16.2694°N, 33.2750°E.
Meroitic royal city in the Sudanese Butana steppe, roughly 170 kilometres northeast of modern Khartoum, built primarily of locally quarried sandstone. The Naqa (Temple of Apedemak) was commissioned around 1–20 CE by King Natakamani and Queen Amanitore, whose paired regnal images flank the pylon facade of the temple in carefully mirrored smiting poses. The lion-headed war god Apedemak himself appears in one relief at the site with three heads and four arms, an iconographic fusion unique within the Meroitic pantheon. A second structure on the site, conventionally called the Roman Kiosk, blends Egyptian, Hellenistic, and Roman architectural vocabularies in a single small chapel — capitals, cornices, and arched lintel all clearly drawn from different traditions. The site was first surveyed by Frédéric Cailliaud in 1822 and excavated in modern detail by the Berlin State Museums mission beginning in 1995.
The royal couple shared regnal authority equally on the temple wall, an arrangement that Rome itself would never have permitted at home.