Qualla: National Museum of Sudan

National Museum of Sudan: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Shmyg, CC BY-SA 3.0. The four-meter granite statue of Pharaoh Taharqa, broken by Egyptians at Napata in 591 BCE, buried by Kushite priests, dug out by George Reisner in 1916, stood at the entrance of the Sudan National Museum for more than five decades. When you walked in, he greeted you. He is one of the few objects that survived what happened to this museum between 2023 and 2025, because he was too heavy to move. The rest of the collection, roughly 100,000 pieces covering the Paleolithic through the Islamic period, is almost entirely gone.

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Image: Shmyg | CC BY-SA 3.0

National Museum of Sudan: What the Museum Was

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Shmyg, CC BY-SA 3.0. The building opened in 1955, the year before Sudanese independence, and became the National Museum in 1971. Its purpose was specific and enormous: to house the largest collection of Nubian archaeology in the world, including objects relocated during the 1960-1980 UNESCO Campaign ...

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Image: Shmyg | CC BY-SA 3.0

National Museum of Sudan: The Collection

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hans Birger Nilsen, CC BY-SA 2.0. Inside the building, galleries traced Sudan's history through ten thousand years. There were Neolithic ram statuettes from the C-Group culture, black-topped red burnished pottery from the same era, funerary goods from the Kerma kingdom. There was the strange bowlegged figurine of...

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Image: Hans Birger Nilsen | CC BY-SA 2.0

National Museum of Sudan: The Monumental Alley

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hans Birger Nilsen, CC BY-SA 2.0. The lane leading from the museum's parking area was lined with Meroitic sculptures. Two stone rams. Six dark sandstone lions, carved in the first century BCE with cartouches of King Amanikhabale on the first lion on the right. These lions had, in local tradition, a second name: m...

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Image: Hans Birger Nilsen | CC BY-SA 2.0

National Museum of Sudan: What Was Taken

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Petr Adam Dohnálek, CC BY-SA 3.0 cz. On June 2, 2023, in the early weeks of the Sudanese civil war, the Rapid Support Forces seized the museum. It sits on Nile Avenue in the al-Mugran area, near the confluence of the White and Blue Niles, surrounded by the government buildings that became the war's primary battlefie...

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Image: Petr Adam Dohnálek | CC BY-SA 3.0 cz

National Museum of Sudan: What Survives

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hans Birger Nilsen, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Sudanese archaeologists who spent their careers building this museum include many young women trained at the University of Khartoum, part of a generation whose work The Guardian had profiled just months before the war began. Their knowledge, of every object, every provenance,...

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Image: Hans Birger Nilsen | CC BY-SA 2.0