An empire on the Nile

It was only in the 18th and 19th centuries that the remains of ancient Meroe were rediscovered by European travelers, with the Scottish explorer James Bruce, the Swiss orientalist Johann Ludwig Burckhardt and the French scientist and explorer Frédéric Cailliaud all describing the ruins at Meroe. Caillaud published the first important account of the remains in his four-volume Voyage au Méroé in 1826-7.

However, it was not until the first major scientific expedition to the remains was carried out by the Prussian archaeologist Carl Richard Lepsius in 1842-45 that the fragmentary accounts left by ancient writers and more modern explorers were really added to, with Lepsius's Denkmöler aus Aegypten und Aethiopen still being considered a model of its kind.

THE LOUVRE EXHIBITION opens with a sketch of this history, for once given in Arabic and unfortunately rather poor English as well as in French, before presenting surviving items from ancient Meroe taken from the Louvre's collections as well as from collections housed in other European museums, notably in Britain and Germany, and in the National Museum of Sudan in Khartoum.

One of the most intriguing features of Meriotic civilisation is the co-existence in it of ancient Egyptian, Hellenistic and African elements, and the exhibition's division of the surviving materials into "prestige objects," "objects from daily life," "royalty and gods," and "palace, temple and funerary world" gives some idea of how this civilisation might have functioned.

Prestige objects along with those associated with royalty and religion take after Egyptian models, and Meroe was organised politically along Egyptian lines. A single Pharoah-like figure stood at the apex of a centralised state and played an important role in religious life by mediating between the population and the gods. Meriotic cities also followed Egyptian models and functioned as centres of political power and religion. Modern excavations have revealed the existence in them of large public buildings, palaces and temples.