Roots of a conflict

British Museum director Neil MacGregor on an exhibition of ancient Sudanese artefacts that offers an insight into the cultural background to the crisis in Darfur
In pictures: six key pieces from the exhibition

An Islamic government at odds with Washington and the European Union; famine and military aggression in Darfur; a continuing war between the north and newly oil-rich south: this is Sudan as it is normally seen in the media in Europe. But behind this lies another Sudan that has been too long overlooked, for many thousands of years one of the leading cultural forces in Africa. It is that Sudan we have been celebrating at the British Museum, through the loan exhibition from the museum in Khartoum.

It would obviously be absurd to suggest that any objects, even star pieces from the National Museum in Khartoum, could go very far in capturing the essence of Africa's largest country, especially a country that borders nine disparate neighbours. But they can at least suggest some of its key characteristics - and some enduring patterns of behaviour and thought.

In the British Museum's collection, the visitor can get an idea of the enormous range of Sudan's cultures. In the rich, settled world of Khartoum and the northern Nile you find a confident, north-facing cosmopolitanism that has always been in contrast with the farming societies of the Fur in the west and the Dinkas and related pastoralist peoples in the south. Through the objects they have produced, you can understand something of the tensions and conflicts between these different worlds, of the present civil wars and the apparent collapse of any community of interest or behaviour. They also allow us to put the current violence in a wider and perhaps more hopeful cultural perspective.

When the current exhibition opened, representatives of almost all the Sudanese political and regional groups came to the British Museum to join - with officials and ministers of the Khartoum government - in a celebration of their shared past. That encouraged us to offer the museum as a particularly appropriate forum for debate on the future of Sudan once the crisis of Darfur has abated and, as everybody hopes, the civil war with the south finally ends. When the relief workers retreat, the geopolitical cultural and religious issues will remain, as powerful and divisive as ever.

The civilisation to which all Sudanese can lay claim is an immensely ancient one, and the pottery of Kerma is only one demonstration of the fact that its highest achievements are very high indeed, something that is often obscured in western Europe by the long shadow that Pharaonic Egypt continues to cast over its southern neighbours.

Sudan's Christianity is also ancient. Justinian and Theodora, the rulers of Constantinople to whom we in Europe owe the mosaic splendours of Ravenna, also sent missionaries over the cataracts to the upper Nile. Emperor and empress famously had many disagreements, religion among them. So each dispatched competing evangelists (as usual, the empress won), foreshadowing the rivalries of European missionaries in the 19th century, who divided the southern Sudan between their various bitterly opposed sects.

If Islam came late (not till 1500), it came militant. Throughout the 19th century, and particularly under the inspiring leadership of the Mahdi, it rallied opposition to the foreigner - Turkish, Egyptian or British - with disconcerting resonances for us now, sharply aware of the religious aspects of the current civil wars, and the presence of Osama bin Laden in Khartoum not many years ago.

Two objects from the British Museum's own collection - a lyre and a slit gong - tell contradictory truths. On the one side, nonchalant coexistence in the lyre of Islam and Christianity within an ancient and abidingly popular pagan ritual, oiled by the small change of peaceful international trade. In the other instrument, brutal struggles for power, the north enslaving the south till both collapsed under foreign attack.

It is these continuous and conflicting aspects of Sudan across the longue durée that we have tried to demonstrate in the exhibition. To a startling degree Sudan is now what it has always been. But century after century, there is one persistent and determinant fact of Sudanese life not apparent in the objects on display: the overweening military and cultural power of a nearby empire. On the edge of Pharaonic Egypt and Imperial Rome, later mistrusted by the Ottomans and the British, Sudan squabbled and skirmished with them all, and on occasion gave them all a bloody nose - most spectacularly when it carried home in triumph the severed bronze head of Augustus, dismembering the Roman emperor in effigy, as 1,800 years later it would destroy General Gordon in person. Could this happen again? Could Sudan effectively resist current international great-power pressure to resolve its internal conflicts? Augustus's head suggests it is by no means impossible.

The forum, which includes Sudanese living in exile and from Sudan, will address questions that are thousands of years old, entirely contemporary and perhaps more urgent now than ever. It may even suggest some answers.

· Beyond Darfur: Sudanese identity and the roots of conflict, a public forum supported by the Guardian, is at the British Museum on Wednesday November 10, from 7pm. Tickets are £10/£8 (concessions), available from the box office on 020-7323 8181.