Buried Treasure

The tomb of a Nubian king in an unlikely resting place

he burial chamber of a king of the Nubian empire, which stretched from Ethiopia to the Mediterranean Sea in the sixth century BC, is the jewel of the collection in New England’s only museum devoted only to African, Caribbean and African-American art. The crypt of Aspelta, ruler of the largest empire on the Nile until modern times, has made the implausible trek from near the Nile River in present-day Sudan to just outside Egleston Square in Roxbury, where the little-known National Center of Afro-American Artists is housed in a neo-Gothic Victorian mansion built in 1870 called Oak Bend. On the walls of the re-created burial chamber—the only one of its kind on display in the world—are hieroglyphics that were found there from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Marcus

Shhhh! King Aspelta ruled from 600
to 580 BC, near the end of the dynasty.

Shhhh! The museum also produces
the world’s longest-running annual production of Langston Hughes’s Black Nativity.

Shhhh! The museum was founded in 1968 by Elma Lewis, who in 1950 had begun the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts to teach black students music and dance.

Shhh who knew

Threatened by the construction of the original Aswan Dam, the burial tomb of Nubian King Aspelta was removed by archeologists from Harvard and the Museum of Fine Arts at the invitation of the Anglo-Sudanese government in 1916.