Report: Sudan-Day 2018

The annual Sudan Day celebrates the dedication of the Munich Museum to the archeology of the Sudan and provides insights into research projects and its own excavations in Naga. Abdelrahman Mohamed Ali, General Director of the Khartoum National Museum of Antiquities and Museums, opened Sudan-Day 2018 with his impressive talk on “Museums in the Sudan”, which presented the extremely varied museological initiatives of Sudanese colleagues throughout the Sudan. Thomas Leisten from Doha presented an interim report for the first five years of the “Qatar Sudan Archaeological Project”; his report also provided insiders with new insights into the strategies and objectives of this collaborative project, which is currently the mainstay of Naga’s excavation. How laborious excavation work can be became clear in the papers of Cornelius von Pilgrim, the director of the Schweizer Instituts für ägyptische Bauforschung und Altertumskunde Kairo about his work in Aswan and Friederike Jesse, archaeologist from Cologne, on a survey on the Fifth Cataract.

After a lunch break with Sudanese broad beans, the afternoon was dedicated to the work of the Munich team in Naga. S.E. Gasafi Abdalla Mohamed Ali conveyed the greetings of the Sudanese Embassy in Berlin and thanked the Museum for its commitment. .

Karla Kröper presented the unresolved questions posed by the excavation of the temple Naga 1200, for which there are no parallels in Meroitic architecture. From the 2017/2018 campaign, Arnulf Schlüter and Christian Perzlmeier presented the spectacular results of the excavation of the temple Naga 700 with four monumental statues of Meroitic gods. Dietrich Wildung gave an outlook on future projects that focus on expanding the typology of Meroitic temple architecture and expressing the hope that the Naga Museum can be built in the foreseeable future.