SUDAN - LAND OF PYRAMIDS

We owe our knowledge of the Sudanese pyramids to an American archeologist, George A. Reisner, who on behalf of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard University spent several winters between 1916 and 1923 excavating the Napatan pyramids as well as those at Meroe, a site only 210 kilometers (130 miles) north of Khartoum. While his work represented the first truly scholarly examination of these monuments, he was not the first to explore them. A hundred years before Reisner, various European travelers had passed by and left descriptions, often very detailed ones, of the Napatan and Meroitic pyramids (See box, page 9).

One of those travelers, an Italian doctor turned treasure-hunter by the name of Giuseppe Ferlini, went a step further and in 1834 began "exploring" the monuments. His goal was simple: to find the great treasures that rumor claimed were hidden inside the pyramids. According to his published account, he employed a very "efficient" - today we would say "barbarous" - method of conducting his treasure hunt: a laborious and systematic dismantling of the structures, one after another, from the top down. The tragedy, from the point of view of the modern archeologist, is that he did indeed find beautiful gold jewelry in one of the Meroe pyramids! These royal treasures eventually found their way to the museums in Munich and Berlin, and since that time have often been displayed in international exhibitions, such as the one that toured various American and European museums in 1978 (See Aramco World, July-August 1979). Fortunately, despite the explorations of Ferlini and his followers, many of the pyramids survived intact.

Reisner began the first legitimate archeological exploration of the pyramids in January 1916. As a scholar of great repute, the Sudan Railways provided him with a special first-class sleeping car, complete with kitchen, for his travel across the Nubian Desert from Wadi Haifa to Karima. The British governor of the time, Jackson Pasha - who, after a lifetime of service in Sudan, was eventually buried beneath a pyramid-shaped tombstone himself - offered the Americans a local government rest house, surrounded by a small garden, as living quarters.