Sudan

Based on Wikipedia: Sudan

The Land Where History Never Stopped

Imagine a place where humans fought the first recorded war in history. Not a mythological battle between gods, but a real conflict between real people, leaving real bodies with real arrow wounds. That happened in Sudan, around 13,500 years ago, at a site called Jebel Sahaba along the Nile.

Sudan sits at a crossroads that has never stopped being crossed. It's Africa's third-largest country by area, sprawling across nearly two million square kilometers where the Sahara Desert meets the Nile Valley, where ancient Egypt bumped against the kingdoms of Black Africa, where Islam spread south and Christianity once held firm, where empires rose and fell for millennia before the Europeans arrived with their maps and straight-line borders.

Today, Sudan is in the news for all the wrong reasons: a brutal civil war between the army and a paramilitary force, millions displaced, famine looming. But to understand the present catastrophe, you need to understand the extraordinary depth of what came before. This is a land where civilization didn't arrive from elsewhere. It grew here, indigenous and proud, often rivaling and sometimes conquering its more famous neighbor to the north.

Before the Pyramids: Sudan's Forgotten Antiquity

The Ancient Egyptians had names for the land to their south. They called it Nubia, Ta Nehesi, or Ta Seti—the last meaning "Land of the Bow," a tribute to the legendary archers who lived there. These Nubian bowmen were so renowned that Egyptian pharaohs recruited them as elite soldiers.

But human civilization in Sudan stretches back far beyond Egypt's first dynasty.

At a site called Affad 23 in northern Sudan, archaeologists have uncovered something remarkable: the remains of open-air huts dating back 50,000 years. These aren't caves where early humans sheltered from the elements. These are structures—the oldest known open-air dwellings in the world. Fifty thousand years ago, when modern humans were still spreading out of Africa into Europe and Asia, people in Sudan were already building homes.

By the eighth millennium before the common era—that's ten thousand years ago—the people living along the Nile in Sudan had developed something we'd recognize as civilization. They lived in fortified villages built from mudbricks. They hunted and fished, but they also gathered grain and herded cattle. They buried their dead in formal cemeteries. They were, in other words, no longer simply surviving. They were building societies.

When the Sahara began drying out around five thousand years before the common era, people migrated into the Nile Valley bringing new ideas and technologies. Agriculture arrived. Populations grew. Social hierarchies developed. And by 2500 BCE, a fully-fledged kingdom had emerged: Kerma.

Kerma: Egypt's Great Rival

Most people have never heard of the Kingdom of Kerma. This is a historical injustice.

Kerma flourished from around 2500 to 1500 BCE, making it roughly contemporary with Egypt's Middle Kingdom—the classical period of Egyptian civilization, when the great pyramids were already ancient monuments. But Kerma wasn't some provincial backwater paying tribute to Egyptian power. It was an independent kingdom, a rival power, and at times a genuine threat.

The kingdom was based in what archaeologists call "Upper Nubia"—confusingly, this means the southern part of Nubia, because the Nile flows north, so "upper" refers to upstream, which is to the south. (The Ancient Egyptians oriented their maps with south at the top, which makes more intuitive sense if you think about it.) Kerma's capital sat near the third cataract of the Nile, in what is now northern Sudan.

Here's how powerful Kerma became: in its final phase, from about 1700 to 1500 BCE, the kingdom expanded to absorb neighboring states and became, in the words of historians, "a sizable, populous empire rivaling Egypt." Not a tributary. Not a client state. A rival.

The Egyptians took this threat seriously. Pharaoh Mentuhotep II, who reunified Egypt and founded the Middle Kingdom around 2000 BCE, launched military campaigns against Kerma. These campaigns are significant because they contain the earliest Egyptian reference to "Kush"—the name that would define Nubian civilization for the next two thousand years.

Eventually, Egypt won. Around 1500 BCE, the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose I conquered Kush, destroyed Kerma's capital, and incorporated Nubia into the New Kingdom as a colonial province governed by an official with the title "Viceroy of Kush."

But the Nubians didn't go quietly.

Two Centuries of Resistance

We know about Nubian resistance to Egyptian rule from an extraordinary source: the autobiographical inscriptions on the tomb walls of an Egyptian soldier named Ahmose, son of Ebana. Ahmose served under three pharaohs in the early 18th Dynasty, during a critical period when Egypt was fighting for its survival.

At the start of this period, Egypt faced what historians call "twin existential threats." To the north were the Hyksos, foreign rulers who had conquered Lower Egypt and held it for over a century. To the south were the Kushites, independent and powerful and apparently eager to take advantage of Egyptian weakness.

In Ahmose's inscriptions, the Kushites are described the same way the Egyptians had always described them: as archers. "Now after his Majesty had slain the Bedouin of Asia," Ahmose wrote, "he sailed upstream to Upper Nubia to destroy the Nubian bowmen."

Note that phrase: to destroy the Nubian bowmen. Not to conquer. To destroy. This was serious warfare.

The rebellions continued for 220 years, from the initial conquest around 1500 BCE until roughly 1300 BCE. Only then did Nubia become a stable Egyptian province. And even as a province, Nubia was never marginal. It was economically valuable, politically important, and spiritually significant. Major pharaonic ceremonies were held at Jebel Barkal, a sacred mountain near the city of Napata in what is now Sudan.

By 1200 BCE, however, Egyptian power was collapsing. The Bronze Age was ending in catastrophe across the Mediterranean and Near East. And by the time the dust settled, Nubia was no longer Egyptian.

The Black Pharaohs

What happened next is one of history's great reversals.

After Egypt's New Kingdom disintegrated around 1070 BCE, Nubia went its own way. The Kingdom of Kush reemerged, now centered at Napata near that sacred mountain of Jebel Barkal. And in the eighth century BCE, the Kushites did something extraordinary: they conquered Egypt.

King Kashta—whose name literally means "the Kushite"—invaded Egypt and established Nubian rule over the ancient kingdom. His successors became the pharaohs of Egypt's 25th Dynasty, ruling for nearly a century. Historians sometimes call them the "Black Pharaohs," though this term is controversial because it implies the earlier pharaohs were somehow not African.

At the height of their power, the Kushite pharaohs ruled an empire stretching from what is now South Kordofan in Sudan all the way north to the Sinai Peninsula. One of these pharaohs, Piye, even attempted to expand into the Near East.

He failed. But it wasn't the Egyptians who stopped him.

Enter the Assyrians

The Assyrian Empire, based in what is now northern Iraq, was the superpower of the ancient Near East in the first millennium BCE. From the tenth century onwards, the Assyrians had systematically conquered everything within reach: Mesopotamia, the Levant, Anatolia, parts of Iran. When the Kushites tried to push into the Near East, they ran directly into Assyrian power.

The collision between these two great powers—one ruling from Sudan, the other from Iraq—was a decisive moment in world history.

The Assyrian king Sennacherib fought against Pharaoh Taharqa and defeated the Kushite attempt to establish a foothold in the Near East. Sennacherib's successor, Esarhaddon, went further: he invaded Egypt itself, driving Taharqa out of Lower Egypt. Taharqa fled south to Upper Egypt and Nubia, where he died two years later.

But the Kushites weren't finished. Tantamani, Taharqa's successor, made one final attempt to reconquer Egypt. He managed to retake the old capital of Memphis and even killed the Assyrian-appointed governor, a man named Necho. But the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal responded with overwhelming force. He routed Tantamani near Memphis, pursued him south, and sacked the ancient city of Thebes.

The destruction of Thebes was catastrophic. This was one of the oldest and holiest cities in Egypt, home to the great temple of Karnak. Its sacking by Assyrian troops in 663 BCE marked the definitive end of Kushite rule over Egypt.

The Bible mentions this conflict. The Kingdom of Kush is described as having saved the Israelites from Assyrian wrath, though the historical reality was more complicated. Disease among the Assyrian besiegers may have contributed to their failure to take Jerusalem during this period.

Meroë and the Pyramids of Sudan

After losing Egypt, the Kingdom of Kush retreated south but didn't disappear. Instead, it transformed.

Sometime in the late third century BCE, the Kushites moved their capital from Napata to Meroë, further south along the Nile where the land was more fertile and less vulnerable to Egyptian raids. The Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik II had sacked Napata around 590 BCE, demonstrating that the old capital was no longer safe.

Meroë became the center of a remarkable civilization that lasted for another six centuries. And during this period, between 800 BCE and 100 CE, the Nubians built pyramids.

Yes, Sudan has pyramids. In fact, Sudan has more pyramids than Egypt does.

The Nubian pyramids are different from their Egyptian predecessors. They're smaller, steeper, and more numerous. They're clustered in several cemeteries, including El-Kurru, Nuri, Gebel Barkal, and most famously Meroë itself. Today, the pyramids of Meroë, rising from the desert like rows of sharp teeth, are one of Sudan's most striking archaeological sites.

These pyramids weren't imitations of Egyptian monuments. They were expressions of a distinctly Nubian royal culture that had absorbed Egyptian influences over millennia but remained fundamentally its own thing.

The Christian Kingdoms

The Kingdom of Kush finally collapsed around 350 CE, ending a civilization that had lasted, in one form or another, for over two thousand years. But Nubia didn't become a vacuum. New kingdoms emerged.

By the fifth century, a people called the Blemmyes had established a short-lived state in Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia. But they were soon driven out by another group, the Nobatians, who founded their own kingdom called Nobatia.

By the sixth century, three Christian kingdoms ruled Nubia. Nobatia controlled the north, with its capital at Pachoras (modern Faras). Makuria held the center, based at Tungul (Old Dongola). And Alodia occupied the heartland of the old Kushite kingdom in the south, with its capital at Soba, now a suburb of modern Khartoum.

Christianity had reached Nubia sometime in the sixth century. The exact process of conversion is debated, but by the early 600s, all three kingdoms were Christian. At some point between 628 and 642, Nobatia merged with Makuria, leaving two major Christian states.

And then the Arabs arrived.

The Arabs at the Gates

Between 639 and 641 CE, Arab armies of the Rashidun Caliphate conquered Byzantine Egypt. It was one of the most stunning military achievements in history: in just two years, the Arabs had seized one of the richest provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire.

They turned south toward Nubia. In 641 or 642, they invaded. They were repelled. In 652, they tried again. They were repelled again.

Think about what this means. The Arab conquests of the seventh century swept across an enormous swath of territory—from Spain to Central Asia—in just a few generations. Armies, kingdoms, and empires fell before them. But when they reached Nubia, they were stopped.

The Nubians were one of the very few peoples who successfully resisted the initial wave of Islamic expansion.

What followed was remarkable: the Arabs and the Makurian king negotiated a unique non-aggression pact that included an annual exchange of gifts. This was essentially a recognition of Makuria's independence. While the Arabs couldn't conquer Nubia, they began settling east of the Nile, founding port towns on the Red Sea coast and intermarrying with the local Beja people.

The Golden Age of Christian Nubia

From the mid-eighth to mid-eleventh century, Christian Nubia reached its peak.

In 747, Makuria actually invaded Egypt, which at the time was ruled by the declining Umayyad Caliphate. The Nubians invaded Egypt again in the early 960s, pushing as far north as Akhmim—deep into Egyptian territory. This wasn't a weak kingdom clinging to survival. This was a powerful state projecting force northward against the Arab world.

The culture of medieval Nubia was what scholars call "Afro-Byzantine"—a blend of African traditions with Byzantine Greek Christianity—though it was increasingly influenced by Arab culture as well. The political system was highly centralized, modeled on the Byzantine bureaucracy of the sixth and seventh centuries.

Arts flourished. Nubian painters created elaborate murals on church walls and decorated pottery with distinctive styles. The Nubians developed their own alphabet for their language, Old Nobiin, adapting the Coptic script. They also used Greek, Coptic, and Arabic for different purposes.

One of the most striking features of medieval Nubian society was the status of women. Women had access to education. They could own, buy, and sell land. They used their wealth to endow churches and commission religious art. Even royal succession was matrilineal: the throne passed not from father to son, but from a king to his sister's son.

This was an African Christian civilization that lasted for centuries, maintained its independence against the Arab caliphates, and developed its own distinct culture. And almost nobody has heard of it.

The Long Decline

Nothing lasts forever.

From the late eleventh century, Makuria's capital at Dongola began declining. Alodia's capital at Soba declined as well. The reasons are complex: environmental changes, internal conflicts, pressure from nomadic groups, the slow erosion of trade networks.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Bedouin Arab tribes overran most of Sudan. They migrated into the Butana, the Gezira, Kordofan, and Darfur—regions that would become the heartland of Arab Sudan. In 1365, a civil war forced the Makurian royal court to flee to Gebel Adda in Lower Nubia. Dongola was destroyed and abandoned to Arab settlers.

Makuria continued to exist as a petty kingdom for a while longer, but the great age of Christian Nubia was over. The churches fell silent. The murals faded. The languages were forgotten. By the time European explorers arrived in the nineteenth century, the memory of Christian Nubia had almost completely vanished.

The Name Sudan

The very name "Sudan" tells a story of how outsiders viewed this region.

In Arabic, the name comes from "bilād as-sūdān," which means "Land of the Blacks." This was a geographical term that Arab geographers applied to the entire Sahel region stretching across Africa from Senegal on the Atlantic coast to the Nile Valley. The term referred to the dark skin of the indigenous peoples—a descriptive label imposed from outside.

Before the Arabs, the Ancient Egyptians had their own names: Nubia, Ta Nehesi, Ta Seti. But "Sudan" stuck, and when the British drew their colonial boundaries, they applied the name to the specific territory we know today.

Since South Sudan became independent in 2011, the remaining country is sometimes called "North Sudan" to distinguish it from its southern neighbor. But officially, it's simply the Republic of the Sudan.

From Colony to Independence

The modern history of Sudan is a story of conquest, colonialism, and catastrophe.

In the nineteenth century, Egypt—then ruled by the Muhammad Ali dynasty—conquered the entirety of Sudan. But Egyptian rule provoked fierce resistance. In the 1880s, a religious leader named Muhammad Ahmad proclaimed himself the Mahdi (the prophesied redeemer in Islamic eschatology) and launched an uprising against Egyptian-Ottoman rule.

The Mahdist forces scored stunning victories, including the conquest of Khartoum in 1885 and the killing of the British general Charles Gordon, who had been sent to evacuate Egyptian forces. For over a decade, Sudan was ruled by a theocratic Mahdist state.

In 1898, a joint Egyptian-British military force under General Kitchener crushed the Mahdist army at the Battle of Omdurman and reconquered Sudan. But this wasn't liberation—it was a different kind of colonialism. In 1899, Egypt and Britain agreed to govern Sudan jointly as a "condominium," though in practice, the British ran the show.

Sudan remained under this arrangement until the Egyptian revolution of 1952, when nationalist army officers overthrew the Egyptian monarchy. One of the revolution's leaders was Muhammad Naguib, Egypt's first president, who was half-Sudanese and had been raised in Sudan. He made Sudanese independence a priority.

On January 1, 1956, Sudan became an independent state.

The Seeds of Civil War

Independence didn't bring peace. It brought civil war.

The fundamental problem was that Sudan, as drawn by colonial boundaries, contained two very different regions. The north was predominantly Arab and Muslim, with its center of power in Khartoum. The south was predominantly African, with populations practicing Christianity or traditional religions.

These regions had different histories, different languages, different religions, and different identities. But they had been lumped together into a single state.

The first civil war began in 1955—before independence was even declared—and lasted until 1972. A peace agreement brought seventeen years of relative calm, but in 1983, the government of Gaafar Nimeiry imposed Sharia (Islamic law) across the entire country. This inflamed tensions with the non-Muslim south, and a second civil war erupted.

This second war was even longer and more devastating. The Sudan People's Liberation Army, led by John Garang, fought against government forces for over two decades. The government aligned itself with the National Islamic Front, a fundamentalist political movement. Religion, ethnicity, resources, and power all became axes of conflict.

The war finally ended in 2005 with a peace agreement that set the stage for a referendum on southern independence. In 2011, South Sudan voted overwhelmingly to secede, and the world's newest country was born.

The Bashir Era

In 1989, a military officer named Omar al-Bashir seized power in a coup. He would rule Sudan for thirty years, presiding over one of the most repressive regimes in modern Africa.

Bashir aligned himself with Islamist political forces and implemented strict Sharia law. His government was accused of supporting international terrorism—including providing shelter to Osama bin Laden in the 1990s. Sudan became an international pariah, subject to sanctions and isolation.

But Bashir's worst crimes came in Darfur.

Darfur is a region in western Sudan, far from the power centers of Khartoum. In 2003, rebel groups launched an insurgency against the government, complaining of marginalization and discrimination. The government's response was genocide.

Using a militia force called the Janjaweed—Arabic for "devils on horseback"—the government launched a campaign of systematic destruction against non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur. Villages were burned. Civilians were massacred. Women were raped as a weapon of war. Millions were displaced.

Estimates of the death toll range from 300,000 to 400,000 people. The International Criminal Court indicted Bashir for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity—making him the first sitting head of state to face such charges.

The violence in Darfur continued, in various forms, until 2020.

Revolution and Collapse

In December 2018, Sudanese citizens began protesting against Bashir's rule. The immediate trigger was economic: bread prices had tripled, fuel was scarce, the economy was in free fall. But the protests quickly became about something bigger—about three decades of dictatorship, about human rights abuses, about the possibility of change.

On April 11, 2019, the military turned on Bashir. He was arrested and imprisoned, and a transitional military council took power. Protesters hoped this was the beginning of a transition to democracy.

It wasn't.

The military and civilian opposition negotiated uneasily over the following years. A transitional government was formed, with power shared between military and civilian leaders. Sharia law was repealed, and Sudan became officially secular in 2020. But tensions between different factions—particularly between the regular army and a powerful paramilitary force called the Rapid Support Forces—continued to simmer.

In April 2023, those tensions exploded into open warfare.

The War Today

As of 2024, Sudan is in the grip of a catastrophic civil war. The conflict is between the Sudanese Armed Forces, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemedti).

The Rapid Support Forces grew out of the Janjaweed—the same militia that carried out the Darfur genocide. Its leader, Hemedti, became enormously wealthy through gold mining and cultivated relationships with regional powers including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.

The fighting has devastated Khartoum and spread across the country. Millions of people have been displaced. There are credible reports of mass atrocities, sexual violence, and ethnic targeting. Famine threatens much of the population.

Sudan, which was already one of the world's poorest countries before the war—ranked 170th out of 193 countries on the Human Development Index—now faces humanitarian catastrophe.

A Land of Extremes

Sudan today is a land of extremes and contradictions.

It has a population of about 50 million people—roughly the same as South Korea—spread across an area nearly the size of Western Europe. Most of that area is desert or semi-desert; the large majority of Sudan is bone dry. Over 60 percent of the population lives in poverty.

The economy relies heavily on agriculture, partly because international sanctions and decades of isolation have prevented the development of other sectors. Sudan has oil, but most of the oilfields ended up in South Sudan after the 2011 partition.

Sudan borders seven countries: Egypt to the north, Libya to the northwest, Chad to the west, the Central African Republic to the southwest, South Sudan to the south, and Ethiopia and Eritrea to the southeast. It also has a coastline on the Red Sea, with ports that have been strategically important for millennia.

The capital, Khartoum, sits at the confluence of the Blue Nile and the White Nile—one of the great geographic landmarks of Africa. This is where the two great branches of the Nile merge to form the single river that flows north through Egypt to the Mediterranean.

The Weight of History

What makes Sudan's current tragedy so poignant is the weight of history behind it.

This is a place where humans have lived for at least 50,000 years—building huts, forming communities, developing civilizations. The Kingdom of Kerma rose and fell. The Kingdom of Kush conquered Egypt and was conquered in turn. The Christian kingdoms flourished for centuries before the Arab migrations transformed the region. Empires came and went: Egyptian, Assyrian, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, British.

Through it all, people continued to live along the Nile, to farm the narrow strips of fertile land, to trade across the deserts, to build and to rebuild.

The borders of modern Sudan were drawn by British colonial officials who knew little and cared less about the region's complex history. They lumped together peoples with different languages, religions, and identities, creating a state that has struggled for unity ever since.

That struggle continues today, in the streets of Khartoum and the villages of Darfur, in refugee camps and battle lines. Sudan's history is not over. It is being written, in blood and tears, right now.

But the pyramids still stand at Meroë, silent witnesses to everything that has come before. They have watched civilizations rise and fall for nearly three thousand years. They will likely watch whatever comes next.