Canadian archaeologists in Sudan, using magnetometers, have found a 2,000-year--old palace in the heart of the ancient black civilization.
NATIONAL POST
April 22, 2002
Margaret Munro
If his partner had not fallen into an ancient tomb and broken both legs, Professor Krzysztof Grzymski would have discovered the ancient Nubian royal palace even sooner.
Still, Grzymski, a professor at the University of Toronto and a curator at the Royal Ontario Museum, is a happy archaeologist these days. He and his colleague, who is walking again, have found what they believe are the remains of a palace and a colonnade built more than 2,000 years ago by the greatest black civilization ever.
"It's quite remarkable, we can see them clearly beneath the sand," says Grzymski.
The discovery is in the ancient, and for the most part buried, city of Meroë, which was the royal capital of ancient Nubia. It is located about 200 kilometres northeast of present day Khartoum.
Meroë, considered one of the largest and most important archaeological sites in Africa, was at the heart of a powerful black civilization that flourished along the upper Nile River from about 750 BC to 350 AD.
Grzymski and his colleagues plan to start excavating the palace and colonnade next winter. But for now Grzymski is content to pour over the grainy images generated by a device that allowed the archaeolgists to "see" the ruins buried beneath the sand without digging them out.
Explorers -- and tomb robbers -- have long been aware of Meroë and its riches. But archaeologists were so pre-occupied with Egypt's pyramids and kingdoms to the north -- and deterred by the political conflict in Sudan -- they largely ignored the ancient Nubian culture. Many assumed it was merely an offshoot of a more advanced Egyptian culture.
"Here you've got this wonderful civilization that was literate, which extended over 1,000 miles, maybe more, up the Nile, and which built pyramids and palaces and temples and at the same time was a major centre of iron production, and yet it is generally unknown to scholars and the general public," says Grzymski.
He has been intrigued with the ruins since the 1970s, when he studied under Professor Peter Shinnie at the University of Calgary. Shinnie worked for years with Sudanese scholars on the ancient iron smelters
of Meroë.
Grzymski helped keep the Canadian-Sudanese collaboration alive through his ROM work. And in 1999, he and archaeologists at the University of Khartoum were given a licence by Sudan's antiquities officials to explore the 50-hectare site of Meroë. About 10 hectares of the ancient city had been excavated in the early 1900s by British archaeologists. But most remains entombed under sand and shrubs.
The archaeologists had a hunch about where the best ruins lay. But they wanted to be sure.
"You can spend weeks and weeks digging nothing," he says.
To find the most promising areas, Grzymski recruited Tomasz Herbich, a Polish archaeologist and geophysicist who specializes in using magnetometers to find buried ruins. Magnetometers are sophisticated versions of the hand-held devices people use to find coins on beaches and parks. They can differentiate between the magnetic properties of materials -- such as sand, pottery, bricks -- and feed the readings into a computer. The readings then generate maps. Just before the archaeologists were to start scanning the Meroë site in the 2000-2001 season, Herbich, who works on ruins throughout northern Africa, fell into an abandoned ancient tomb in Egypt, breaking both his legs and injuring his spine.
"It was a terrible accident," says Grzymski. And it set the Meroë scan back by one year.
In February, Hebrich and his magnetometer went to the Sudan site. Within days, Herbich homed in on the palace and colonnade.
The palace, about 400 square metres in area, is about a half a metre beneath the surface of the sand. "There are traces of staircases, so it suggests there must have been upper floors," Grzymski says. The street in front of the building also came into view.
To their surprise, they found what appears to be a colonnade near one of the gates to the ancient city.
"We were absolutely delighted," says Grzymski. "It's really fascinating when you can see the urban design without excavating."
In October, Grzymski will return to Meroë to start digging with his Sudanese partners.
It remains to be seen what treasure lies beneath the sand, but the materials uncovered in the region over the years have made it clear the Nubian civilization was a powerful, inventive society.
The most incredible find was made almost 200 years ago in a pyramid near Meroë. An Italian physician and tomb robber known as Ferlini accompanied an Ottoman invasion of Sudan in 1821 and discovered exquisite gold amulets, signet rings and necklaces by blasting open the pyramid of Queen Amanishakheto, one of Nubia's most powerful rulers.
Ferlini tried to sell the treasure when he returned to Europe. But collectors would not believe such treasure could come from black Africa. They thought he was trying to pass off fakes, says Grzymski. "They were jewels of great quality and beauty and often influenced by Greek art, which was really a surprise," he says. "People didn't expect deep in the heart of Africa depictions resembling those of Egyptian or classical Greek art."
The ancient Nubians exchanged plenty of ideas and goods with cultures around them. Nubian pyramids, monuments and jewels were clearly influenced by Egyptian, Mediterranean and Arabian cultures.
"They worshiped many of the same gods as the Egyptians and the royalty was buried in pyramids," says Grzymski.
Some of their pottery and burial talismans predate similar discoveries in Egypt, indicating Nubia may have influenced the Egyptians rather than the other way around.
At the height of their culture, Nubian kings are said to have ruled Egypt from 750 to 650 BC. They were driven south by the Syrians, says Grzymski.
Ancient trash heaps have revealed many details of daily life for the Nubians. Olive pits suggest the Nubians either imported olives from the Mediterranean or grew them on the banks of the Nile. And the animal bones they left behind reveal much about the climate and environment they lived in. Along with sheep and goats, the Nubians consumed gazelle, antelope, warthogs and other wild animals now seldom seen in Sudan. The bones, and ancient water reservoirs, suggest rainfall patterns have changed in the past 2000 years, shifting 300 to 400 kilometres to the south. "There has been quite a change in environment," says Grzymski.
But it is the Nubians' written language that he finds most intriguing. Borrowing 24 signs from Egyptian hieroglyphics and using them as an alphabet, they developed their own writing system, Grzymski says.
"It's the second-oldest writing system in Africa, but it has still not been deciphered."
So far, 1,500 inscriptions written in the ancient Nubian language have been found, but no one knows what they mean. Grzymski and his colleagues are sure to find more as they continue excavating.
While finding more palaces would make Grzymiski happy, what he would most like to find is some manner of bilingual inscription to enable scholars to unlock the messages left by the Nubian people. He says the archaeologists need something like a Rosetta Stone, the famed slab of black basalt inscribed in Greek text and Egyptian hieroglyphs that enabled scholars in the early 1800s to decipher the Egyptian writings.
