Many Sudanese are turning to three millennia of cultural history to build a new identity—one that balances ancient African heritage with recent centuries of Arab influence
leaving the country without civilian leadership.) The general called it a state of emergency, but the Sudanese people recognized it as a coup and turned out by the hundreds of thousands to protest in the country’s capital, Khartoum, and beyond.
When I returned to Sudan in January 2020 to explore these questions, the postrevolutionary capital felt energized. In Khartoum, where just a year earlier women could be publicly flogged for wearing pants, young Sudanese were dancing at music festivals and packing cafés. The city’s thoroughfares and underpasses were emblazoned with portraits of modern martyrs—some of the estimated 250 protesters killed during and since the revolution—as well as murals of ancient Kushite kings and gods.
The remains of the Amun temple that visitors see today, however, come from a time after the collapse of the New Kingdom and the retreat of Egyptian power in Kush. By the eighth century B.C., Jabal Barkal had become the center of Napata, the Kushite capital from which a series of local rulers consolidated power and turned the tables on their former colonizers.
That view of the African kingdom was reinforced by the racism of most Western scholars. “The native negroid race had never developed either its trade or any industry worthy of mention, and owed their cultural position to the Egyptian immigrants and to the imported Egyptian civilization,” remarked George Reisner, a Harvard University archaeologist who undertook the earliest scientific excavations of the royal tombs and temples of Kush in the early 20th century.
Now Elamin and a team of Sudanese and American archaeologists are searching for the homes and workshops of ancient Kushites who supported this spiritual capital for millennia. Jabal Barkal has long been a popular destination for Sudanese who come during holidays to climb the mesa and picnic in the broad swaths of shade it casts across the desert. In the past, Elamin says, visitors paid little attention to the sprawl of ruins surrounding the magnificent rock outcropping. But that’s changing.
The south flank of Jabal Barkal looms above an Islamic cemetery. Arab Muslim elites have long monopolized power in Sudan, but marginalized groups hope that a new generation of Sudanese will forge a more inclusive future.Tucked around the corner from Taharqa is one of the country’s most heralded artifacts: a glowering bronze head of Caesar Augustus. It’s believed to have been the war trophy of a one-eyed Kushite queen named Amanirenas, who battled the Romans in Egypt around 25 B.C.
Then I pose a delicate question: How do ethnic groups living in areas of Sudan that never were part of the Kushite Empire—tribes from the Nuba mountains or Darfur, for example—react when asked to rally around an ancient history they don’t feel is theirs? Bashir’s regime was notorious for exploiting ethnic and religious differences to prevent the richly diverse country from uniting against the Arabized political elite in Khartoum. Jahin furrows his brow and pauses. “This is a good point.
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