Nubian Museum

The Nubian Museum opened in 1997 as part of the international response to what the High Dam had done: Lake Nasser drowned Lower Nubia, the temples were cut up and moved, and the population was resettled, and the museum was built to hold both the archaeology recovered in the salvage campaign and an account of Nubian culture itself. The building, in local sandstone with a Nubian-influenced plan, won architectural awards. Inside, the collection runs chronologically from prehistory through the Kingdom of Kush to the Christian and Islamic periods, with a large hall of statuary, and a substantial ethnographic section on Nubian houses, dress, music and crafts, including a full-scale reconstructed Nubian house. Outside is a garden with rock art and a reconstructed cave.

History

The museum grew out of the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, which UNESCO launched as Lake Nasser rose behind the High Dam: the Egyptian government asked for a museum in 1960, and a trust fund set up that year with money from donor states and the governments of Egypt and Sudan paid for it, with UNESCO specialists and Egyptian academics shaping its development. Designed by the Egyptian architect Mahmoud El-Hakim, the International Museum of Nubia, as it is officially called, was inaugurated on 23 November 1997 to hold the artefacts and record the culture of ancient Nubia, and in 2001 it received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture; it still works on the conservation of archaeological sites across the region (Wikipedia, Nubian Museum).

What you'll find

• The salvage campaign account - how the temples were cut and moved.
• Kushite and Meroitic material - the archaeology of the kingdoms upriver.
• A reconstructed Nubian house - the ethnographic hall at full scale.
• The sandstone building - award-winning architecture in local stone.

When to go

October to April. Afternoons, when the museum is cool and Aswan is hot. Two to three hours. It is rarely crowded and is one of the better places in Aswan to spend the middle of the day.

Before you go

It is out of the centre and needs a taxi. Photography is charged or restricted. Some galleries are dimly lit. The ethnographic section is stronger than the archaeological one for many visitors, which is the reverse of what they expect.

Nearby

The Unfinished Obelisk is close; the Aswan corniche is north.

Key facts