Concerted Effort to Save Sudan’s Pyramids

Matthias Meyer, the German ambassador, had long dreamed of staging a performance of Beethoven works in the deserts of Sudan to raise money to restore at least one of the country’s ancient pyramids.

The idea took off when he raised it with a friend, Klaus-Peter Modest, a Hamburg conductor who is musical director of the Deutsche Akademische Philharmonie. Preparations began last year, and recently 30 musicians and Modest covered their expenses for a performance to save a 2,000-year-old pyramid.

About 125 miles north of Khartoum, with the 144 pyramids of the Meroitic kings and queens as a backdrop, the orchestra played Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C Major on a makeshift stage.

With ticket prices starting at $80, the event raised $23,000, the estimated cost of restoring what is known as pyramid No. 20.

Sudan, poor and ravaged by civil war since 1983, has been unable to develop its pyramids into a tourist attraction to rival the pyramids farther north in Egypt. The Meroitic site lacks running water, electricity or toilets. The few tourists who come have to make their own way to the ruins of the city of Meroe, its temple complex and its vast royal, noble and commoner cemeteries.

For the concert, however, charter buses headed for the desert with the German musicians, a Sudanese theater troupe and the audience for the night -- a crowd of about 250 that included Sudanese, but was made up mostly of Western diplomats, United Nations staffers and other foreigners.

Some had the foresight to bring picnic baskets; most settled themselves on scattered pieces of stone.

The musicians, wearing formal black, were seated on folding chairs on the “stage”-- an area of swept earth -- and played on despite wind and sand.

The Sudanese actors performed a pantomime drawn from what scholars know about ancient rituals about the death of a king and the coronation of a new king, a theme of renewal suited for the occasion.

Friedrich Hinkel, a German archeologist, has been working with Sudan’s Department of Antiquities and Archeological Sites since the 1960s to study and restore the Meroitic tombs. He helped choose pyramid No. 20 as the beneficiary of the concert.

No. 20’s design, with smooth faces, corner decorations and a decorative band, is considered unique in the Nile valley. The pyramid, built in the second century for an unknown prince or princess, has a single burial chamber located four yards under an offering chapel. It was looted centuries ago.

“The present condition of the pyramid’s superstructure gives reason for concern,” Hinkel said. “The structure is heavily damaged on its southern side. The offering chapel ... consists of only a few blocks of the northern, southern and western walls.”

The director of the antiquities department, Hassan Hussein Mohamed, said researchers hoped to raise money to restore other monuments later.

Time, neglect and harsh desert wind and sand have left No. 20 and scores of others in ruins. Some were deliberately destroyed by man. In the 19th century, Italian adventurer Giuseppe Ferlini knocked the tips off 40 pyramids as he searched for gold. Many of the utensils, tools, jewelry and other treasures Ferlini found ended up in German museums, establishing a link between Sudan and Germany.

“I think this [concert] is a very special moment in the history of Sudan and I can also say in my life, because I have never thought that something like this could happen during my stay in the Sudan,” said Meyer, the German ambassador. “This is a dream fulfilled.”

Abdul Jalil Al-Basha, Sudan’s tourism minister, said the significance of the benefit concert went beyond the good it would do for a piece of the past.

“Look at this event, the fact that hundreds of Europeans and musicians and Sudanese are in the middle of the desert shows that there is another face of the Sudan,” Al-Basha said.

With its pyramids, Meroe is a monument to the intertwined history of Egypt and Sudan. Egypt ruled what is now Sudan for five centuries, until the collapse of the Egyptian empire in the 12th century B.C. Sudanese kings ruled Egypt about 400 years later and adopted Egyptian burial and other practices.

Meroe was flourishing as the center of an African kingdom by about 400 B.C. Its culture wove threads from Egypt, farther south in Africa, even Greece.

Hinkel is credited with driving efforts to document, preserve and restore Sudan’s monuments. In recognition, the concert was held on the 43rd anniversary of the German scholar’s first visit to Sudan.