HiddenMysteries: Where ancient gods and royalty walked

Key ROM archeologist uncovers `the daily life' of mighty kingdoms that ruled Nubian world

John Goddard

MEROE, SUDAN–More royal pyramids stand in the deserts of northern Sudan than in all of Egypt

For 3,000 years, a succession of African civilizations rose and fell along the Nile River in ancient Nubia, at one point expanding north to the Mediterranean Sea.

Relatively little is known about these peoples. While Egypt hosts up to 200 foreign archeological teams a year, Sudan until recently has averaged 10 to 12.

Among the pioneers is Krzysztof Grzymski, head of world cultures at the Royal Ontario Museum, and known to local villagers as simply "Chris."

For 25 years of annual field seasons, he has represented a friendly Canadian presence in a country known mostly for fundamentalist Islam, ties to Osama bin Laden and what the UN calls "the world's worst humanitarian crisis," the war in Darfur.

Grzymski knows a different Sudan. His work centres at Meroe (pronounced MARE-oh-way), capital of one of Africa's greatest ancient civilizations, the Kingdom of Kush. It is one of the country's key archeological showcases and one of its most photographed sites.

"This is the period that really interests me," Grzymski says, "from 750 BC to AD 350. "And halfway through this period, you have the incredible invention of their own writing, still largely undeciphered. It's a scholarly mystery."

On Saturday, as head of half the ROM's collections, Grzymski will be circulating among fellow dignitaries helping to open the Crystal wing.

Recently, he could be seen in his other role, driving three hours north from Khartoum over a desert highway to his dig.

First recorded by the Greek historian Herodotus in the 5th century BC, Meroe served as capital of the most politically sophisticated empire seen to that point in sub-Saharan Africa.

To the right of the highway, along a sandy ridge, stand more than 40 royal pyramids – some with their tops lopped off by Italian tomb raider Giuseppe Ferlini in 1833, others recently restored by German architect Friedrich Hinkel.

"I don't like digging graves," Grzymski says. "That's where you find all those treasures, I know. But I have a not very archeological attitude that we should leave the dead alone."

Instead, he digs on the left of the highway, at Meroe's Royal City on the east bank of the Nile.

To the inexperienced eye, the site looks strewn with rubble. But through Grzymski's eyes, scattered boulders resolve into grand staircases and sacred sphinxes. Low-lying walls rise to become palaces and temples, decorated with murals and graced by tree-lined avenues.

Grzysmki points out the temple to the god Amun, and indoor royal baths outfitted with ceramic pipes and covered in glazed tiles of Mediterranean hues.

"I fortunately didn't find any gold yet," he says, happy not to be the target of thieves. Artefacts for his popular 1994 ROM exhibition The Gold of Meroe came from Ferlini's 1833 plunder, today housed in Munich and Berlin.

"What fascinates me is uncovering the daily life (of the city)," he says, "the jars, the cooking pots that somebody left in the kitchen and 3,000 years later we are finding them."

In 1992, under Grzymski's direction, the ROM opened North America's first permanent Nubian exhibition. It is due to reopen in early 2009 after renovations.

Recent threats to Nubian ruins have ignited wider interest. Construction has begun on Africa's largest hydroelectric project, a dam that by the end of next year is to submerge an area north of Meroe at the Nile's fourth cataract.

Priceless antiquities stand to be lost. Flood waters threaten the remains of entire cities. As a result, Africa's largest archeological rescue project is underway, drawing teams from Britain, France, Italy, Poland, Germany, Hungary, Peru and the United States.

"It's bringing in a whole new crowd," Grzymski says. Parisian curators have consulted him on plans to open a Nubia Gallery at the Louvre in 2009, the French museum's first permanent African exhibition.

"(The Louvre) also started a field project about 40 kilometres south of Meroe at Muweis," he says. "They hope to work with the ROM both in terms of field research and museum exhibitions."

At his own site, Grzymski says his long-term priorities are to clarify when Meroe was established and why, and to create an open-air museum. Already, with help from Ottawa's Canada Fund, he has built toilet facilities for visitors and developed a water source that nearby villagers also use.

He dreams of cracking the writing code. At around 200 BC, the people of Meroe developed the second-oldest writing system in Africa after the Egyptians. Instead of continuing with the multitude of Egyptian hieroglyphics, they developed an alphabet of 23 signs, with vowels and divided words.

"We can read it but we can't understand it," Grzymski says. Pronunciations are known from Egyptian antecedents. But to understand the words, linguists need another Rosetta Stone, a bilingual tablet that sets the unknown language against a known one.

More than gold, this is the treasure Grzymski is searching for.

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John Goddard recently travelled in Sudan on a fellowship from the Canadian Association of Journalists and the Canadian International Development Agency.

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Where ancient gods and royalty walked

Sunday, June 03 2007 @ 10:00 PM CDT