SudanInnovation: Higher Education Training

1. Introduction

This chapter summarises the aims and the conceptual and practical aspects related to the application of innovative technologies to cultural heritage, dealt with in the advanced training programme addressed to Sudanese university students and university lecturers in the framework of the SudanInnovation project conducted by the National Research Council of Italy-Institute of Heritage Science (CNR-ISPC).

It also describes the context in which the training took place and the students of a Sudanese higher education institution, Comboni College of Science and Technology (CCST), applied the learnt contents.

2. Development and topics of the training phase

Sustainable heritage management is a multidisciplinary process. Consequently, the SudanInnovation project favoured an integrated approach that combined the protection of cultural heritage with the promotion of cultural diversity and the innovation of digital technologies.

The main aim of the project was to support the sustainable development of Sudan through the application of innovative digital technologies to cultural heritage. This implied the development of the skills and competencies of a group of university students and lecturers in computer science.

The ad hoc training programme allowed those students, with the support of the Sudanese-trained teaching staff, to develop graduation projects in which they applied technology to their own cultural heritage sector and, also, to grow in awareness about their own cultural heritage and its potential to become an engine of sustainable development.

The programme consisted of a series of webinars provided by the CNR-ISPC (with a team of 17 researchers), attended by the Sudanese students and lecturers at the CCST premises. This Sudanese university college and the national institutions responsible for the protection of cultural heritage were involved in the selection of the training content.

In particular, the beneficiaries of the training project, with a total duration of 30 hours, have been:

• 30 students of the BSc in Computer Science with priority to finalists who will have to prepare their graduation project in 2021 and with a good level of English language (15 from CCST and 15 from other Sudanese public or private universities selected in collaboration with the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research of the Republic of Sudan (MOHE)).

• Six university lecturers of CS departments (three from CCST and three from other Sudanese universities). These lecturers will be potential supervisors of the aforementioned graduation projects.

The online workshop proposed content that allowed Sudanese students and lecturers to acquire the knowledge necessary to develop degree projects where new digital technologies are mainly applied to the cultural heritage sector.

The programme included a theoretical framework on sustainable development and cultural heritage (Africa World Heritage Sites: risks and challenges for their conservation; Tourism, Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Development; Societies in transition and sustainable development; Suakin as a model of transformation of cultural heritage into an engine of sustainable development). This introduction aimed to provide technical students and lecturers with the necessary theoretical framework and attitude.

The technical topics covered were the following:

• Techniques for knowledge of the territory: remote sensing, archaeological mapping and topographical survey (high-resolution optical satellite imagery: panchromatic; InSAR and LiDAR for archaeology; photos for the study of landscape transformations; aerial photography and archaeological aero-topography; archaeological mapping for the knowledge and preservation of cultural heritage; mapping ancient roads and agricultural land divisions; cartography aimed at the archaeological research from aerial and satellite data).

• 3D GIS for Cultural Heritage in Sudan (Geographical Information System for Cultural Heritage; GIS for cultural heritage: from data management to spatial analysis).

• Preparing datasets for creating a 3D model.

• Acquisition of data using different resources and pre-processing of data for 3D/4D.

• Augmented reality.

• The creation of software for virtual visits to museums or archaeological sites (virtual reality).

• Digitisation Vanishing Architectural Heritage. The design and development of Sudan’s historic building information modelling platform (mapping from UAVs and 3D laser scanning; virtual reconstruction of ancient contests: some examples from Italy and Egypt).

• Geostatistical applications through GIS (geostatistics, GIS and cultural heritage: theoretical concepts and applied case studies; didactic methods and examples of applications to the knowledge and enhancement of the cultural heritage).

• Understanding, documenting and sharing the materiality of cultural heritage (polychromy in ancient sculpture and architecture; understanding, documenting and sharing the materiality of ancient manuscripts; looking beyond the visible: the use of X-rays to unveil the unknown past of ancient materials).

The lessons were propaedeutic to the practical activities proposed to prepare participants for the final field exercise during the thesis development. In fact, this application phase concluded the training edition.

Course participants played the role of the cultural heritage protection in Sudan, especially in light of the internal conflict that, only a few months later, would explode violently in the country, causing almost irreparable damage to many monuments.

However, this cycle of advanced training, aimed at undergraduate students and teachers, can be replicated in other sensitive contexts where cultural heritage could be at serious risk of conservation due to a lack of maintenance or possible armed conflicts.

Education in the knowledge of the cultural heritage of one’s country thus becomes the first weapon available to counter the violation of the human right to preserve the historical memory, tangible and intangible, as an inviolable expression of the identity of a people.

To this end, research and the scientific community can and must play a fundamental role in terms of international cooperation and scientific diplomacy (also known as Third Mission activity, which the CNR-ISPC is committed to [1, 2]), transferring the knowledge of the necessary skills and tools to support other peoples to grow in awareness about their origins, as established since 1954, with the Aja Convention for the protection of cultural property in the event of armed conflict and its two protocols, and in 1972 with the Paris Convention of UNESCO.

3. Projects’ contextualisation

The strategic location of Sudan along the Nile River and the junction point of the Blue and White Nile has made this country a site of ancient civilisations that have left a wonderful cultural heritage and a zone of contact among the peoples of Central Africa, the Mediterranean and the Arab world [3]. ‘The river Nile and its tributaries served as a corridor through which people, goods and ideas circulated between the south and north’ [4].

All these movements of population since Palaeolithic times have left traces that have remained particularly north of Khartoum, thanks to the characteristics of the soil and the climate. Not too much remains south of Khartoum instead, as ‘the cultures that have evolved there were using perishable building materials such as wood that did not survive in the acid soil and the rainforest’ [5]. The sand of the desert in the north of Sudan has kept stoned and brick architecture for millennia.

These treasures remained almost unknown to Europe until the publication of the illustrated volumes of Frédéric Cailliaud. He ‘was the first western scholar to come to Sudan in 1820/1822, as he accompanied Ismaïl Pacha, general military commander of his father Mehemet ali, just like the scholar squad that accompanied Bonaparte in Egypt’ [5]. The conquest of Sudan by the Ottoman Egypt of Mehemet ali finished the Funj kingdom of Sennar and reopened the country to the Mediterranean Basin and to European antiquarians, traders, explorers, travellers, etc.

Some years later, in 1842, archaeological activity gained impetus with the expedition ‘launched by the king of Prussia under the direction of Carl Richard Lepsius, the best Egyptologist of his time and German successor of Champollion’ [5].

While for Egyptologists, Sudan was part of their field of competence, in 1899, the border between Egypt and Sudan was fixed along the 22nd parallel, just north of the second Nile cataract. The great impulse to archaeology in Sudan was given by the salvage campaign launched by UNESCO in 1960 before the inauguration of the dam of Aswan, on the first cataract, that was supposed to create a more than 500 km long lake (called Lake Nasser in Egypt and Lake of Nubia in Sudan). Around 30 archaeological expeditions have uncovered some of the hidden treasures of the cultural heritage of Sudan. Part of those findings were sent to the 21 countries that had funded those expeditions, and part of them were hosted in a new museum that was inaugurated in 1971 in Khartoum. The Sudan National Museum also incorporated the collection of the Sudan Museum, founded in 1904 inside the Gordon Memorial College (today the University of Khartoum) and renamed in 1952.

The extreme weather conditions, the limited resources, the lack of modern equipment, the poor maintenance of the existing ones, sometimes due to the lack of spare parts, and the political agenda of the previous regime put many of the artefacts of these collections and materials at risk. Moreover, that same political agenda did not promote tourism in the country, which would have helped to get funds for the preservation of that cultural heritage and for its transformation into a source of income and sustainable development.

The war that broke out in April 2023 poses a further threat to that heritage and has already damaged part of it.

3.3 From computer science to cultural heritage

There is another way to link computer sciences and cultural heritage, different from the direction followed by students who come from a cultural heritage-related field and have to learn to use IT tools. It would be the opposite one, that is, to take computer science as a starting point and then introduce within it cultural heritage and its digital transformation.

At CCST, a small university college located in the centre of Khartoum, there are no departments of fine arts or archaeology. The ongoing degree programmes are a Bachelor of Science (BSc) in Computer Science, a BSc in Information Technology, two Diplomas in Information Technology applied to Accounting and Management, a BSc in Nursing, a BA in Education and a BA in English Language and Literature and around 875 students.

One particularity of these students is that 27% are refugees from South Sudan, and 14% are Eritreans and Ethiopians. Just 59% are Sudanese, and many of these come from displaced families from Darfur and South Kordofan.

Some of those refugees and displaced people arrived in Khartoum after 2013, in particular those South Sudanese who fled after their civil war started in December 2012. However, most of them are born in Khartoum and are children of refugees or displaced people, but have never seen their ancestors’ homeland. Therefore, the question about their own cultural identity becomes a paramount question.

This is why the college facilitated a reflection on this issue by creating an activity in 2015 called the ‘Cultural Week’. Every year, a theme was chosen and was supposed to be dealt with from their cultural perspective and academic field.

This activity led them to discover their own cultural heritage, work on it and present it to others. These cultural activities created a certain sensibility in the students about the importance of cultural heritage as a pillar on which they can build their personal identity in a changing world (Figure 1).

After these activities, the students themselves organised some trips to get to know better places they had never seen before, like the pyramids of Meroe, for instance.

In this context, a group of finalists of the BSc in Computer Science asked for a Core i7 computer in order to have their graduation project on the application of photogrammetry to 3D modelling of three artefacts.

The existing computers in the college were not able to respond to the needs of such a kind of project. In addition, this is one of the factors that hinders many universities in Sudan from introducing the necessary theoretical subjects in a computer science syllabus. To have a fully complete lab with 35 computers with a Core i7 processor for a group of students is not affordable for most Sudanese universities. The college bought one to facilitate the first graduation project in this field.

3.5 The location of the projects

Two graduation projects were located in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan; one in Suakin (northeast of the country on the Red Sea coast); one in Kerma; and another one in Sonqi Tino (north of the country).

3.5.1 Kerma and its museum

Kerma is located 45 km north of the modern city of Dongola, the capital of the Northern State, near the third cataract. ‘The town of Kerma is characterised by well-developed architecture, which included elaborate defences, an important religious quarter located at its heart, and countless domestic buildings, storage magazines, and administrative and industrial complexes. The remains of the capital city surround the Western Deffufa’ [6]. This is a large mudbrick temple, currently standing 18 m high and surrounded by a quarter with religious buildings (Figure 2).

The city was the capital of the Kingdom of Kerma, referred to in Egyptian hieroglyphic texts as the Kingdom of Kush, and was founded around 2540 BC. The kingdom extended from the second cataract in the north to the fifth cataract in the south.

Kerma quickly became one of the earliest urban centres in sub-Saharan Africa. The kingdom flourished between 2500 and 1500 BC. In its expansionist operations, it entered into conflict in the North with the Middle Kingdom of the Egyptian Pharaohs. These ones built 10 massive mudbrick fortresses at the beginning of the nineteenth century BC around the second cataract to defend Egypt from Kerma. One of those fortresses was built at Buhen.

In 1700 BC, the Kerma kingdom, taking advantage of the weakness of Egypt, which was fighting the Hyksos in the North, invaded the region, and Buhen became part of it [5]. Nevertheless, after setting their accounts with the Hyksos, the Egyptians conquered Kerma, destroyed the city and built a new one nearby, Dukki Gel, where the famous statues of the ‘Black Pharaohs’ were discovered in 2003. These statues are today in the Museum of Kerma, which was one of the locations of the graduation projects.

The Egyptians established themselves over the entire Kerma kingdom under the rule of Thoutmosis I and later on under Thoutmosis III. The whole territory was divided into two provinces, Wawat to the north (Lower Nubia) and Kush to the south (Upper Nubia and Central Sudan).

However, in the eighth century before Christ, a dynasty of Nubian kings invaded Egypt. They are known as the ‘Black Pharaohs’. Thus, the 25th dynasty was a line of Nubian pharaohs who reigned in part or all of Ancient Egypt for nearly a century, from 744 to 656 BC [7].

With the goal of protecting and promoting the cultural heritage of the region, in 1999, the High Committee for the Kerma Complex Initiative was created. This regional committee, along with the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums (NCAM), supervised the construction of a museum in Kerma, which started in 2003, funded by a Sudanese-Swiss partnership. The museum was inaugurated on 19 January 2008 and presents an overview of the region’s archaeology from the first human settlements.

3.5.2 The Sudan National Museum, the Buhen temple and the military museum

The Sudan National Museum was built in 1971 after the campaign launched by UNESCO to rescue as much as possible from the Sudanese cultural heritage that would have remained under the waters of the Nubian Lake. Thus, the museum hosted those objects plus the old collection that had been kept in the Khartoum Museum, opened in 1904 inside the Gordon Memorial College, renamed in 1952 as the Sudan Museum.

The museum contains collections from prehistoric sites; the kingdom of Kerma (2500–1500 BC); Napata (660–300 BC) and Meroe (300 BC–350 AC); the periods of Egyptian domination; the Mediaeval Christian kingdoms (550–1500 AC) and the first years of Islamic presence (Figure 3).

The main building of the museum is surrounded by a garden which contains the temples of Buhen and Semna West and some mediaeval columns from the Cathedral of St Peter of Faras and artefacts from different temples.

One of the graduation projects has to do with the museum as a whole, and another one with one of the walls of the temple of Buhen built by Hatsheput. She was the fifth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt and the second historically confirmed female pharaoh. She came to the throne of Egypt in 1478 BC. She decided to destroy all the monuments of her father, Thoutmosis I, to build her religious base and legitimacy beyond her position as God’s Wife of Amun.

The temple of Buhen is the best-preserved around the second cataract. It was dedicated to the god, Horus. The wall chosen by the students to rebuild its original colours was part of the sanctuary where there was a statue of the main god Horus. The colours changed a little over time and were never restored. Hatshepsut, depicted as a king and not as a woman, is facing Horus. There is a table dressed with all sorts of breads and meat that the pharaoh presents to the god [5]. This reconstruction may be particularly relevant as Cultural Heritage Monitoring Lab analysts identified damage to the structure containing the temple of Buhen that occurred between 17 April and 20 April 2023 [8].

The Military Museum, instead, is located in Khartoum Bahri and documents the history of the Sudanese army and the weapons, equipment and machinery the Sudanese soldier used over different epochs of history.

3.5.3 Suakin

The island town of Suakin, or Sawakin, is located on a flat, oval-shaped island, on the west coast of the Red Sea, inside a narrow inlet that penetrates four kilometres inland and ends in a wide basin about two kilometres across. The island is connected to the mainland by a short man-made causeway (Figure 4).

While Kerma was one of the first urban centres in sub-Saharan Africa, Suakin was one of the oldest seaports in Africa with a natural harbour. It was used by African Muslims who set out for pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia. ‘The architecture of the island is the same as that seen at the older Turkish ports of the Red Sea, such as Jeddah and Massowah. At the height its prosperity trade flourished between it and Arabia, Abyssinia, Egypt, India and places as far off as China’ [9].

Until the nineteenth century, Suakin was the residential address of the Ottoman Empire’s Habesh Province, which included what is today’s Eritrea, Djibouti and northern Somalia. The administration of the city was left to the Khedivate of Egypt in 1865 (Figure 5).

With the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, the city effectively left Turkish sovereignty and was officially ceded to Egypt under British sovereignty. The Anglo-Egyptian colonial government built a new port between 1905 and 1909, Port Sudan, to replace Suakin. After that, the historical port diminished in importance and accelerated its deterioration until it turned into a ghost town.

3.5.4 Sonqi Tino

An expedition organised by La Sapienza University of Rome started working in 1967 at a Christian site that had been identified at Sonqi West, on the west bank of the Nile, about 150 km south of Wadi Halfa. The site included a small mudbrick church with some wall paintings [10]. The project benefitted from the support of the National Research Council of Italy and the Holy See. The Vatican appointed a Comboni missionary specialised in the mediaeval period in Sudan, Fr Giovanni Vantini, who would teach Sudanese Studies at Comboni College of Science and Technology until 2007 [11].

Jorge Carlos Naranjo Alcaide, CCST Principal, contacted Giuseppe Fanfoni, architect and member of the expedition, who had done the architectural designs of the church. Loredana Sist, Egyptologist and former director of the Museum of Near East, Egypt and Mediterranean of Sapienza University of Rome, provided a map of the church where it was possible to identify the location of every fresco that was rescued from the church before being covered by the waters. Most frescoes are kept at the ‘Museum of Near East, Egypt and Mediterranean’ of Sapienza University of Rome; one single painting is displayed in the Vatican Museum, and a group located in a side chapel of the church was at the National Museum of Sudan before the war that started in 2023. With all this data, the students worked on the virtual reconstruction of a church that the waters had destroyed in 1975.