Nubia Museum

Introduction

The Nubia Museum opened in 1997 with UNESCO support as a single-subject museum devoted to Nubia, the land running south from Aswan along the Nile valley into northern Sudan. Its sequence covers roughly twelve thousand years, from Palaeolithic tools and Kushite material through Christian and Islamic remains to everyday objects of modern Nubians. The reason the museum exists is concrete. When the Aswan High Dam was filled, the villages of Lower Nubia went under Lake Nasser and about 100,000 Nubians were resettled; between 1960 and 1980 UNESCO ran an international campaign to excavate the valley's sites before the water rose. The museum's most distinctive section is the rescue wing: no other museum in Egypt tells the story of Nubian displacement and the temple relocations in this detail. The story most foreign visitors do not know before walking in is the Kingdom of Kush. In the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty kings Piye, Shabaka, Taharqa and Tanutamun ruled all of Egypt from Nubia. Nubia was not the periphery of Egypt; for a long stretch it was Egypt's master. That is the single most worth correcting when you come in. The building is part of the visit. Its stone facades, domes and courtyards are drawn from vernacular Nubian house forms, and a garden of about 50,000 square metres holds a full-scale reconstruction of a Nubian house, relocated ancient monuments, granite boulders from the First Cataract landscape and a shallow pool, with views across the Nile to the western desert and Nubian villages. The galleries are heavily air-conditioned, so in summer bring a light layer. One common error worth clearing up: what was inscribed in 1979 is the Nubian Monuments from Abu Simbel to Philae, a group of ten sites including Philae, the Aswan granite quarries and the Unfinished Obelisk, Elephantine, the Monastery of St Simeon and the tombs at Qubbet el-Hawa. The Nubia Museum itself is not on that list and was not inscribed in 2001. It documents the rescue campaign rather than forming part of the listing.

✨ Highlights

🛈 Practical Info