Okwui Enewzor Postdoctoral Fellow highlights new perspectives of the collapse of Meroitic State

Professor Mohamed Faroug A. Ali, the Okwui Enewzor Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual Culture, Performance Studies, and Critical Humanities at the Africa Institute delivers a lecture titled, “A new perspective on the collapse of the Meroitic State 300 B.C-350 A.D.” on Tuesday, October 18, 2022 at the Khalid School Auditorium.  

Mohamed Faroug A. Ali is a postdoctoral fellow in residence as well as an Assistant Professor of Archaeology at the International University of Africa, Sudan. He completed his undergraduate school in Sudan at Dongola University and obtained his MA and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He is the co-founder and the CEO of the American Sudanese Archaeological Research Center (AmSARC) and he also serves as the Executive Director of the Sudanese Archaeologists Union.

Given Professor Faroug’s rich experience and research interests that focus on the formation, political economy, collapse, and regeneration of ancient states in sub-Saharan Africa, his talk discusses concepts and assumptions that have emerged among scholars to address the collapse of the Meroitic state by the middle of the 4th century in light of new archaeological discoveries and first-hand investigation in the region.

“Meroitic state was established in Sudan in the middle Nile region and controlled the area between the second cataract and the modern city Khartoum. The rise of the state was followed by a series of cultural innovations that provided a platform for a significant new type of burial tradition, local cult, new official written language, and centralized production. It also involved investments to establish an infrastructure for political economy and the developing sociopolitical structure in the middle Nile region where they adapted local beliefs to elevate their social power,” said Professor Faroug.

Through the seminar’s discussion, Professor Faroug highlighted how collapse is a political process that often involves decline in different sectors of life, varying from economy through art and literature.

“The current understanding of the collapse of the Meroitic state in the fourth century A.D. is based on historical texts and the available archaeological data from Meroitic settlements and cemeteries, with no consideration to the peripheries and how regional resources influenced Meroitic regional interconnections, and significantly shaped the Meroitic administrative system and political economy,” he adds.

Professor Faroug shared details about the evolutionary complexities of our societies, the process and reasons for collapse with relevant arguments, theories and findings.

The session was moderated by Professor Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann, Associate Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology, The Africa Institute, Sharjah.

Through these lectures and workshops, The Africa Institute reaffirms its mission as a center for the study and research of Africa and its diaspora, and its commitment to the training of a new generation of critical thinkers in African and African Diaspora studies.