16.4158°N, 33.3236°E.
Meroitic temple complex in the Butana steppe of central Sudan, built almost entirely from locally quarried sandstone and in continuous ritual use from roughly the third century BCE through the fourth century CE. Musawwarat es-Sufra centres on the so-called Great Enclosure, a labyrinthine arrangement of courtyards, ramps, ramparts, and small chambers without obvious parallel anywhere else in the ancient world; the adjacent Lion Temple was dedicated to the Meroitic war god Apedemak by King Arnekhamani around 220 BCE. The site has no permanent water source and depended on seasonal storage in a large hafir reservoir, suggesting periodic pilgrimage rather than year-round residential occupation. Excavations were begun by Fritz Hintze of Humboldt University in 1960 and continue today under the joint Sudanese-German mission directed from Berlin. Reliefs throughout the complex depict elephants in apparent ceremonial role — one of the very few ancient African records of trained elephants south of the Sahara.
The Meroites built a stone maze in the desert and left no instructions for reading it.