Sudan National Museum
The Sudan National Museum is Sudan's largest museum and the country's foremost archaeological memory. It is located on Nile Street in the Al-Muqrin district of Khartoum, near the confluence of the Blue and White Niles and next to the Friendship Hall, and it belongs to the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums, the body responsible for protecting Sudan's antiquities and museums.
The museum's roots go back to early archaeological collections preserved in Khartoum at the beginning of the twentieth century, then the project to establish it accelerated in the 1960s with the international campaign led by UNESCO to save the antiquities of Nubia threatened with submersion after the construction of the High Dam and the formation of Lake Nasser. The museum was inaugurated at its current headquarters in 1971 in a two-storey building designed to narrate Sudan's history in sequence: the ground-floor halls begin with prehistoric eras and the cultures of Kerma, Kush, Napata and Meroe, while the upper floor displays the antiquities of Christian Nubia, foremost among them the mural paintings transferred from Faras Cathedral.
The museum is not limited to its indoor halls; its garden is an open-air museum in which Nubian temples and tombs, dismantled from their original sites before they were submerged, were reassembled around a water basin symbolising the River Nile and in the same original orientation. Among the most prominent are the Eastern and Western Semna temples, the Buhen temple from the reign of Queen Hatshepsut, the Kumma temple, the remains of the Akasha temple, the tomb of the Nubian prince Djehutihotep, and the granite columns of Faras Cathedral. Its holdings include statues, sculptures, the famous Kerma pottery, jewellery, tools, weapons and mural paintings, the most famous of which is the statue of King Taharqa.
The museum performs the role of preservation, documentation, research and education: it preserves and studies the pieces, and receives researchers, students and visitors, and its collections have participated in international exhibitions organised by the Antiquities Corporation in European and Arab capitals, so that it remains the foremost window for introducing the successive civilisations of Sudan.
(Sources: The Arabic and English Wikipedia encyclopedias — Sudan National Museum; the British Museum — page of the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums; a The Conversation study on the history of the museum and the Nubia rescue campaign; Music In Africa platform — Sudan National Museum guide)
— Editorial Team