Nubian Museum

There is a particular quality of light in Aswan — a clarity of late-afternoon yellow, arising from the granite dust that settles on the bedrock islands and the clean air above the first cataract — that makes the town's museum unlike any other on the Nile. The Nubian Museum is set on a gently rising terrace in the south of Aswan, a short taxi from the riverfront hotels, and it reads, architecturally, as a single unified work. It was designed by the Egyptian architect Mahmoud el-Hakim in deliberate echo of the vernacular architecture of the Nubian villages — low-pitched domes, roughcast limestone walls, courtyards open to the sky. The intent was that the museum should not impose a foreign form on a civilisation whose own building tradition had been among the world's oldest.

I. The UNESCO inheritance

The museum's institutional story begins with the international campaign of 1960 to 1980, which responded to the impending flooding of Lower Nubia by the reservoir of the Aswan High Dam. Between 1964 and 1968 the twin temples of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel were dismantled and reassembled sixty-five metres higher on the plateau above the rising waters. Other monuments were rescued to Sudan, to Egypt's own Upper Egypt sites, and (as part of the campaign's international cost-sharing) to museums in Berlin, New York, Leiden and Turin. The campaign was the largest archaeological rescue operation ever undertaken. It was also, as the decades passed, increasingly felt to owe a debt to the Nubian people whose homeland had been submerged. The Nubian Museum, opened in 1997 with UNESCO support, is the institutional payment of that debt — a comprehensive record of the civilisation whose upper reaches now lie beneath the lake.

II. The galleries

The collection runs chronologically, in a single long loop around the central atrium. The prehistoric rooms hold petroglyphs recovered from the rising waters — carvings of giraffes, cattle and boats cut into granite boulders by a Saharan population five millennia before the dynasties. The Pharaonic galleries trace Nubia's complex parallel relationship with Egypt: the Kerma culture of the Middle Kingdom; the A-Group and C-Group pastoralists; the Kushite kings who, in the eighth century before the Christian era, ruled Egypt itself as the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty and left the pyramids at Meroe. The Christian period — the kingdoms of Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia — is represented by an extraordinary collection of Coptic-painted frescoes lifted from church walls; the Islamic period by brass-inlaid lamps and carved mashrabiyas.

III. The ethnographic garden

Outside the main building, wrapped around a small mudbrick pavilion, lies an ethnographic garden reconstructing a traditional Nubian village — painted houses, a courtyard well, a camel-mill, a palm-thatched animal pen. The garden is tended by a small staff from the displaced village of Balana, themselves relocated in the 1960s, and on most days one or two of them will be present to answer questions. A single long evening walking the garden at the end of the afternoon is time very well spent.

IV. The prehistoric petroglyphs

A set of granite boulders, saved by helicopter lift from the rising waters during the Franco-Egyptian surveys of 1961–1964, is displayed in a covered courtyard on the north side of the museum. The carvings — herds of cattle, a rider with a bow, a fleet of reed-bundle boats — derive from the wetter Sahara of the sixth millennium before the Christian era, when the region supported pastoralists and hunters and lake-margin fishermen. They are among the oldest representational art in the world. That they survive at all, and that they sit now in Aswan rather than on a lake-bed, is a quiet rebuke to every fatalism about cultural loss.

V. A practical suggestion

Combine with a morning felucca to Kitchener Island and an afternoon at the museum. The museum's tea-garden, at the back of the ethnographic village, serves an excellent karkadey — hibiscus tea — and is one of the few places in Aswan where the tourist is genuinely welcomed to linger. The pass includes museum admission; the felucca ride is negotiated separately at the boat-landing, with the pass-holder entitled to the rate set by the boatmen's syndicate rather than the tourist rate.

VI. A closing thought

The Nubian Museum is, in the end, a museum about the resilience of memory in the face of modernisation. It does not speak of the High Dam as catastrophe — the dam was, for the broader Egyptian nation, an instrument of agricultural and electrical transformation — but it insists, quietly and beautifully, that the transformation had a cost, and that the cost was borne largely by a particular people, and that the particular people have a right to the continuation of their story. A pass-holder who leaves Aswan without visiting has, in our considered opinion, not fully visited Aswan.