Nubia museum head links Boston, Egypt

The Boston-Baystate Banner (Kenneth J. Cooper)

The Nubia Museum sits on a hill just up from the floating line of cruise ships moored on the Nile River.

Inside the museum’s yellow sandstone walls works an enthusiastic man with a Boston connection, some 6,000 miles away from this southern Egyptian city. His name is Ossama Abdel Meguid, the founding director of the world’s only museum devoted solely to Nubia.

Scholars now agree that this region — divided between modern Egypt and Sudan — was the homeland of several pharaohs in a late dynasty of ancient Egypt. Some Afrocentric theorists further argue that Nubia provided the foundation of the revered civilization that erected the pyramids, temples and monuments still standing in the Nile Valley.

Three years ago, Meguid, 45, came to Boston to research ancient Nubia. He pored over archival records at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from a Harvard professor’s archeological expeditions in the 20th century. He also toured the National Center for Afro-American Artists in Roxbury, including its permanent exhibit on a Nubian pharaoh, and chatted with director Edmund Barry Gaither about their common interests.

Meguid’s main mission as a Fulbright Scholar at the MFA for five months in 2005 and 2006 was to study the archives of George Reisner, a Harvard professor who conducted the first archeological survey of Nubia in 1907 and 1908 then spent four decades conducting digs in the main Nubian sites.

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