Nubian Studies Conference | Munich

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In September my wife, Mona Sherif, and myself attended the 16th International Society for Nubian Studies conference in Munich, Germany. The conference which gathered together scholars, academicians, archaeologists, researchers, and other specialists in fields ranging from app development to photography, mapping and archiving took place from 7 to 12 September 2026.

Home - The International Society for Nubian Studies

About ISNS Modern Nubiology was born in the early 1960s, when an international salvage campaign was launched by UNESCO to save the monuments of Lower Nubia being flooded by the construction of the Aswan High Dam and the creation of Lake Nasser. This campaign brought together scholars from over 25 countries from around the world […]

The International Society for Nubian StudiesAbasseya Project

Four years earlier, as I was researching topics on Nubia, I came across an announcement for the quadrennial for the conference that was to take place in Warsaw, Poland. I reached out to them and we were invited to attend. However, we had property business to attend to and were unable to make the trip to Europe.

My daughter Nabra who is now the director of the non-profit Nubian Foundation (https://nubianfoundation.org/) that my wife and I founded 1998 was contacted by the British Museum regarding the foundation. Along with my wife, Nabra participated in a number of outreach and educational sessions sponsored by the museum. In the ensuing months, the 2026 Nubian Studies Conference was talked about and our participation was encouraged. We submitted a proposal to give a presentation on my decades long photographic documentation of Nubia with Mona talking about contemporary life of the Nubians. It was accepted and we made plans to travel to Munich.

Opening of the conference |

The opening session got underway with a welcoming speech by ISNS President Artur Obluski followed by a pre-recorded account of the state of affairs in war-torn Sudan by Dr. Mahmoud Suleiman Mohammed Bashir, Director General of the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums in Sudan.

The National Museum of Sudan suffered severe destruction and widespread looting during the two-year civil war with the Raped Support Forces (RSF) occupying the building and using it as living quarters and sniper positions. Sudanese Army forces recaptured the area in early 2025 and it is estimated that 60 to 90 percent of the museums 100,000 artifacts spanning 7,000 years of Nubian, Kushite, Coptic, and Islamic history—had been stolen, vandalized, or destroyed.

Archaeologist Julia Budka, Professor for Egyptian Archaeology and Art History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, presented a comprehensive lecture titled "Diverse Nubias: Challenging the monolithic understanding of New Kingdom Nubia". Professor Budka's lecture presented an in-depth overview of the diversity of Nubia and how it not only shared but was distinctive from it's often Egyptianized characterization during the New Kingdom era (c. 1550–1070 BCE).

More information on her research on New Kingdom Nubia https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00438243.2021.1999853#d1e151

ISNS 2026 Munich – 16th International Conference for Nubian Studies

ISNS 2026 Munich

https://nubianstudies2026.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/ICNS_Book-of-Abstracts_en.pdf

Our presentation on contemporary Nubian life |

On the second day of the conference, Mona and I made our presentation titled "Photographic Exploration of Contemporary Nubian Life." I have been documenting Nubia for almost 40 years and much of my photographic effort has centered around Mona's family.

Nubia is incredibly diverse and family is at the core of Nubian life. I felt in order for the audience to get a sense of what it is to be Nubian, I needed to include not only photos of family life, traditions and celebrations, but also the geography, the monuments, the river, displacement villages as well as those few villages that were not inundated by the flooding of Nubia. In the early 1960s, the Aswan High Dam was completed and most of Egyptian Nubian and a portion of Sudanese Nubia was buried under Lake Nasser - at the time - the largest man-made lake.

Mona recounted stories from her childhood in the village as a young girl. When her village of Abu Simbel was flooded her family moved to Cairo. She tells of her struggles to assimilate with Egyptian city life and how the Nubians tried to maintain their languages, culture and traditions. Her father, Mohy el din Sherif, a Nubian scholar, author and song writer, figures prominently in her life and those of the displaced Fadija Nubians. She relates her close relationship with him and how he carried on Nubia's linguistic and musical heritage.

Images of Nubia |

Nubian house paintings |

Village Life |

City Life and food | Cairo

Nubian wedding celebrations |

The Nile |

The Monuments |

New friend and presentors |

At the conference, we met so many new friends and actually came across a friend from our early Cairo days back in the 1980s. There were over hundreds sessions on diverse subjects over the five day conference. Fve meeting rooms and each with 10 to 15 sessions per day. Each day in the conference rooms there were different themed topics. Here are just a few of them (you can see the full list on the ISNS website) | Fieldwork, Ceramics, Museums, Archaeometallurgy, Sensor Worlds of Nubia, Religion & Beliefs, Text and Languages, History, Tales of Entanglement, Bioarchaeology, Animals and Men, Photographic Archives, Heritage Conflict, Urbanism, Art and many more.

Our presentation on the photographic exploration of contemporary Nubian life fell under the category of Anthopology.

Obviously it was only possible to attend a fraction of the presentation. What amazed me was the number of disciplines and exhaustive studies that are happening all over the world on the study of Nubia. I, of course, have known about Nubia and its amazing history and culture, but few people I meet even in Egypt know much or anything about this ancient civilization, their rich heritage and the tragic displacement of most of Egypt's Nubians.

My main interest was on the social and photographic aspects of Nubia, though I did attend presentations on the anthropological and archaeological endeavour on Nubia.

Here are some of the people we met and their contributions to the study of Nubia.

Dress to Impress | Nubian Kingdom Christian era fashion show

The final event of the conference was a fashion sbow depicting "costumes of authority" from the royal family and clergy in medieval Christian Nubia. A transdisciplinary team of archaeologists and designers from the University of Poland and SWPS University painstakingly recreated five costumes from cupola wall paintings of the Faras Cathedral that had been perserved and photographed before the area was inundated by the flooding of most of Egyptian Nubia in the early 1960s. From the murals they recreated the designs and tried to replicate the actual fabric material. Mona and other presenters were pressed into service as models and made a dramatic entrance to the applauds of the audience.

An interesting side note: Mona's father Mohy el Din Sherif, was the omda (mayor) of Faras. So maybe a thousand or so years ago, Mona's relatives may have actually worn the original costumes.