People & Culture

Long before the pyramids most visitors picture, the upper Nile had already produced a city. At Kerma, on a bend of the river in what is now northern Sudan, an urban civilization rose around 2500 BC and lasted a thousand years, built around a river port and centred on a fired mudbrick tower known as the Western Deffufa, a monument that still stands some twenty metres high after four thousand years and is generally reckoned the earliest urban centre built anywhere in Africa outside Egypt. Kerma traded with, fought, and at times outmatched its northern neighbour, and its kings were buried under vast tumuli with retinues of sacrificed attendants, evidence of a state with its own court and its own theology rather than a satellite of the pharaohs. Kerma's successor kingdom is the one most people have half heard of: Kush. Centred first at Napata, beside the sacred mountain of Jebel Barkal where Kushite kings believed the god Amun himself lived, Kush grew powerful enough that in the eighth century BC its king Piye marched north and took Egypt outright, founding the Twenty-fifth Dynasty. For close to a century Kushite pharaohs ruled the length of the Nile from the Sudanese interior to the Mediterranean, until Assyrian invasions in the 660s and 650s BC pushed them back south. Kush kept going on its own terms for another thousand years. Its royal centre moved further south to Meroe at some point between the sixth and third centuries BC, historians differing on exactly when, while Napata went on serving as the sacred seat where kings were crowned for centuries afterward. It is worth saying plainly, because most visitors never hear it until they arrive: Sudan has more pyramids than Egypt. Estimates vary depending on how ruined a structure has to be before it stops counting, but Sudan holds somewhere around two hundred to two hundred and fifty of them, more than twice Egypt's total, raised by Kushite kings and queens between roughly 700 BC and 300 AD across three main sites, El Kurru, Nuri near Jebel Barkal, and Meroe itself, which alone holds close to a hundred. They are steeper-sided and smaller than the pyramids at Giza, built two thousand years later, and they stand nearly unvisited in the desert for reasons that have nothing to do with their significance. Kush also left behind a genuine puzzle. From around the second century BC, Meroitic scribes wrote in their own script, adapted from Egyptian hieroglyphs, in a formal monumental form and an everyday cursive one. The British Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith worked out how to sound the script out in the years around 1907 to 1911, so its letters can be read aloud with confidence. But reading is not understanding. No bilingual text bridging Meroitic to a known language has ever been found, its language family was disputed for most of a century and is now tentatively linked by some scholars to languages of the eastern Sahel, and beyond royal names, titles and a scatter of Egyptian loanwords, nobody can yet translate a full Meroitic sentence. It remains one of the last scripts of the ancient world still keeping its meaning to itself. Kush faded by the middle of the fourth century AD, and what followed was Christian. Missionaries sent under the Byzantine emperor Justinian converted the Nubian successor kingdoms: Nobatia in the north, Makuria in the middle around the new capital of Old Dongola, and Alodia further south near modern Khartoum. Nobatia and Makuria merged into a single kingdom that held together for roughly six centuries. When Arab Muslim armies conquered Egypt in the 640s they tried Nubia next and were fought to a standstill, and the peace that followed, known as the Baqt and agreed in 652, is one of the longest-held treaties in recorded history, structuring an exchange of Nubian goods and captives for Egyptian grain and cloth and holding for something like six hundred years before it broke down between the 1270s and the middle of the fourteenth century, sources differing on the exact date. Makuria's cathedral at Old Dongola was converted into a mosque in 1317, a single dateable act usually taken as marking the region's turn to Islam. Islam took longer to become the popular faith than the ruling one. The Funj Sultanate, founded at Sennar on the Blue Nile in 1504 by Amara Dunqas, governed central Sudan for three centuries as a nominally Islamic but culturally mixed state, while further west the Fur Sultanate rose around Jebel Marra in the middle of the seventeenth century and ran Darfur as an independent power for two hundred years. Both were eventually swallowed by outsiders. In 1820 Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Egypt, sent armies south in search of gold, slaves and conscripts. They took Sennar and Kordofan within a year, ending Funj rule, and built a garrison at the junction of the Blue and White Niles in 1821 that grew into Khartoum, made the formal seat of Egyptian Sudan by 1830. Turco-Egyptian rule, remembered locally as the Turkiyya, expanded the slave trade dramatically, using Sudan as both a source of captives and a route for moving them, a legacy still felt in how the country's regions relate to one another. Resentment at that rule fed a religious uprising. In 1881 a boatbuilder's son named Muhammad Ahmad declared himself the Mahdi, the divinely guided redeemer of Islam, and built an army that swept the Turco-Egyptian garrisons out of the country. Khartoum fell in January 1885 after a long siege, and General Charles Gordon, sent to oversee an evacuation and instead determined to hold the city, was killed there two days before a British relief force reached the Nile. The Mahdist state he had defended against ruled Sudan for thirteen years, under Muhammad Ahmad and then his successor the Khalifa Abdullahi, until an Anglo-Egyptian army under Herbert Kitchener destroyed it at the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898. What followed was condominium: joint British and Egyptian rule from 1899 to 1955 that was British in practice. Colonial administrators governed the largely Muslim, Arabic-speaking north and the largely animist and Christian, non-Arab south as separate worlds, formalised by the Closed Districts Ordinances of 1922, which required permits to cross between them and steered the south toward English and missionary schooling while the north kept its Arabic and Islamic institutions. It was an administrative convenience that hardened into the deepest fault line in the country's future. Independence arrived on 1 January 1956, and the fault line opened almost immediately, since southern officers mutinied months before independence was even declared. The first civil war ran from 1955 to 1972, killing, by most estimates, somewhere between five hundred thousand and a million people before the Addis Ababa Agreement bought eleven years of uneasy peace. The second, triggered by the imposition of nationwide sharia law in 1983 and fought largely by the southern SPLA, ran until 2005 and is estimated across sources to have killed around two million people through combat, famine and disease, with roughly four million displaced. Darfur erupted separately in 2003, when non-Arab rebel groups took up arms against Khartoum and the government answered by arming Arab militias, the Janjaweed, against Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa civilians. Death toll estimates range enormously by method and time window, from under one hundred thousand to four hundred thousand, and whether the word genocide fits remains genuinely disputed among governments, the United Nations and historians, even after the International Criminal Court issued indictments. The peace deal that ended the second civil war led, in 2011, to a referendum in which the south voted overwhelmingly to secede, and South Sudan became independent that July. Sudan kept most of the disputed border region but lost the revenue beneath it, shedding around three-quarters of its oil production almost overnight and watching oil's share of GDP fall within two years from roughly eleven percent to about three and a half, a shock the economy never fully absorbed before the next war arrived. That war, between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, began in April 2023 and is still being fought. It is not a subject for casual curiosity while standing in the country, and its toll, with estimates running from the tens of thousands by conservative counts to figures approaching four hundred thousand by others, remains contested and still moving, alongside a displacement crisis now numbering more than fifteen million people inside and outside Sudan's borders. The Sudan National Museum in Khartoum, home to the finest Nubian and Kushite collection anywhere, was occupied by RSF fighters for the better part of a year, and reports since have put the losses anywhere from sixty to ninety percent of its holdings, including gold and jewellery from Napata and Meroe that had survived intact for millennia and did not survive this. This is what a visitor stands in front of, once the country is safe enough to visit again: Meroe's pyramid field rising out of empty desert with almost nobody else there to see it, the sacred hill of Jebel Barkal and its temples to Amun, the fired-brick ruins and the country's oldest mosque at Old Dongola, a former cathedral that changed faiths in a single year, the coral-stone ruins of Suakin on the Red Sea, once the Ottoman gateway for pilgrims and traders before Port Sudan replaced it in 1922, and, at the centre of it all, the literal meeting of the Blue and White Niles at Khartoum, two rivers of different colour and character joining at a spot whose Arabic name describes the shape it makes, an elephant's trunk reaching into the water. None of it is open to ordinary travel right now, and that has to be said outright rather than folded into a footnote. When it does reopen, move through this history the way its custodians would want it moved through. Do not raise the current war with people you meet as a matter of casual interest, since it is a live catastrophe for them rather than an anecdote for you, and let them set the terms of that conversation or leave it alone entirely. Do ask about Kerma, Kush and Meroe, because the pride Sudanese people carry for that history, for having out-built and, for a century, out-ruled Egypt, runs deep, is entirely earned, and is met by almost no outsider who already knows it is there.