The Pyramids You Command
In 0 A.D., you can build the pyramid field of Kush yourself, one monument at a time.
0 A.D. is a free, open-source real-time strategy game, built and given away by volunteers at Wildfire Games — which makes it the one game on this site whose screenshots you can trace to a genuine, verifiable license rather than take on faith. Since Alpha 23, it has shipped a playable Kushite civilization, centered on the “Island of Meroë,” the Nile-and-Atbarah peninsula that was the real heartland of the Kingdom of Kush.
Play them and you don’t just visit Meroë, you raise it. Kushite monumental pyramids are buildable structures in your city, boosting your economy and your army the way the real dynasty’s building program projected its wealth and power along the Middle Nile for six centuries. Zoom out on a thriving Kushite town and the skyline behind the market stalls and elephants is unmistakable: a cluster of steep, sharp-angled pyramids, rendered by people who clearly looked at the real Northern Cemetery before modeling them.
It is a small, odd kind of tribute — a monument built by treasure hunters and reconstructed by volunteer coders now gets rebuilt again, freely, by anyone who queues it up in a build menu.
Read the full study: Pyramids of Meroë