El-Kurru, Sudan:
Little by little, the deserts of northern Sudan slowly reveal the secrets they have held for 2,000 years and more.
With wheelbarrows, pulleys and shovels, sweating laborers have unearthed the remains of pyramids, temples and other ancient monuments.
But much of the country's rich archaeological heritage still remains hidden, and what has been discovered remains little known to outsiders.
An unprecedented $135 million project funded by the Gulf state of Qatar aims to change that.
"Archaeologists had a dream that this site would attract more interest," Abbas Zarook said at the Napatan ruins of El-Kurru, about 300 kilometres (190 miles) northwest of the capital Khartoum.
He heads a Sudanese-American mission excavating the site.
Zarook said the Qatari funding, a five-year project announced in March, will support further discoveries at El-Kurru, and elsewhere.
"Without the Qatari donation, no one knows how long this knowledge would have been hidden," he said.
El-Kurru and more than two dozen other archaeological projects, spread over hundreds of kilometres along the Nile Valley, will benefit from Qatar's support, officials say.
"I don't think we will find everything hidden in five years, so we hope this funding will be extended," Zarook told journalists invited to see some of the sites that will benefit from the new funding -- the largest ever for Sudanese antiquities.
It will support projects by several foreign and Sudanese teams in northern Sudan, where the first archaeological digs took place only about 100 years ago. That was much later than in Greece or Egypt, whose pyramids are grander and much better known.
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Last year, fewer than 600,000 tourists visited war-torn Sudan, where El-Kurru and other ancient cemeteries are among the few attractions.
By comparison, the much older monuments at Luxor, on the banks of the Nile in southern Egypt, have drawn millions of visitors annually.
The Napatan civilisation, which emerged after 900 BC, extended its influence north to Luxor and then briefly conquered all of Egypt.
A royal burial site, including remains of a pyramid for the powerful Napatan king Piangkhi, is part of a vast UNESCO World Heritage site that includes El-Kurru.
Zarook's Sudanese-American team is still unravelling El-Kurru's mysteries, about a century after the first excavations.
"We are trying to preserve what has been found before, and to discover what remains hidden," Zarook said at the site near a farming village.
During the excavation season which ended in March, workers removed tonnes of sand and other debris from El-Kurru's largest pyramid, which archaeologists believe was about 35 metres (115 feet) high.