Background: recent political history

The more recent history of Sudan forms an important background for understanding the conflict and the various threats to cultural heritage. Omar al-Bashir took power in Sudan during a military coup in 1989. The ensuing, and protracted, civil war between the mostly Muslim northern part of the country and the non-Muslim south ended in a truce in 2005 and the partition of the country in 2011, with South Sudan becoming a newly independent state.

Prior to the truce, an armed struggle in Darfur (in the west of Sudan) saw al-Bashir’s forces commit genocide against civilians between 2003 and 2005. Alongside elements of his army, commanded by Abdel Fattah Burhan, al-Bashir paid local militias to carry out a great deal of the fighting and killing, resulting in at least 200 000 civilian deaths and the displacement of millions (Reliefweb 2005). The militia came to be known as Janjaweed and one of their leaders was a man named Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commonly called Hemedti.

Beginning in December 2018, popular protests led to the ousting of al-Bashir in April 2019, which started a period of great hope in Sudan, with the possibility of forming a democratic government. The downfall of al-Bashir had, however, been orchestrated by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), now led by Burhan, and the Janjaweed militia, now renamed the Rapid Support Force (RSF) and still led by Hemedti. During the protests, these forces were jointly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of civilian protesters.

When civilians were scheduled to take control of the government in October 2021 under the leadership of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, the military refused to give up power, effectively staging another coup. Just 18 months later, in April 2023, Burhan and Hemedti and their followers began a war against each other, which has continued for more than two years. This is not a civil war, as it has sometimes been called. Rather, it is a conflict between two armed groups with civilians trapped between them.

Both armies have caused substantial civilian casualties. Published figures are regularly revised, but in February 2025 it was estimated that as many as 150 000 people have died (Roberts Reference Roberts2025) and that close to 10 million are internally displaced or have left the country (out of a population of about 50 million, according to a United Nations estimate (2024)).

Politics in Sudan are complicated, as they are everywhere, and we have not even mentioned divisions and tensions surrounding religion, ethnic-tribal identity, class status, economics, other militias, and the international actors who have armed and supported the two sides. But this brief background provides a basis for understanding the threats to archaeology and cultural heritage in Sudan between 2023 and 2025.

As another preliminary note, we would like to address the perception that archaeology and heritage should not be prioritised during a humanitarian crisis (Bashir & Näser Reference Bashir and Näser2025). We argue that heritage provides a sense of identity and belonging and may also provide a focus for peace-making when the conflict eventually ends (Bradshaw et al. Reference Bradshaw, Abulgasim, Davis, Dafalla, Elamin, Mohamed, Emberling, Mithen, Rabbani and Rabbani2025). In addition, heritage really is about people; supporting heritage protection and education has proven to be an effective way to support people in Sudan. And finally, archaeologists (such as the present authors), by virtue of the time we spend living and working in local communities, can have uniquely close connections with community members, providing an awareness both of their needs and of the ways in which these may be addressed. By working through archaeological heritage, which are our fields of specialisation, we can protect museums and sites while also supporting people.

Background: cultural heritage in Sudan

Sudan’s tangible cultural heritage is preserved in cultural institutions and historical sites in the Khartoum area and in regional museums in most of the country’s 18 states (Table 1; see also Ali Mohamed & Emberling Reference Ali Mohamed, Emberling, Obungu and Probst2022). In addition, a rich assemblage of archaeological sites and monuments are preserved in and near the Nile Valley, north of Khartoum, extending more than 700km northwards to the Egyptian border. These include Sudan’s two UNESCO World Heritage sites, centred on the ancient capital cities of Napata (Jebel Barkal: Figure 2) and Meroe, and other major sites such as Kerma, the first capital of ancient Kush (c. 2000–1500 BC), and Old Dongola, the medieval capital of the Christian Nubian kingdom of Makuria (c. AD 550–1350) (though we regret that the diverse and rich intangible cultural heritage of Sudan is beyond the scope of this report).

Table 1.

A selection of museums in Sudan and their current situation.

Some of these museums and their collections are summarised as part of the Sudan Memory Project (https://www.sudanmemory.org/browse/ accessed 28 May 2025).

Figure 2.

Jebel Barkal and the surrounding archaeological site (image by Pawel Wolf, Jebel Barkal Archaeological Project 2025).

Archaeological projects in Sudan, conducted over the past century and more (Ahmed Reference Ahmed, Emberling and Williams2021; Näser Reference Naser, Emberling and Williams2021) have established historical sequences and identified major urban centres as well as the burials of nomadic peoples who lived on either side of the Nile and into the surrounding savannahs and deserts. These projects also provided the bulk of the collections held in the archaeological museums in Sudan.

In Khartoum itself, many of the historical sites, libraries, academic institutions and museums are clustered around the Presidential Palace, located along the Blue Nile River. These include the Sudan National Museum, the Ethnographic Museum, the University of Khartoum and its complex of historical buildings, encompassing the Natural History Museum, the National Records Office and the Sudan National Library. Other specialised museums in Khartoum that NCAM helped to establish include the Judicial Museum, the Women’s Museum at Ahfad University, the Sudanese Police Museum, the Currency Museum, the Bank of Sudan Museum, the Geology Museum and the Military Museum. Of particular interest in this report are the Sudan National Museum, the Ethnographic Museum and the Khalifa House Museum in nearby Omdurman, as they have been the most-visited museums in the Khartoum area.

Sudan National Museum

The Sudan National Museum (Figure 3) is located on Sharia an-Nil (Nile Avenue) in the al-Mogran area of Khartoum, close to the confluence of the White and Blue Nile rivers (Ali Mohamed & Anderson Reference Ali Mohamed and Anderson2013; Rilly Reference Rilly2013; Ali Mohamed & Emberling Reference Ali Mohamed, Emberling, Obungu and Probst2022). Established in 1971, it also houses NCAM. Before the current war, the museum held an estimated 100 000 objects covering thousands of years of Sudanese history, ranging from prehistory to the Kushite empire, the Christian Nubian kingdoms and the Islamic period (c. AD 1400–1800). A significant catalyst for the National Museum’s construction was the large number of artefacts and buildings excavated and relocated during the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, occasioned by the construction of the Aswan High Dam during the 1960s. The museum galleries had been deinstalled in preparation for a UNESCO-funded renovation, and the display objects packed in crates in the museum storerooms, when the war started.

Figure 3.

The Sudan National Museum façade before the current war (photograph by Marc Maillot © Section Française de la Direction des Antiquités du Soudan 2012).

Destruction of Sudan’s cultural heritage

The current war began with very little warning on 15 April 2023. Most of the initial combat was in the capital city of Khartoum and the adjacent cities of Omdurman and Khartoum North, with an initial raid also being made on an airfield at Merowe, some 400km to the north, near the museums of Jebel Barkal and Merowe.

It was not immediately clear what specific threats the war would pose to museums and to archaeological sites and monuments in Sudan, but historical precedents provided some indication that destruction could be severe. International concerns about damage to cultural heritage after the First and Second World Wars ultimately led to the creation of UNESCO and the adoption of the Hague Convention for Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict in 1954. More recent parallels in the broader region include the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in 2001; the looting of sites and museums in Iraq around the US-led invasion in 2003; sporadic looting of sites and museums in Egypt around the Arab Spring in 2011 (Parcak et al. Reference Parcak, Gathings, Childs, Mumford and Cline2016); and looting and destruction by ISIS in Syria and Iraq around 2015 (Emberling & Hanson Reference Emberling, Hanson and Gunter2019). The full toll of the Israeli bombing and military campaigns in Gaza since October 2023 has not yet been tallied.

In the early months of the war in Sudan, many civilians living in the Khartoum area fled for safety, including the entire staff of NCAM. The Sudanese government was quickly forced to suspend salary payments to employees, including most of NCAM as well as university-based archaeologists. Together, these changes created an immediate danger that there would be no specialists remaining to monitor threats and damage.

Within a few weeks, the RSF controlled most of Khartoum. Looting, vandalism, combat damage and destruction eventually affected all the museums in Khartoum, including the National Museum, causing a substantial loss of cultural heritage. RSF members filmed themselves inside the Bioarchaeology Lab at the National Museum, posting the video online. Until recently, however, the full extent of the damage has been difficult to assess because the RSF did not allow NCAM staff or international observers access to these sites. NCAM and the international community have thus been forced to rely on reports from non-specialists via social media for much of the past two years. In addition to threats of damage and the looting of museums, there has been damage and threat to the storerooms of archaeological projects, for example at Soba, south of Khartoum, and by gold miners on Sai Island in Northern State. The British Museum’s research project at Amara West had built a visitor orientation and storage facility at the site. In April 2023, Google Earth imagery suggested some damage, and by July NCAM staff documented its total destruction (Figure 4), likely by gold-digging groups.

Figure 4.

Remains of the Amara West archaeological storeroom after destruction in April–May 2023 (photograph by Shadia Abdrabo, National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums).

It was widely reported that truckloads of artefacts from the National Museum were removed by the RSF to western Sudan (e.g. Mohammed Salih Reference Mohammed Salih2024). This information from the Sudanese central intelligence agency has been corroborated by international organisations, with the trucks appearing on satellite images. A truck was stopped by the SAF as it crossed into South Sudan and it was reported that some artefacts from the National Museum were recovered, although the details have not been made public. A few items that may have been from the National Museum collection were also offered for sale, some online (on eBay) and some by phone (Constantin Reference Constantin2024).

The conflict has been highly mobile, and it has often been difficult to predict where fighting would occur. NCAM made efforts (discussed below) to move collections from regional museums to safer storage and were successful in many cases, but two regional museums (El-Geneina and Nyala) were extensively damaged and looted by the RSF in 2023–2024 (Geranpayeh Reference Geranpayeh2025).

In addition to threats from looting and the conflict itself, potential damage to archaeological sites is also being caused by the unprecedented influx of people displaced from the capital region. This is one of the unusual aspects of the situation in Sudan, compared with what happened in Iraq and Syria. Having lost their livelihoods, many displaced Sudanese people have turned to agriculture and gold mining, and some have attempted to build houses on archaeological sites. The growing number of people around archaeological sites also increases the risk of vandalism and inadvertent damage, although it can present an opportunity for education and engagement (Bradshaw et al. Reference Bradshaw, Abulgasim, Davis, Dafalla, Elamin, Mohamed, Emberling, Mithen, Rabbani and Rabbani2025).

NCAM action

The leadership of NCAM moved to Cairo soon after the beginning of the war, where it set up an antiquities department in exile and formed an Emergency Response Committee to monitor the developing threats to heritage. Since the outbreak of the war, the primary concern of NCAM (after the safety of its staff) has been the safety of museums and historical buildings located near areas of active combat. The first measure taken was to create a WhatsApp group to monitor museums and buildings and report levels of risk based on location and distance from the conflict zone. In addition, NCAM created a location map to help staff who remained in the country to safeguard cultural heritage. It further created an Emergency Action Department to assess damage and implement measures to protect sites when it was safe to do so.

Throughout the conflict, NCAM staff have actively participated in international workshops and conferences to inform the international community of threats to heritage in Sudan. For example, in September 2024, a number of NCAM staff and Sudanese scholars presented papers at the Meroitic Studies conference in Münster related to lost heritage and the conflict, and Dr Ikhlas Abdel Latif, Director of Museums for NCAM, also presented a paper at the 27th conference of the General Union of Arab Archaeologists in November 2024. More recently, NCAM participated in an exhibition at the International Forum of Civilizations of the Nile Valley (Egypt and Sudan), organised by the Italian Cultural Institute in Cairo in 2025. These events have been important opportunities for NCAM to share information and generate support from international colleagues.

The progression of the war has often been unpredictable, and NCAM staff have had to adapt to try to keep themselves and their collections safe. The managers of the two UNESCO World Heritage sites in Sudan, Meroe (Mahmoud Suliman Bashir) and Jebel Barkal (Sami Elamin), remained in the country. Mahmoud and Sami are also responsible for the safety of archaeological sites throughout River Nile and Northern states, respectively (together comprising most of the known archaeological sites in the country), and their continued presence formed a focal point for displaced NCAM staff. The Merowe airfield was targeted by the RSF at the beginning of the war but was then not directly threatened for over a year. By contrast, River Nile state became unsafe in the second year of the war as the RSF consolidated control of Khartoum North and was able to launch raids northwards, including to the archaeological site of Naga, where firefights with local police led to several deaths and the dig house of the archaeological project was looted (Naga Project 2024).

The regional office in Jebel Barkal, with the support of international partners, has been equipped with meeting rooms, robust internet networks and solar power, allowing regular communication with NCAM and international organisations and colleagues. It also acts as a training centre for heritage protection and has allowed NCAM staff to participate in international workshops and conferences.

In collaboration with international partners, NCAM intensified its efforts in areas where cultural and historical sites were in immediate danger. The Merowe Museum, which contained archaeological collections from salvage excavations conducted during the construction of the nearby Merowe Dam (c. 2000–2008), was located close to an initial RSF attack and the RSF has continued to threaten the region. With funding from Cultural Emergency Response and the Sudan Archaeological Research Society, the collections were moved across the Nile to safer storage in the Jebel Barkal Museum. In the Sheikan Museum in El-Obeid, the collection was documented and evacuated with the support of the British Council, as were the collections of the Sultan Ali Dinar Museum in El-Fasher, and the El-Damer Museum, the Sennar Museum and the El-Jazirah Museum in Wad Madani.

With the increased need for housing and jobs outside the conflict zones, archaeological sites are threatened by agriculture, construction or gold mining. In many cases, NCAM was able to register archaeological sites with the State Survey Office to reduce risk of their destruction.

Action of the international community

The international community—including institutions, governments and scholars—has been actively working to assist Sudan with protecting and preserving its cultural heritage. In addition to the collaborative efforts detailed above, one response of the international community has been to organise training workshops. One took place in Cairo by the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), as part of its FAR programme (First Aid and Resilience for Cultural Heritage in Times of Crisis) in June 2023. This workshop was initiated by the British architect Michael Mallinson, together with the Egyptian Heritage Rescue Foundation (EHRF), UNESCO Cairo, UNESCO Khartoum, ICCROM’s Regional Centre in Sharjah, and representatives from the British Museum and the International Council of Museums Egypt. A second hybrid workshop on crisis response was held in Cairo in July 2023, with a broader range of participants, and a third was held in April 2024. In addition, the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology in Cairo organised a workshop on monitoring sites and museums (September 2024), and UNESCO has organised a regular meeting of organisations and potential funders in an attempt to co-ordinate efforts.

Members of archaeological projects that had been conducting work in Sudan have also been greatly concerned. In some cases, they have been able to continue some version of their activities during the war; in others, they have been able to send modest funding to the local communities in which they worked.

A major challenge has been finding ways to get money into the country during wartime. Sudan was under American and international financial sanctions until 2020 and some of these restrictions remain in place. One result is that Sudanese banks are not connected to the international banking system and the direct wiring of funds into accounts in Sudan is not possible. Various less-formal methods have been developed, all requiring an unusual degree of flexibility from funding institutions, although not all have been able to release funding successfully.

One field project that has been able to remain active throughout the war is the Jebel Barkal Archaeological Project (JBAP), a joint project between NCAM and the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan (co-directed by one of the authors of this paper). JBAP relied on an existing grant for ‘community-engaged conservation’ from the US State Department’s Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation, which was unfortunately cancelled by the Trump administration in February 2025. This project, built around a collaborative model in which all key positions were held jointly by Sudanese and international scholars and practitioners, was able to continue its work effectively because of the trust gained in earlier seasons of work (Bradshaw et al. Reference Bradshaw, Abulgasim, Davis, Dafalla, Elamin, Mohamed, Emberling, Mithen, Rabbani and Rabbani2025). JBAP has been able to support colleagues who relocated to the area of Jebel Barkal, to actively protect the site from increased visitation and to ameliorate damage from the unusually heavy rains that hit Sudan in August 2024, including rescue excavations. We have also used the opportunity of more people visiting the site to develop a programme of training for local site guides and to conduct outreach in local communities, including among displaced people living in camps. These activities have provided some small comfort and support to communities around the site. All this work has been carried out under the direction of Sami Elamin, who courageously decided to remain in Sudan to do what he could to protect the sites and museums under his supervision. We hope that this heritage work will provide support for rebuilding human connections in Sudan when the war ends.

The area around Meroe has been less safe than the area of Jebel Barkal for much of the war, and funding for projects in that area has encountered more barriers. Despite this, Mahmoud Suliman Bashir (who also remained in Sudan) has worked with the support of international funding to control flooding, the development of sand dunes and damage to the royal pyramids at the site, as well as rescue excavations (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Meroitic period lion statue found in rescue excavation at the site of El-Daragab, near Meroe in 2023 (photograph by Mahmoud Suliman Bashir).

Other international organisations and individuals have made significant contributions. Generous private donations, organised by the Sudan Archaeological Research Society (https://www.sudarchrs.org.uk/) have supported a large number of NCAM staff, including guards at archaeological sites, for much of the first two years of the war. The American Sudanese Archaeological Research Center (https://amsarc.org/) has provided small grants for Sudanese scholars to continue research, conduct community engagement, protect sites and, more recently, to translate scholarly articles into Arabic to facilitate the teaching of Sudan’s archaeological heritage to a cohort of displaced students. It has also hosted regular online lectures by Sudanese and international scholars to highlight current work.

At least three other international organisations have worked, and continue to work, to monitor damage to cultural heritage in Sudan, primarily through satellite imagery: the Smithsonian Institution’s Cultural Rescue Unit (https://culturalrescue.si.edu/); Heritage Through Peace through its Sudan Heritage Protection Initiative (https://www.heritageforpeace.org/sudan-heritage-protection-initiative-shpi/); and the Section Française de la Direction des Antiquités du Soudan (SFDAS) through their projects ‘Innovating monitoring approaches for heritage protection in Sudan’ and ‘Sudan Archaeological Heritage Protection Project’ (https://sudanheritageproject.wordpress.com/).

SFDAS, also known as the French Unit, is a French archaeological unit housed within NCAM and now also in exile in Cairo. It has continued to provide support for cataloguing in the National Museum and the Kerma Museum, with the publication of a trilingual catalogue by the missions working in Kerma. SFDAS also launched a project to create a virtual museum based on objects that had been on display in the Sudan National Museum in collaboration with NCAM and the Musée du Louvre in Paris. It further offers annual scholarships to Sudanese researchers and students, in Sudan or in exile, to facilitate their research.

Update: March–July 2025

In March 2025, the SAF regained control of the Al-Mogran area in Khartoum with its wealth of museums and cultural institutions, which by that point had been controlled by the RSF for 20 months. Soon after, videos and photographs from the Sudan National Museum were posted on social media, showing the extensive damage to the museum building and grounds (Figure 6). The Khalifa House Museum has been looted, and the Ethnographic Museum was looted and burned down (Figure 7).

Figure 6.

The Sudan National Museum facade, after its liberation from the RSF (photograph by Gasim Hassan Nasir, National Committee for Assessment and Protection of Khartoum Museums, NCAM, July 2025).

Figure 7.

The courtyard of the Ethnographic Museum after burning (photograph by Gasim Hassan Nasir, National Committee for Assessment and Protection of Khartoum Museums, NCAM, July 2025).

After the SAF removed unexploded shells and armaments from the area, NCAM staff were able to begin the work of documenting the damage to the National Museum, as well as the losses from its collection and archives; the work is ongoing and was supported initially by small donations from individuals, projects and organisations. NCAM requested assistance in co-ordinating and fundraising from the International Society for Nubian Studies. A small taskforce of archaeologists working in Nubian Studies has been formed and has secured grants from the Michaela Schiff Giorgini Foundation and from the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage (ALIPH) Foundation to begin restoration and recovery.

Since the liberation of Khartoum from the RSF, NCAM has also increasingly led efforts to inform international institutions about looted artefacts. A preliminary list was submitted to Interpol. Presentations were made at a UNESCO conference in Cairo (April 2025) on combating the illicit trafficking of cultural heritage, with relevant authorities including police and border guards in attendance. NCAM made contact with the International Council of Museums to prepare a Red List for Sudanese collections to help customs and police officers recognise the types of objects that might be smuggled. A preliminary list of looted objects was also submitted to UNESCO.

Remarkably, a few archaeological projects held field seasons in the north of Sudan in 2025, including two Russian projects in north-eastern Sudan (Red Sea state), an Austrian project in Northern State and a joint American-Sudanese project at Jebel Barkal (conducted entirely by Sudanese team members).