Exhibition: Interview with Barbara Racker on relations between Egypt and Nubia

Heritage Key (Helen Atkinson)

The Nubians get short shrift when it comes to recognition of significant ancient cultures. A new exhibition at the Clay Center in West Virginia, US, hopes to rectify that. It is cleverly entitled: “Lost Kingdoms of the Nile,” but the artefacts are all Nubian, not Egyptian. (The subtitle is: “Nubian Treasures from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.”) The exhibition runs from Sept. 12, 2009 to April 11, 2010.

Part of the problem for the Nubians, of course, is the rock-star quality of their neighbors, the Ancient Egyptians, who persistently dominate the imaginative landscape when it comes to ancient things. Most of us have to wrack our brains to make the distinction. “Nubians have been ignored until recently,” said Barbara Racker, Curator at the Clay Center. There was a major exhibition in 1976, and then the Museum of Fine Arts Boston opened a gallery dedicated to Nubian culture in the early 1990s, but it was subsequently closed to make space for other collections.