ABSTRACT
Sometime in the early fourth century, if not before, the political and cultural hegemony of Meroe and the Meroitic kings seems to have begun to disappear. At the heart of the kingdom, Meroe itself declined as a major centre of population, with the abandonment of its public buildings and perhaps, over a more extended period, its abandonment as a major settlement. Temples and palaces went out of use, some may have been deliberately destroyed. By the middle of the fourth century the building of royal pyramid tombs at Meroe also seems to have ceased. When exactly remains unknown. The last reasonably secure date we have for a Meroitic king is for a King Teqorideamani, in AD 253. The reconstructed royal genealogies suggest that there could have been as many as six later kings buried at Meroe; the latest is unlikely to date much after AD 350.
