Former Swiss wine grower uncovers Sudans ancient roots

By Guillaume Lavallee, in Khartoum for AFP Published: 1:16PM GMT 03 March 2010

Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet. Photo: AFP/ASHRAF SHAZLY

He has come a prolonged approach from the Swiss vineyards he harvested as a youth.

"As a immature person, I was a booze grower. I jumped off my tractor and fast went to university," he recalled, eyes lighting up, as he sat on the patio of the Acropole road house in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum.

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He credits his roots as a vine grower with a little shortcoming for his successive career. "One learns how to see the ground, the vegetation, the colours of the ground," he said, things he could not collect up at university.

Bonnet helped show that Sudan was not merely a heavenly body to Egypt"s resources of very old relics. He unearthed statues of Sudan"s "black pharaohs", the overlords of the Kingdom of Kush, suggesting that Sudan was a trove itself.

After university, he drifted to South America, but finished up environment his sights on Egypt. "I was meddlesome in Egypt, but some-more in Africa. I realised it was wrong to find Sudan in Egypt. It was required to find Sudan in Sudan," he said.

He has explored the past given 1965, excavating for about 3 months a year. "At the time I was told: you are wasting your time, there is zero in Sudan. Today, no one says that any more."

Kush was one of the beginning civilisations in the Nile hollow and, at first, was dominated by Egypt. The Nubians in the future gained their autonomy and, at the tallness of their power, they incited the list on Egypt and cowed it in the 8th century BC.

They assigned the complete Nile hollow for a century prior to being forced behind in to what is right afar Sudan.

Bonnet peeled afar at the old dominion of Kerma (2500 to 1500 BC) and detected 7 slab statues of the Nubian rulers nearby the bank of the Nile.

But with archaeologists right afar meddlesome in the Nile hollow in northern Sudan, where the Kushite dominion flourished in between benefaction day Khartoum and the Egyptian border, he still dreams of lost kingdoms elsewhere in the country.

"In Kordofan (in executive Sudan), I am certain there are huge sites, kingdoms, to be discovered. In Darfur (west), what happened prior to the initial sultans in the 16th century? And afterwards the Red Sea. There was the fabulous nation of Punt," he said.

In a nation deeply noted by the Islamist government, he says he has not had problems digging deeper in to the pre-Islamic past.

"I had discussions with President Omar al-Beshir. He said: you are meddlesome in durations comparison than Mohammed and Islam. I pronounced yes, 2000 years before. But they are your ancestors," he said.

"He said: all right, if they were the ancestors keep on, continue!"

He has persisted. "I have only detected a Nubian formidable that is � la mode with the 18th Egyptian pharaoh dynasty. It was the time of Akhenaton, Tutenkhamun."

The very old Egyptians colonised Nubia, but had to accept their limitations. Scarcely a couple of metres from a city built by the Egyptians, the Nubians set up flower-shaped temples.

"It"s as though one commissioned a mosque nearby Notre Dame, it would poise a problem. But the Egyptians had to accept the element of a sacrament that grown next to theirs. And that is brilliant, from an chronological point of view."