Sudan’s rich past comes into its own

Sudan’s archaeology is finally stepping out of Egypt’s shadow as teams work against the clock to rescue an entire swathe of Nile Valley heritage from the rising waters of a Chinese-built dam.

“The paradox is that, yes, an entire area is being wiped off the map but thanks to the rescue project, Sudanese archaeology is being put on the map,” says Sudan’s antiquities chief Salah Ahmed.

The Merowe dam is a controversial hydroelectric project one of the largest in Africa being erected on the Nile’s fourth cataract and due to start flooding the valley over more than 100 miles within months.

Archaeologists admit that an incalculable amount of information will be forever lost.

But the largest archaeological rescue project since the Nubian campaign began in the 1960s (during the construction of the Aswan dam in southern Egypt) has unearthed a heritage that would likely have remained untapped.

“This area was completely unknown to archaeologists. It was a missing chapter in Sudan’s history, and nobody was planning to go there because it’s very hard from a logistical point of view,” Mr. Ahmed says.

Sudan’s pre-Christian civilizations built more pyramids than the Egyptians but have received little attention since being defeated by the Egyptian warrior Pharaoh Tuthmosis I (15th century B.C.).

“Of course, there is no Abu Simbel here,” says Mr. Ahmed, referring to the massive temples originally carved out of the mountain under the reign of Ramses II and relocated as part of a monumental transfer when the Aswan dam was built.

But teams of archaeologists from Britain, France, Germany, Poland and a dozen other countries have been relentlessly searching the fertile Nile riverbanks near Merowe for at least five years now and made some significant discoveries.

Some of the artifacts found in the soon-to-be-flooded area enabled archaeologists to redefine the borders of ancient kingdoms such as Kerma, which ruled part of Nubia between 2,500 and 1,500 B.C.

“We found very rich Kerma occupation farther upstream, extending the frontiers of this important kingdom by more than 200 kilometers (120 miles),” Mr. Ahmed says.

“We also found for the first time in the fourth cataract area the foundations of a pyramid, with Meroitic ceramics. This gives political importance to the area because it shows someone important was buried there.”

Funerary archaeology in the area also benefits from exceptional chronological continuity, offering experts a rare chance to retrace historical developments.

“The fourth cataract is very interesting for the study of transitional periods, which are often shrouded in mystery and uncertainty,” says Vincent Francigny, a resident archaeologist at France’s Khartoum-based SFDAS institute.

Only a tiny fraction of the vast area has been excavated, and archaeologists, currently wrapping up their season, will have little time left to make more discoveries before the waters start rising. In addition to scorching heat and accessibility problems, there is simmering tension between the government and local communities being evicted by the dam’s growingreservoir.

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