emphasis at Karnak.

The map places Sanam and Abu Dom just south of the Fourth Cataract, along the Nile in Upper Nubia. Other marked sites—Kerma, Kawa, el-Kurru, and Nuri—show that the discussion spans a substantial stretch of the river, from the Third Cataract toward the Fifth.

In nineteen twelve, Francis Llewellyn Griffith carried out excavations at the site. Those excavations were limited by the standard techniques of the time and by a complete lack of knowledge of Nubia in the Napatan Period, because the royal tombs at el-Kurru and Nuri had not yet been excavated.

Because of those limits and Egyptology’s dominant narrative of Nile Valley history, Griffith’s interpretation of Sanam Temple’s significance was biased. His understanding of the Sanam Historical Inscription overlooked elements reflecting strong local traditions.

This evidence reveals complex entanglements between Egyptian and local cultural, religious, and political references, as well as the functioning of the state, where the temple played a central role. Previous interpretations overemphasised the alignment of the local state with Egyptian political and cultural references, often hypothesising that Egyptian administrative institutions were transferred to Nubia during the New Kingdom colonial period.

More recently, critiques of Egyptocentric interpretations have opened the way for more complex understandings of the Napatan state based on alternative, African-derived models of statehood. The passage cites Morkot, published in two thousand, at page two hundred fifty-seven, in connection with the period under discussion.

The excavations expand knowledge of how socioeconomic needs influence the adoption and adaptation of foreign political and cultural references. Faience production at Sanam had previously been hypothesised from moulds for shabtis and amulets excavated by Griffith in the early twentieth century.

Production had also been postulated from a few faience beads associated with a Napatan pottery workshop at Kerma, while preliminary analyses highlighted distinctive local characteristics in Napatan faience objects. The workshop now provides the first conclusive evidence that faience was manufactured at Sanam, revealing specific manufacturing processes and recipes as well as aspects of the Napatan state.

Although faience manufacture has been emphasised as a key element in the adoption of Egyptian culture in Napatan Nubia, the archaeological context of the Sanam workshop points to a greater complexity of interactions. That context supports rejecting views of Napatan Nubia as either a replication of Egyptian New Kingdom patterns or a product of local interactions disconnected from the wider north-east African setting.

Instead, Nubian archaeology is revealing a complex global setting to which Nubia contributed through local cultural repertoires and innovative potential. Excavations conducted from twenty eighteen to twenty twenty focused on areas inside the sandstone temple and outside the main temple building.

The fieldwork revealed the site’s vast archaeological potential, including stratified deposits, especially outside the temple precinct. Look to the northeast edge of the outlined temple complex, where the black arrow points to a small marked area near TR3. The figure places the faience workshop immediately outside the sandstone temple, rather than within the main cluster of white architectural outlines.

Four main excavation areas were opened outside the temple walls, and production areas were identified at the rear of the temple. Trench three revealed a faience-production workshop where beads, vessels, and shabtis were manufactured. Trench four revealed no structures but yielded similar compacted layers containing embedded faience beads.

Faience is a deliberately manufactured vitreous material made mainly from silica mixed with varying amounts of alkali and lime. Firing the paste at relatively low temperatures produces a glassy surface that binds the material together. Faience was valued for its bright, glossy appearance, most often in blue, green, or white.

In ancient Egypt, it was called ‘that which is brilliant,’ reflecting its shine and its role as a desirable material, as well as the social role faience played in Nubia. The Sanam Temple faience workshop was exposed in the north-east part of the site, immediately outside the sandstone temple.

The archaeological context suggests that the temple controlled faience production, with some items intended for exclusive royal consumption. The workshop comprised three originally circular firing pits. The three firing pits were connected with two mudbrick basins. A two-point-five by two-point-five metre trench first revealed part of firing pit one and basin one.

The excavation area later expanded into a five by five metre square, revealing further parts of the structures, two more firing pits, and another basin. A further two-point-five by two-point-five metre extension to the south-west revealed the entirety of basin two.

The orthophoto makes the spatial arrangement especially clear: firing pits one and two sit across the upper part of the excavation, while firing pit three lies to the lower left. Basin one occupies the central area, basin two runs along the southern edge, and collapsed mudbrick is visible between the two upper pits.

The firing pits are recognisable as depressions surrounded by ashy layers produced by continuous firing. The depressions are roughly circular or oval, although the edges of firing pit three have been damaged. Collapsed mudbrick between firing pits one and two could represent surviving edges or the superstructure of industrial-style kilns.

Industrial kilns were not required for faience manufacture, because the necessary temperatures, around nine hundred degrees Celsius, could be achieved in simple kitchen-style ovens. It remains unclear whether industrial kilns existed at Sanam or whether a removable cover was used on top of the firing pits.

The remains clearly identify a formal temple workshop, including firing remains and material culture. Production remains were embedded in ashy layers around and inside the firing pits. Excavations recovered wasters, hundreds of blue, green, and white faience disk beads, and fragments of faience vessels.

Thousands of small gastropod and bivalve shells were also excavated in the ashy layers with production waste and grindstones; the shells were a useful source of calcium carbonate for producing lime. The upper panel shows the jar sherd’s clearly articulated double-folded rim and ribbed profile, with the scale indicating a fragment several centimetres across.

In the lower panel, the finds are visibly diverse in colour, form, and size, including rings, fragments, and irregular production waste arranged against a black background. Sanam Temple was a faience production centre and the first workshop securely identified for Kushite Nubia.

Connecting the newly discovered workshop with objects excavated by Griffith clarifies aspects of Napatan political economy, from state-controlled production to restricted consumption of faience items such as shabtis. Clay shabti moulds found by Griffith had already suggested that faience shabtis were manufactured around the temple, and the new excavations confirm that assumption.

A new clay shabti mould found inside the temple exactly matches a fragmentary green faience anepigraphic shabti found among the workshop’s enormous quantities of faience fragments. Earlier moulds found by Griffith also perfectly match faience shabtis excavated by Reisner at the royal necropolis of Nuri.

The results strongly suggest that items in Nuri’s royal tombs originated from temple workshops like Sanam, especially because shabtis were exclusively consumed by royalty in Napatan Nubia. On the left, the small green faience figure can be compared directly with the recessed human-shaped cavity in the larger clay mould on the right.

Their matching silhouette and proportions provide a physical fit between the finished object and its production tool, while the scale bar indicates that both are only a few centimetres in height. Identifying Sanam as a production centre for royal funerary faience opens new ways to understand the role of the state in the Napatan period.

The archaeology provides insight into technical aspects of faience production that appear closely linked to local environmental constraints and state control over resources and labour. Workshop evidence directly links manufacture to deposition at the royal necropolis of Nuri, shedding light on state organisation and practice.

The faience evidence further clarifies Sanam Temple’s role in the state economy. Two types of shells were identified around the firing pits: gastropods resembling Nile snails and marine species, and a marine bivalve most likely typical of the Red Sea.

Species identification based on morphology alone remains uncertain, and further analysis is prevented by the ongoing war in Sudan. The secure Red Sea provenance of the bivalve suggests that the gastropod shells may also be coastal, although a mixed Nile–Red Sea assemblage remains possible.

Contextual evidence and grinding traces indicate that shells were crushed in mudbrick basins with workshop grindstones and added to faience mixtures before firing. The emergence of a local faience recipe at Sanam indicates a deliberate Napatan strategy to produce specific objects for royal use, reinforcing social distinction and royal power.

State agency is evident from controlled procurement of raw materials through temple-based manufacture to elite consumption of items such as shabtis. Alternative lime sources show the state’s capacity to obtain large quantities of shells from the Red Sea coast, either through direct control over distant communities and resources or through negotiation with desert groups involved in long-distance transport.

The Sanam evidence points to direct Napatan state control over raw material procurement, development of a local faience recipe, and manufacture through temples. Some products manufactured at Sanam, including shabtis, were consumed exclusively by royalty, who established and maintained the temple.

Direct state involvement and control over faience production resulted in social differentiation and strengthened state and royal power. State control generated hierarchisation and reinforced boundaries between different social spaces in Napatan society, revealing the state’s ability to centralise power.

The new evidence reveals direct state involvement in economic activity, from resource procurement and production to controlled consumption, including management of the people and materials used in faience manufacture. It also highlights the Kushite state’s capacity to operate in ways comparable to highly centralised ancient states despite its distinctive character.

Interpreting Middle Napatan faience production solely through the state-controlled workshop at Sanam risks giving an incomplete picture. Evidence from Egypt shows state and household workshops coexisted during decentralised and centralised periods, and a pottery workshop associated with a house was identified at Napatan Kerma.

Non-state workshops likely supplied unrestricted faience items to wider social groups, while the Sanam Temple workshop focused on royal funerary production, as indicated by shabti manufacture. Sanam’s faience workshop links temple manufacture, controlled raw materials, and royal consumption, showing how Kushite state power operated through production and social distinction while still leaving room for non-state workshops.