Treasures From Sudan

Five years ago, curators at the British Museum began planning Sudan: Ancient Treasures — 320 objects, some of them 200,000 years old, on loan from the Sudan National Museum in Khartoum. But about three months ago the curators decided to put some more recent Sudanese artifacts on display as well: items from the western province of Darfur, where the Khartoum government and allied ethnic militias are blamed for killing 50,000 people and uprooting more than 1 million in the past 19 months. The Darfur objects — including a storage basket, toys and an ostrich-feather fan — testify to pastoral ways of life. These people make little representational art, yet it's hard not to hear an elegiac note in their clay figurines of cows and camels. They're made by Darfur children, says museum spokes-woman Hannah Boulton, "who dream of the large herds they will tend when they grow up."

The objects in the main exhibition, which runs through Jan. 9, 2005, tell an important story about a place where for millennia the cultures of Central Africa and the Mediterranean have met and sometimes clashed. These items, mostly from recent excavations and on display outside Sudan for the first time, help to fill in the outlines of human history from the Paleolithic period to the end of Ottoman rule in Sudan in 1885. A 200,000-year-old pebble found among raw ochre lumps on Sai Island in the Nile appears to be smeared with yellow and red pigment. If the color was consciously applied, the stone is one of the earliest indications of artistic expression ever found. Sandstone lions from the mid-1st century B.C. symbolize the Kushite state, and a gilded representation of a Kushite King is the largest copper-alloy statue yet found in Sudan. The Nubian settlement of Kerma was home to the earliest major urban centers in sub-Saharan Africa and produced, says curator Derek A. Welsby, "superb pottery, among the best ever made." Beakers dating from around 1750 B.C. have a distinctly contemporary look. A 19th century helmet represents the Otto- man era in Sudan's long Islamic history.

The exhibition ends with a reminder that more of Sudan's rich heritage will soon be lost. A dam to be built near the fourth cataract of the Nile will inundate a 170-km strip of land on either side of the river. That's good news for crocodiles, bad news for archaeologists.