PARIS: In a dimly lit office in a corner of the French National Institute for Art History, Sudanese archaeologist Shadia Abdrabo studies a photograph of pottery made in her country around 7,000 B.C. She carefully types a description of the Neolithic artifact into a spreadsheet.
As the war between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) rages on, the curator from Sudan’s National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums (NCAM) is on a yearlong research grant in France with one mission: to build an online database of the African nation’s archaeological sites, museum collections and historical archives.
Soon after the war in Sudan started, in April 2023, museums were looted and destroyed. It’s unclear what exactly went missing, but Abdrabo says her task is to find out — and time is of the essence.
“We have to work fast to secure our collections. We’ve already lost two museums and we don’t want to lose more,” Abdrabo told The Associated Press.
She says two regional museums in El Geneina and Nyala were almost completely destroyed, while in Khartoum, the National Museum — which held an estimated 100,000 objects before the war — was ransacked by militias who posted videos online of their fighters inside the storeroom.
