Virtual museum preserves Sudan's plundered heritage

Cairo: Destroyed and looted in the early months of Sudan s war, the national museum in Khartoum is now welcoming virtual visitors after months of pain...

Cairo: Destroyed and looted in the early months of Sudan's war, the national museum in Khartoum is now welcoming virtual visitors after months of painstaking effort to digitally recreate its collection.

At the museum itself, almost nothing remains of the 100,000 artefacts it had stored since its construction in the 1950s.

Only pieces too heavy for looters to haul off, like the massive granite statue of the Kush Pharaoh Taharqa and frescoes relocated from temples during the building of the Aswan Dam, are still present on site.

"The virtual museum is the only viable option to ensure continuity," government antiquities official Ikhlass Abdel Latif said, during a recent presentation of the project carried out by the French Archaeological Unit for Sudanese Antiquities (SFDAS) with support from the Louvre and Britain's Durham University.

When the museum was plundered following the outbreak of the war between the regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023, satellite images showed trucks loaded with relics heading towards Darfur, the western region now totally controlled by the RSF.