In a dimly lit office in a corner of the French National Institute for Art History, Sudanese archaeologist Shadia Abdrabo studies a photograph of pottery made in her country around 7,000 B.C. She carefully types a description of the Neolithic artifact into a spreadsheet.
As the war between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) rages on, the curator from Sudan’s National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums (NCAM) is on a yearlong research grant in France with one mission: to build an online database of the African nation’s archaeological sites, museum collections and historical archives.
Soon after the war in Sudan started, in April 2023, museums were looted and destroyed. It’s unclear what exactly went missing, but Abdrabo says her task is to find out — and time is of the essence.
“We have to work fast to secure our collections. We’ve already lost two museums and we don’t want to lose more,” Abdrabo told The Associated Press.
She says two regional museums in El Geneina and Nyala were almost completely destroyed, while in Khartoum, the National Museum — which held an estimated 100,000 objects before the war — was ransacked by militias who posted videos online of their fighters inside the storeroom.
The National Museum had pieces dating back to prehistoric times, including from the Kerma Kingdom and the Napatan era when Kushite kings ruled the region as well as from the Meroitic civilization that built Sudan’s pyramids. Other galleries displayed later Christian and Islamic objects.
Among its most valuable items were mummies dating back to 2,500 B.C., some of the oldest and most archaeologically significant in the world as well as royal Kushite treasures.
‘Entire archives vanished’ UNESCO raised the alarm on reports of plundering saying the “threat to culture appears to have reached an unprecedented level.”
“My heart was broken, you know? It’s not just objects that we lost. We lost research, we lost studies, we lost many things,” Abdrabo said.
Last month, hundreds of people were left dead and more than 80,000 others forced into displacement after the capture of North Darfur’s capital, El Fasher, by the RSF. For Abdrabo the work is deeply personal.
“I’m from Nubia, from the north, an area filled with monuments, archaeological sites and ancient life,” she said. The region was home to some of the world’s earliest kingdoms that rivaled ancient Egypt in power and wealth.
She was working at the national museum in the capital Khartoum when the war started.
“We thought it would finish soon ... but then life started getting really difficult: not just the bombing, but there was no electricity, no water,” she said. With her three sisters, she fled north — first to Atbara, then to Abri, and eventually to Port Sudan.
During that time, Abdrabo and her NCAM colleagues worked tirelessly to try and protect Sudan’s 11 museums and sites — some designated with UNESCO World Heritage status — moving pieces to safe rooms and secret locations.
But efforts to protect Sudan’s art were too slow, said Ali Nour, a Sudanese cultural heritage advocate.
“While applications were being drafted, sites were being emptied. While risk assessments were reviewed, entire archives vanished,” Nour wrote in an article for the UK-based International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works.
Urgent recovery efforts UNESCO said it carried out inventories, trained police and customs officers to recognize stolen antiquities, while appealing to collectors “to refrain from acquiring or taking part in the import, export or transfer of ownership of cultural property from Sudan.”
But, unlike similar cultural emergencies that followed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, "Sudan has not benefited from strong media coverage denouncing the degradation and plundering of its cultural heritage,'' according to researcher Meryam Amarir. ‘’This lack of visibility has reduced the international response.”
Ancient Sudan was connected, through trade and military activity, with Egypt, the Mediterranean world and Mesopotamia, and was the source of much of the gold available in the region, according to Geoff Emberling of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan.
“If we’re interested in these ancient cultures, then we have to be interested in Sudan,” said Emberling, who is involved with the recently established Sudan Cultural Emergency Recovery Fund.
The task force, requested by NCAM, aims to unite institutions, scholars, and donors around the urgent recovery efforts of Sudan’s heritage.
“What Shadia Abdrabo is doing is urgently essential — establishing what’s missing,” Emberling told the AP. “And with a team of about 15 Sudanese now working in the museum in Khartoum to clean and restore what has been damaged, they will soon be able to compare what remains there now.”
‘I cry when I talk about this’ Abdrabo has funding until April 2026 to finish compiling the data and building a platform, but she worries it won’t be enough time.
The work is painstaking. Some datasets arrive as spreadsheets, others as handwritten inventories or photographs taken decades ago. Colleagues at the Louvre, the British Museum and others lend support but she works mostly alone.
“I’m trying to finish this database but it’s a lot. I’ve done about 20% of the work. Just for the national museums, I’ve recorded 1,080 objects so far ... and then I have to do other museums, sites, archives... I need to add pictures, ID numbers, coordinates ...”
As the winter settles over Paris, the crisis in Sudan drives Abdrabo.
“We are working on tracking what has been looted,” she said. “I cry when I talk about this. My only goal and message is to bring back as much as possible, to do as much as I can for Sudan, but it’s not easy for us.”
It’s not just the war itself, but the consequences of it that could affect the country’s heritage: “militias, people displaced... it’s not safe for the art to be in unsecure locations,” she added.
“Until the war finishes we just don’t know what is going to happen.”
