Massive looting of Sudan's National Museum during civil war shocks culture h

Reports of mass looting at Sudan’s National Museum during the ongoing civil war have shocked the cultural heritage community. Ikhlas Abdel-Latif Ahmed, head of museums at Sudan’s National Antiquities Authority, said soldiers from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) had stolen artifacts from the recently renovated Sudan National Museum in Khartoum. She called the theft by RSF soldiers “a major looting operation,” according to the Financial Times.

The war in Sudan has killed an estimated 150,000 people and driven 10 million into exile.

Opened more than fifty years ago, the Sudan National Museum houses artifacts rescued from an area flooded by the construction of Egypt’s Aswan Dam. Among the 100,000 pieces housed in the museum are those from the Paleolithic, Meroë, Christian and Islamic eras. The museum also houses artifacts such as ushabti funerary figures of Kushite kings from Kerma, a capital in northern Sudan that predated Meroë.

Many of the items taken from the Sudan National Museum were loaded onto trucks and smuggled across the border into South Sudan, Abdel-Latif Ahmed said. “Unfortunately, this has all become a target of the war,” she said.

Reports of looting have become so persistent that UNESCO released a statement in September warning that the “threat to (Sudanese) culture appears to have reached unprecedented levels.” UNESCO called on art market professionals and members of the public “to refrain from acquiring or participating in the import, export or transfer of ownership of cultural property from Sudan.”

UNESCO’s appeal followed concerns that some of the antiquities may have been offered for sale online, disguised as Egyptian artefacts. The situation in Sudan is reminiscent of the large-scale theft of artifacts during recent wars in Iraq, Syria and Mali.

None of Sudan’s treasures are safe, said Amani Gashi, archaeologist and coordinator of the cultural protection initiative Safeguarding Sudan’s Living Heritage Against Conflict and Climate Change. Gashi added that this includes the temple of Amun at Jebel Barkal in Karima, the lion-headed god Apedemak at Naqa, and the elephant statue at the temple at Musawwarat, near Meroë.

The situation has drawn parallels with previous conflicts where cultural heritage was at risk. The Iraq Museum in Baghdad was looted after the 2003 US invasion. Although a 4,000-year-old statue of Sumerian king Entemena was later returned to the Iraq Museum, many stolen pieces remain missing. In 2016, Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, an Islamist militant, became the first person to be tried for the war crime of destroying antiquities when he was sentenced by the International Criminal Court to nine years in prison for destroying historical monuments in Timbuktu, Mali .

Sudan was home to some of Africa’s earliest human settlements, dating back as far as 8,000 BC. The Kingdom of Kush, founded in Kerma around 2500 BC, ruled Egypt for almost a century after it was conquered in the eighth century BC, with Meroë as the seat of power with pyramids, temples and a water network.

Meroë itself has a history of both plundering and being plundered. In 1834, the tops of dozens of pyramids near Meroë were blown up by the Italian treasure hunter Giuseppe Ferlini. The British Museum in London, much of which comes from looting, includes the Meroë Head, a large bronze head depicting the first Roman emperor Augustus. The Meroë head was recovered from Meroë in 1910, where it ended up after being plundered from Roman Egypt in 24 BC.

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Sources: Financial Times, Periodico HOY

This article was written in collaboration with generative AI company Alchemiq