Evidence that Man was Making Art 200,000 Years Ago, 170,000 Years BEFORE the First Cave Paintings - This and More Revealed in Treasures from Sudan at the British Museum 2004

Date: 12-09-2004
Owning Institution: British Museum
Publication:     Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2010  
Subject:   Classical Antiquity    

In the 1940s the archaeologist A.J. Arkell noted the presence of Paleolithic sites on Sai Island, in the Nile in northern Sudan, and remarked that excavation of those sites might reveal significant information about Stone Age man in North Africa. He failed to act on his own intuitions, however, and the place was more or less forgotten until its rediscovery in 1996 by a team of Belgian architects from the University of Leuven. As Arkell had suspected, they found that the extremely unusual geomorphology of the site – where a depression protected by a sandstone ridge had created a “sediment trap”, preserving deep layers of trapped history from erosion – had created a rare opportunity to excavate for signs of human activity in the Palaeolithic period. So they dug, and the remarkable fruits of their explorations can now be seen in a new exhibition, “Sudan: Ancient Treasures”, which opened last Friday at the British Museum.

The finds from Sai are by no means the most visually spectacular exhibits in this wide-ranging show, but they are certainly among the most thrilling. They include the kind of material that might be expected from a Stone Age settlement – the jagged triangular head of a handaxe made from sandstone, another axe of quartz, some grinding tools – but also a small group of intriguingly amorphous lumps of hard, coloured material. These gobbets of stuff, which are agglomerations of yellow iron oxide, yellow ochre and red ochre, clearly rubbed and worn and shaped by human touch, were found with a number of smooth pebbles themselves bearing traces of colour. This apparently innocuous gathering of objects amounts to the world’s earliest clear evidence of human beings gathering, processing and using pigments – and represents, therefore, the almost unimaginably dim and distant first stirrings of Man the Artist, all of 200,000 years ago, some 170,000 years before the generally accepted date of the earliest known cave paintings.

Everything else remains speculation. Were the pigments used to paint pictures, or to decorate human bodies, perhaps on certain ritual occasions? Were the stones found with them used to grind and prepare the pigment, or do they bear traces of colour because they were once themselves decorated objects – in which case they would constitute the earliest known examples of human artistic expression? All that can be said with confidence, to judge by statistical analysis of pigments found at the site, is that the men and women of North Africa in the Stone Age particularly liked the colour yellow.

Sudan is the largest country in Africa, covering an area of more than 2.5 million square kilometres. Thanks to its geography it has, for millennia, been a place where different civilisations have met and intermingled, clashing with one another and assimilating one another’s different traditions. One of the principal areas of contact between Central Africa, the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds, its culture has been influenced by Egypt and, more remotely, by Rome; by Islam and by Christianity; and by the arts and activities of many different tribes, both settled and nomadic. Partly because of the historical heterogeneity of Sudan, its lack of association with a single easily identifiable archetype, its culture remains far less well known and appreciated than that of its near neighbour, Egypt. It is the neglected civilisation of the Nile.

The story of Sudan presented by the British Museum, which contains artefacts mostly from the northern part of the country, but ranging in date from the Stone Age to the present day, is one both of long continuities and of sudden, sharp ruptures. Near the start of the show a case contains five exquisitely shaped lip plugs, long, smooth, bilobed objects of startling abstract grace, formed from materials such as ivory and amber-coloured carnelian, between seven and ten thousand years ago, near El-Barga in Sudan, by members of a late hunter-gathering society – and almost identical to similar ornaments worn by peoples in East Africa today. Relics from the later so-called “Kerma culture”, which developed out of pre-existing Neolithic societies around 2500 BC, also show an unbroken link to the culture of contemporary Africa. One recently excavated tomb of a Kerma king was found to contain the remains of a staggering sacrifice of 4,000 head of cattle, conspicuous symbol of his wealth and power; and some of the impressive bucrania, or cattle horns, recovered from that site are included in the display. Works of twentieth-century and contemporary art also on show in the museum, in tributary displays close to the North Entrance and in the domed Reading Room, testify to the continuing symbolic power of bulls and cows in Sudan. These include an elaborate mid-twentieth-century neck ornament, formed exotically from a multitude of Venetian glass beads, each one of which would have corresponded to one of the cattle owned by the wearer; as well as more recent lithographs and sculptures by the gifted modern Sudanese painter and sculptor Osman Shibir, whose repertoire of forms is dominated by minotaur-like figures, distant African cousins to those of Picasso, which reflect the continuing symbiotic relationship between man and his livestock in much of rural Sudan today.

Sudanese culture in the three millennia before the birth of Christ was distinctively shaped by contact with Egypt, and the exhibition contains numerous fascinating relics of Egyptian occupation and colonisation – tomb memorials, fine jewellery, such as a number of exquisite flies and scarabs fashioned from pure gold, and a mass of temple ornaments, including numerous, impassively impressive images of gods and kings. The relationship between the peoples of Sudan and their Egyptian neighbours was more complex than that, simply, of colonisers to colonised, and in the middle years of the eighth century BC the rulers of the Kingdom of Kush themselves conquered the entire Egyptian Nile Valley. Their rule was short-lived but Kushite culture remained a powerful force in Africa for more than a thousand years. Described by the British Museum’s expert on Sudan, Derek Welsby, as “a rich amalgam of Pharaonic, Persian, Hellenistic or Roman and indigenous African traditions”, Kushite art is perhaps the greatest revelation of this exhibition. The most startling work in the show is a ceramic Kushite statue of an infrequently encountered dwarf-goddess known as Beset, which Welsby himself recently discovered, in pieces, at a temple site in Kawa. The goddess half-squats, arms akimbo, thrusting her prominent breasts and pubic mound – incised with numerous grooves to represent pubic hair – at the world. Beset was a deity shared by the Kushites and the Egyptians but her origins almost certainly lie in the Sudan. Her face, with its flared nostrils and pouting lips and heavy, hooded eyes, is far removed from Egyptian facial types and she is imbued with a raw sexual energy alien to Egyptian temple art. She is thought (for evident reasons) to have been associated with sexuality, women and childbirth.

“Sudan: Ancient Treasures” lives up to its title in that it really is a treasure trove, full of unfamiliar but wonderful objects: votive wall paintings created in the early Middle Ages, when missionaries from the Byzantine Empire converted large parts of the population to Christianity and when persecuted Copts from Egypt sought safe haven there; carved inscriptions and arms and armour created by later generations of Moslems; and throughout all periods a stunning array of pots and ceramics, finer than anything created in Egypt and some – especially the ancient glazed ceramics of the “Kerma period”, which are stunningly delicate in form and surface decoration – to compare in quality with the most famous products of China and Japan.

All of the objects contained in “Sudan: Ancient Treasures” have been loaned by the Museum of Khartoum, which has longstanding connections with the British Museum, and many of them were found during recent excavations, which means that this is the first time that an audience other than professional archaeologists has had an opportunity to see most of them. The exhibition was planned several years ago, when the current crisis in and around Darfur was not foreseen. But in some respects the political turmoil of the present brings the aims behind the show – to reveal the depth and breadth of the country’s artistic and cultural past, to enrich and complicate the stereotypical view of Sudan as a remote African trouble spot – into sharper focus. Normally, the British Museum would charge visitors admission to an exhibition as ambitious and expensive to organise as this one. But on this occasion there is no entry fee, only an invitation to contribute to two charities – Oxfam and Save the Children – which are particularly closely involved in the effort to bring relief to those suffering in Sudan today.