Mass Graves, Old and New

Mass Graves, Old and New

By John Ryle
The Times Literary Supplement ("Not saving, but drowning")
October 15, 2004

The Merowe Dam, the threat to ancient Nubia and the crisis of the Sudanese
state

Not long ago I took time off from the round of aid agencies and government
departments in Khartoum to follow the road north, past the sixth cataract of
the Nile, to the pyramid field at Meroe, heart of the Kingdom of Kush in the
first millennium BC. The royal cemetery is a few miles from the ruins of the
ancient city of Meroe (first described by Herodotus on the basis of accounts
from spies sent by the Persian King Cambyses). It is, by any criterion, a
spectacular sight: dozens of thirty or forty-foot high pyramids scattered
over the plain like huge tetrahedral dice, the funerary monuments of
generations of Meroitic kings and queens.

If this were in Egypt the place would be a major attraction, overrun by
tourists, a symbol of nationhood. But here in Sudan, just a few hours from
the capital and half a mile away from the mainline railway, the monuments
were utterly deserted. A single scarab-seller lingered forlornly at the
gate. I was able to spend the day wandering round Meroe without meeting any
other visitor, foreign or Sudanese.

In present-day Sudan, with its recurrent pattern of state-sponsored
violence, large-scale famine and political crisis, contemplation of the past
is salutary, even therapeutic. This is not because earlier Sudanese history
is free of mass killings, or famine, or slavery. It is, on the contrary, to
a significant extent, defined by them. It is because an understanding of the
history of the polities that were created along the Nile valley, from the
time of ancient Egypt onwards, offers some context, at least, for the
grimness of the present, for the sequence of state formation and decay, and
the environmental and political constraints under which the powers in the
land still operate.

Until recently scholars saw Kush and other ancient kingdoms of Sudan from
the perspective of Egyptian archaeology, as a cultural extension of ancient
Egypt. This view of the lands to the south reflected the imperialist,
expansionist attitude of Egypt itself. In ancient Egyptian conquest stelae,
the land of Kush is routinely referred to as "wretched", its inhabitants -
represented as black where Egyptians are pale-skinned - good only to be
enslaved. This view, prevalent for millennia, gave rise to a kind of Monroe
doctrine, one still not abandoned by the Egyptian government, which regards
Egyptian interests in Sudan as paramount over those of the inhabitants of
the Sudanese lands - particularly when it comes to the waters of the Nile,
on which both countries depend.

The last few decades in archaeology and anthropology, though, have seen an
increasing emphasis on the distinctive features of the ancient kingdoms of
Nubia (the region stretching from the first cataract at Aswan upstream to
the sixth and southernmost cataract, north of Khartoum). Contemporary
research stresses the complex relations between Nubia and Egypt that evolved
from the time of the Egyptian Old Kingdom, in the third millennium BC, and
the challenge that independent Nubian powers posed intermittently to
Egyptian hegemony.

Most of ancient Nubia lies within the boundaries of modern Sudan, in the
northern third of the country, and it is from here that the majority of the
objects in the British Museum's exhibition, Sudan: Ancient Treasures
, have been drawn. Many of these
objects have been unearthed in the last two decades and have not previously
been seen outside Sudan; the catalogue of the exhibition conveys the sense
of scholarly excitement that animates the field. Though tourism may be
non-existent, archaeology in Sudan is thriving. According to the catalogue
more than thirty archaeological missions are currently active. That is to
say, the same number as participated in the last major phase of Nubian
archaeology, during the construction of the high dam at Aswan in the 1960s
and 1970s, when the northern, Egyptian part of Nubia was flooded, its
inhabitants dispersed and the spectacular translocation of the temple of Abu
Simnel was completed under the auspices of UNESCO.

The pace of archaeological research in Sudanese Nubia has been spurred on
likewise by a major hydrological project, a new dam at the fourth cataract,
the Merowe Dam (the location is not to be confused with the ancient Meroe,
several hundred miles upstream). Athough it is lower than the Aswan High
Dam and set to flood a lesser area, the Merowe Dam raises comparable social
and political questions. It involves the forcible displacement of tens of
thousands of local people as well as the inundation of an indeterminate
number of unexplored archaeological sites. (Many of the ancient remains in
Nubia are built of mud brick, preserved by the almost total absence of rain.
Underwater they will vanish entirely, returning to mud.) The time that
remains for salvage anthropology in the affected area - barely four years if
construction work is completed on schedule - is a good deal shorter than in
the case of Aswan.

The case against the Merowe dam has been put recently by Ali Askouri, a
former senior civil servant in the Sudanese Ministry of Planning. "The
Merowe Dam project, " he writes in Forced Migration Review
"was proposed, designed
and implemented by an influential group within the military government of
Sudan to serve its own purposes in monopolizing the electricity sector.
Internationally accepted standards on human rights, resettlement and the
environment have been ignored.. In one peaceful protest police dispersed
men, women and children with tear gas and live bullets. Organizers were
arrested, detained and tortured."

These aspects of the situation are treated with discretion in the British
Museum exhibition. This is hardly surprising, since it has been arranged in
collaboration with the Sudan Government Corporation for Antiquities and
Museums and most of the exhibits are on loan from the National Museum in
Khartoum. It is a routine irony of archaeology in Nubia and elsewhere that
the work of excavation should be given wings - and attract funding - in
response to the ruthless schemes of autocratic governments. (The monuments
themselves, of course, were most likely built under similarly dictatorial
auspices, by unfree labour; so not much has changed.)

That said, Sudan: Ancient Treasures is a thrilling exhibition: excellently
presented, complementing and illuminating the holdings from earlier Nubian
excavations to be seen in other galleries in the Museum. The balance of
artefacts, explanation and illustrative material is just right. There are
some surpassingly beautiful objects: a stylized Neolithic figurine of veined
sandstone, for example, its sole anatomical detail a roll of fat at the
level of the abdomen; and a delicate tulip-shaped ceramic beaker from the
second millennium BC, encircled by aleatory bands of polished black and red
and grey pigment.

There are intriguing fragments, such as the capstone from one of the
pyramids at Meroe, a truncated tetrahedron that replicates the shape of the
pyramid itself. (The stone has metal dowels that probably held a copper disk
designed to catch the rays of the morning sun.) And there are mummified
corpses and grave goods from cemeteries up and down the river, where the
mass sacrifice of livestock and, in some cases, humans (they were smothered
by sand), was a feature of elite burials. There is even a naturally
mummified desert rat: a five-thousand-year-old gerbil, robber of granaries,
mysteriously caught in mid-leap.

Among the most striking of the grave objects are five bucrania, cattle
skulls from a royal grave in Kerma, around the turn of the second
millennium, representing some 4,300 animals sacrificed for a single funeral,
and buried together in a vast crescent shape. These great-horned cattle,
descendants of aurochs, wild kine from Asia, are similar to the contemporary
Brahma breeds to be seen in the ranchlands of the South-Eastern United
States. They look - to the gallery-goer's gaze - like the looming cattle
skulls in paintings by Georgia O'Keefe.

One of them has had its horns trained to curve inwards by oblique cuts made
at an early stage of growth, a practice that is still widespread in southern
Sudan. (Here, perhaps, the catalogue of the exhibition, which is generally
excellent, errs, referring in passing to a single contemporary instance of
this practice, and suggesting that its purpose is unknown, whereas there is
ample ethnographic documentation of contemporary horn deformation and its
place in the elaborate system of bovine aesthetics developed by the Dinka
and Nuer, Nilotic cattle herders of the South.)

The exhibition also covers the Monophysite Christian kingdoms of Nubia in
the early mediaeval period, from the sixth century AD, and the coming of
Islam a few hundred years later. The latter is an event, it may be noted,
that seems to have been accompanied not by spiritual warfare, but by an
extensive period of more or less peaceful existence between the two
religions that persisted until the waning of Christianity in the fourteenth
century. The advent of Abrahamic religions in Sudan marks the end of grave
goods and the pagan vision of the afterlife; the wondrous objects that
populate the earlier sections of the exhibition give way to Christian wall
paintings and Muslim chainmail, to representations of Christian churches and
Muslim qubba (tombs of holy sheikhs).

It may seem odd that none of the spectacular archaeological monuments of
Nubia has ever been employed as a national symbol by the Government of
Sudan. In Egypt, the pyramid and the sphinx have long been ubiquitous
emblems of the country (though there are in fact more pyramids in Sudan than
in Egypt). In Cambodia, to take another example, the corncob towers of
Angkor Wat are featured on the national flag as well as on postage stamps
and currency. Not in Sudan. Although Meroe has featured on a commemorative
stamp, no Nubian monument has appeared on a Sudanese banknote since the
Sudanese pound was replaced by the dinar.

It is a symptom, no doubt, of the current decay of the state, that it cannot
seize on such a potential unifying symbol at the present time, when the
country is threatening to come apart. The government of Sudan has embraced a
form of political Islam that is unlike that practiced by most of its
citizens. It has reinforced an Arabist ideology that excludes the majority
of Sudanese (a good two thirds of whom are not Arabs, by their own or anyone
else's criterion). It has turned its back on pluralism and inclusiveness
and embraced a strategy of divide and rule. And it has sponsored death and
displacement on a scale to rival that of any era in the past.

The elite burials of Kush with their human sacrifices are not the last mass
graves to be found in Sudan. Two months ago a new grave site was discovered
near Furawiyah in the far west of the country. There were no grave goods
there, no funerary monument. It was described in these words
by Samantha Power,
the first non-Sudanese to see it:

The stench of decomposing flesh greeted us before we saw that rotting bodies
were lying in the gullies on either side of us. There were the bodies of
fourteen men, dressed in bloodied djellabahs or in shirts and slacks.
Seventeen bullet casings lay scattered around them... They had all been shot
from behind, except for one man. His body lay not in a ditch but in the
center of the slope, and one of his palms was outstretched, as if he were
pleading for mercy.

This new grave site is clearly not a case for archaeological investigation,
but for forensic anthropology. It is the location of one of an uncounted
number of group killings of non-Arab Sudanese perpetrated during the past
year by government-backed Arab militias operating in Darfur - agents of a
process of ethnic cleansing that has not ceased.

The archaeological record shows us that there is nothing new about state
violence in Sudan. But it also shows - and perhaps the exhibition at the
British Museum is discreetly designed to draw attention to this - that the
history of the country is a history of many gods, of many faiths and many
languages, of a multitude of peoples and ways of being. And that this
plurality is a feature not just of the history of Sudan, but also of its
present, where Arabs and non-Arabs, farmers and herders, Christians and
Muslims and practitioners of autochthonous religions all live side by side,
and where darker-skinned and lighter-skinned people blend with one another
continually and imperceptibly.

C John Ryle 2004


Internet Resources


Sudan Archaeology links


Sudan Archaeological Research Society

Nubian Archaeology

"Kush - Black Africa's Earliest Civilization" by Claude Rilly
kiosque.com/art/exhibiti/rhesouda.htm>

Arkamani - Sudan Electronic Journal of Archaeology and Anthropology


"The Invention of Nubia" by William Y. Adams


"Henry Wellcome (1853-1936) and Archaeological Excavation in Sudan"


The Merowe Dam and the Nile Waters


British Museum Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan


"The Merowe Dam" by Ali Askouri, Forced Migration Review, Sept 2004


Map of Ancient Nubia


Rift Valley Institute Sudan Internet Resources

Hi Mr. Asskouri…

This is just a quick note to extend my appreciation to your posts and to your concern with humanity. I also would like to say thank you for you participating in English…. Last but not least I extend my apology on behalf of all…. English written posts don’t get as much attention even though the content is very enlightening…

Regards….
S.S

ShiningStar

Salamat
Thanks for your comments.

It is encouraging to hear from people like yourself.


regards

A.Askouri

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