Remembering the "Nubia Campaign" - (Culture and History of the Ancient Near East) (Hardcover)

About the Book

Remembering the Nubia Campaign is a touching revisitation, 50 years later and by the protagonists, of what is still today considered the most important undertaking in the field of cultural heritage.

Book Synopsis

The surviving protagonists of the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, one of the most important enterprises in the field of cultural heritage, met, many years later, at the Nubia Museum of Aswan to celebrate its 50th Anniversary. It was March 2009. They recounted their personal experience in Nubia, highlighting the success of the technical work carried out but without ever forgetting what has been irremediably lost in this conflict between culture and human development. The "Campaign" transformed the Nubia region not only in a international chantier of new and challenging scientific experiences but also in a theatre of unforgettable human relationships. Dynamics, reflections, evaluations, mixed with scientific data, make this volume an educational manual in the field of cultural heritage at all levels enriched by descriptions of natural panoramas, no longer visible to our eyes, geological observations, insights on local flora and fauna. Words and images offer a vision of not only what is part of the collective memory of major events (almost always scientific/academic) but also popular memories of ordinary individuals of which history is also made.

Review Quotes

"Being published in the shadow of the ongoing conflict in Sudan and recent examples of extensive looting of the National Museum of Sudan in Khartoum, the volume's critical consideration of cultural heritage and its loss remain as relevant and pertinent today as it was during the Nubian Campaign."-Robert J. Stark, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

About the Author

Maria Costanza De Simone is an Egyptologist specialist in Nubian studies (Egypt and Sudan), with extensive experience mostly gained in 19 years of stable work in the field -especially as a UNESCO expert- where she now coordinates the creation of the Nubia Museum in Wadi Halfa.