THE NILE'S OTHER KINGDOM

• Share

Archaeologist Timothy Kendall was leading an expedition in northern Sudan earlier this year when one of his diggers came across a slab of intricately carved stone hidden in rubble. Soon after, another slab turned up, and then another, until there were 25 in all, laid out in the sand like an archaeological jigsaw puzzle. Fitted together, the pieces formed a dazzling tableau: golden stars set against an azure sky, with crowned vultures flying off into the distance. Flying where, precisely? Kendall, an associate curator at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, thinks he knows. And if his hunch is correct, he may be a few tons of rubble away from a major archaeological find.

Kendall's breakthrough, when and if it comes, should be one of many arising from that corner of Africa. Long considered an archaeological afterthought by scientists exploring the more famous temples and pyramids of Egypt, just to the north, Sudan is suddenly the hot place to be--and not just because of the equatorial temperatures that register as high as 100[degrees]F even during the prime winter digging season. At least 15 teams from the U.S., Europe and Sudan are sifting through the same sands for secrets of ancient Nubia, the world's first black civilization, which at its height stretched more than 1,000 miles along the Nile River, from what is today the central part of Sudan to the southern reaches of Egypt.

Everything uncovered thus far supports the conviction that has been building among scholars during the past 20 years that the Nubians were not just vassals and trading partners of the Egyptian Pharaohs but also the creators of an ancient and impressive civilization of their own, with a homegrown culture that may have been the most complex and cosmopolitan in all Africa.

That's why Kendall is particularly interested in the jigsaw tableau he has laid out on the sand. The newly discovered blocks, he believes, once made up the vaulted ceiling of a passageway that led to a temple dug into a 300-ft.-high hill known today as Jebel Barkal. It was there, Kendall thinks, that rulers in the ancient Nubian kingdom of Napata and Meroe, which dated from 900 B.C. to A.D. 350, practiced their coronation rites, climaxing in a crowning by the god Amun.

The passage Kendall discovered was, he believes, closed by an earthquake and rockslide sometime between A.D. 100 and A.D. 200. That's the bad news--and the good news, for the same wall of rubble that separates Kendall from his temple probably kept out treasure hunters as well. Once he manages to bore through a few huge boulders and track the flight of those majestic vultures, he hopes to find that the temple's interior, and whatever treasure it holds, has been preserved intact for 18 centuries.

Such findings, according to Dietrich Wildung, curator of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, represent "nothing less than the discovery of a new dimension of the ancient world." The sense of breaking new ground, and of taking archaeology in a new direction, has contributed to what Wildung calls "the pioneer spirit in Sudan."