A shock for experts, a voyage of discovery for art lovers and history buffs: Larger-than-life sculptures in Hellenistic style, statues and monumental temple reliefs of African rulers in Pharaonic regalia, colossal animal sculptures of sacred rams and lions, relief stelae with images of gods and kings, and inscriptions in hieroglyphics that are not Egyptian. The exhibition “Königsstadt Naga” showed around 130 objects that have only been excavated in the desert of Northern Sudan in the last 15 years by a team of researchers from the Egyptian Museum Berlin.
Naga was a royal city of the Meroë Empire, which was the politically and economically powerful southern neighbour of Ptolemaic-Roman Egypt from 300 BC to 350 AD. The works on loan from Sudan for this exhibition were all created in Naga in the 1st century AD. Despite this narrow limitation in space and time, they represent a spectrum of artistic diversity in sculpture, relief and architecture, ranging from African tribal art to Egyptian-inspired works to works that draw from Hellenistic-Roman sources.
As a world premiere, these artworks are an irritating broadening of the horizons of the established image of ancient art and culture. They form a bridge between Africa and the world of the Mediterranean and thus symbolically stand for a region that also today and in the future has the potential to connect continents and cultural areas. All objects were made available on loan by the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums of Sudan. The exhibition was created in cooperation with the National Museums in Berlin, funded by the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung and supported by the Verein zur Förderung des Ägyptischen Museums Berlin e.V.