In Sudan, a Green Faience Shabti From a 2,700-Year-Old Workshop Matches a Mold in Napata’s Temple

Archaeologists have identified a faience workshop just outside Sanam Temple at Napata, in the Kingdom of Kush in Sudan. It dates to roughly the mid-7th century BCE, about 2,700 years ago. The team calls it the first securely identified evidence of faience manufacturing from the Middle Napatan period. Rennan Lemos, Kathryn Howley, Siobhan Shinn and Shadia Abdu Rabo reported it in Antiquity in 2026, after excavations from 2018 to 2020.

What the workshop held

The team found three firing pits and two mudbrick basins used in faience production. Compacted ash held hundreds of blue, green and white disk beads, vessel fragments and manufacturing waste. Thousands of small shells and grinding stones lay nearby, along with broken storage-jar pottery that formed a work surface. The firing pits show repeated heating, and such installations could reach about 900 degrees Celsius, the temperature faience needs. The researchers could not determine whether the pits held permanent kilns or removable covers.

The mold link

A fragmentary green faience shabti, a funerary figurine, matches a clay mold found inside Sanam Temple. Molds from Francis Llewellyn Griffith’s 1912 excavations match shabtis that George Reisner found at the Nuri royal cemetery. In Napatan Nubia, shabtis appear restricted to royalty, unlike in Egypt, where people of several social classes used them. King Taharqo, who ruled from about 690 to 664 BCE, built Sanam Temple. The authors read these links as a sign that the workshop supplied funerary goods for royal tombs. The temple’s inscription records transfers of people and resources, so temple-assigned people may have worked in production.

What remains uncertain

The identities and working conditions of the faience makers are unknown. Some shells likely came from the Red Sea, but a mix of Nile and marine shells cannot be ruled out. Household and independent workshops may have made less restricted objects, so royal control did not cover all craft production. Ongoing conflict in Sudan has blocked further analysis of the material.

Sources: Lemos et al., “Crafting power in Kush: faience production and state control in the Napatan region,” Antiquity (2026), doi:10.15184/aqy.2026.10434; Arkeonews, 19 October 2026.