سد في السودان يغمر تغمر مياهه الاف المواقع الاثرية النوبية _ بقلم هنري اوبن كاتب " تحرير القدس

Quote: Sudanese dam would flood thousands of Nubian archeological sites Nile's waters threaten to cover Nubia, a cradle of civilization HENRY AUBIN The Gazette Saturday, September 09, 2006 One of my rules is never to write a column about my vacations. Time to break that rule. I'm just back from some time-off in Warsaw, where I attended the International Conference of Nubian Studies. I return with two conclusions about ancient Nubia, located along the Nile River in what is today northern Sudan and southern Egypt. The first is that this obscure civilization won't stay obscure much longer. Retiring the popular stereotype that ancient sub-Sahara Africa was completely "backward" might take years, but surely some day high school history classes will give Nubia a place alongside Greece, Rome, Israel, Phoenicia and Assyria. A generation ago, only a handful of academics and archeologists were curious about Nubia, then widely perceived as a shadowy sidebar to glorious Egypt. That last week's conference drew 200 specialists from 19 countries shows how much this is changing. Research papers delivered at the conference, including my own on how a Nubian-led army saved Jerusalem from an Assyrian siege in 701 BC, demonstrated how Nubia was a major player in the eastern Mediterranean for more than half a century. In an effort to resist the Assyrian superpower, this black civilization led a loose alliance stretching from Egypt to what is now Lebanon. But I'm not breaking my rule on vacations to dwell on the distant past. I want to call attention to a problem in the imminent future. My second conclusion is that much of the research in this largely unexplored field will soon be stopped in its tracks. The cause has nothing to do with the nightmarish strife in Sudan's Darfur region, 600 sandy kilometres to the west. The cause, rather, is a dam that the Sudanese government is building at the Nile's Fourth Cataract. When the Chinese-backed hydro-electricity project is finished in mid-2008, it will create a lake 170 kilometres long and up to four kilometres wide. Much of the Nubian heartland will lie at the bottom. Thankfully, the waters will spare the impressive ruins of Napata and Meroe, the two main cities of Kush - as Nubia was called at the time of its greatest power. But, as archeologist Derek Welsby told me in Warsaw, the lake will submerge "several thousand" other sites ranging in age from 200,000-year-old paleolithic to medieval. To be sure, "several thousand" is a vague number - but it has to be. Excavations have only begun in the last few years, and the figure is an extrapolation based on what has been found. Eight archeological teams from different countries (Canada is not among them) are in a desperate sprint to save vestiges on the riverbanks, which climate change rendered arid and desolate centuries ago. Adding to the time problem is the heat, which limits the digging season to October-March. A further handicap: lack of money. Welsby, head of the British effort, says the teams are raising something over $1 million in total. That's peanuts. Little wonder that only about 100 of these thousands of sites have been investigated so far. With time running out, more than 90 per cent will likely never be unearthed. The hand-to-mouth funding reflects the low profile of this archeological crisis. The media have given it meagre attention. And although Sudan's government supports the salvage effort, the distant Darfur horror gives the country a bad image among foundations and other would-be Western donors. Nor is this the first time the Nile's waters have threatened to drown our understanding of Nubia. In the 1960s, Egypt's Aswan High Dam immersed a still larger area that straddled the border of ancient Egypt and Nubia. Because that project imperiled such major monuments as Egypt's colossal Abu Simbel sculptures, the world cared: UNESCO sent swarms of well-funded archeologists to save what they could. Nubian buildings and artifacts, less spectacular, were often ignored. Since then, it's become clear that Nubia was a cradle of civilization. And yet its vestiges, valuable for the light they would shed on this culture, are still not on the world's radar. With just two winters left for digging, the world should know what's at stake. There's still time to do better. Gazette columnist Henry Aubin is author of The Rescue of Jerusalem: The Alliance between Hebrews and Africans in 701 B.C. haubin@... © The Gazette (Montreal) 2006