A History of The Sudans

• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Early Societies: Prehistory in the Nile Valley and Eastern Sudan
• Chapter 2 The Kingdom of Kush: An Ancient Power in Nubia
• Chapter 3 The Meroitic Kingdom and the Christianization of Nubia
• Chapter 4 Medieval Nubia: The Kingdoms of Nobatia, Makuria, and Alodia
• Chapter 5 The Rise of Islamic Kingdoms: The Funj and Keira Sultanates
• Chapter 6 The Peoples of Southern Sudan Before the 19th Century
• Chapter 7 Turco-Egyptian Conquest and the Era of the Merchant Princes
• Chapter 8 The Mahdist State: Rebellion and the Rise of a Theocracy
• Chapter 9 The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium: The Establishment of Colonial Rule
• Chapter 10 The Southern Policy and the Divergent Paths of North and South
• Chapter 11 The Road to Independence and the First Sudanese Civil War
• Chapter 12 The Nimeiry Era: From Socialism to Sharia Law
• Chapter 13 The Second Sudanese Civil War and the Rise of the SPLA
• Chapter 14 The Omar al-Bashir Regime and the War in Darfur
• Chapter 15 The Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the Promise of a New Beginning
• Chapter 16 The 2011 Referendum and the Birth of the Republic of South Sudan
• Chapter 17 Post-Independence Conflicts: The Heglig Crisis and Border Disputes
• Chapter 18 The South Sudanese Civil War: A Nation Divided
• Chapter 19 The Fall of al-Bashir: Revolution and Transition in Sudan
• Chapter 20 Tribal Conflict and Internal Strife in South Sudan
• Chapter 21 The 2021 Military Coup in Sudan
• Chapter 22 The War in Sudan: The Armed Forces versus the Rapid Support Forces
• Chapter 23 International Relations and Regional Interventions
• Chapter 24 Economic Challenges and the Politics of Oil
• Chapter 25 Contemporary Society and the Future of the Two Sudans

The Nile is a river of two parts. From the highlands of Ethiopia, the Blue Nile tumbles down, heavy with the rich silt that for millennia fed the civilizations of Egypt. From the great lakes of Central Africa, the White Nile flows more languidly, pushing its way through the world's largest freshwater swamp, a vast, seemingly impenetrable marshland known as the Sudd. They meet at Khartoum, the capital of modern Sudan, their distinct waters flowing side-by-side for a time before finally merging into the single, mighty river that journeys north through the deserts of Nubia and Egypt to the Mediterranean Sea.

This confluence of two rivers is a fitting metaphor for the history of the lands through which they flow. The story of the Sudans is a story of union and division, of distinct cultures flowing in parallel before clashing or merging, of a history that is at once shared and sharply divergent. For centuries, the territory that now comprises two independent nations—the Republic of Sudan and the Republic of South Sudan—was regarded, at least by outsiders, as a single entity. The name itself, derived from the Arabic bilād as-sūdān, or "Land of the Blacks," was a broad, often vague term applied by northern travelers to the vast African territories south of the Sahara. Yet this single name has always masked a profound diversity of peoples, languages, religions, and ways of life.

This book tells the history of that complex region. It is a chronicle that stretches from the Stone Age hunters of the Dongola Reach to the 21st-century civil wars that have captured the world's attention. It is the story of ancient pharaohs from Nubia who conquered Egypt, of medieval Christian kingdoms that held out against the tide of Islam for centuries, and of powerful sultanates that controlled the trade routes of the savanna. It is also the story of peoples in the south, shielded by geography, whose societies developed largely outside the orbit of these northern states, their histories passed down not in texts but through oral tradition.

Our journey begins in prehistory, in a time when the Sahara was not a desert but a green, fertile savanna. We will explore the rise of the first complex societies along the Nile Valley, culminating in the magnificent Kingdom of Kush. This Nubian power was a contemporary, a rival, and for one glorious century, the ruler of ancient Egypt. The pharaohs of Kush's 25th Dynasty, the so-called "Black Pharaohs," controlled an empire stretching from the heart of Africa to the Near East, a testament to the region's ancient importance as a center of power and civilization. We will follow the Kushite kingdom as it moved its capital south to Meroë, developing a unique culture and its own script, which remains only partially deciphered to this day, a silent challenge from a sophisticated past.

With the decline of Meroë, the narrative shifts to the arrival of a new faith. The Christianization of Nubia in the sixth century gave rise to three medieval kingdoms—Nobatia, Makuria, and Alodia—whose art, architecture, and faith flourished for nearly a thousand years. These kingdoms formed a Christian bulwark on the southern frontier of the Islamic world, holding off Arab armies through a unique treaty known as the baqt and developing a vibrant Afro-Byzantine culture. Their eventual collapse in the 14th and 15th centuries paved the way for the next great transformation: the Islamization and Arabization of the northern Sudan.

Two powerful new states emerged to fill the vacuum: the Funj Sultanate of Sennar in the east and the Keira Sultanate of Darfur in the west. These Islamic kingdoms dominated the region for centuries, controlling trade, practicing a syncretic form of Islam that blended with older African traditions, and presiding over societies where identity became increasingly fluid. It was during this period that many of the Nubian and other indigenous peoples of the north adopted an Arab identity and the Arabic language, a process of cultural change that would profoundly shape the future political landscape.

While these great kingdoms rose and fell in the north, the peoples of the south—the Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, Azande, and many others—followed different historical trajectories. Their world was not one of centralized sultanates but of kinship-based societies, their economies centered on cattle, agriculture, and fishing. Protected by the formidable barrier of the Sudd, they had limited contact with the north. The Shilluk, however, established a powerful centralized kingdom along the White Nile, while the Azande built an impressive empire in the tropical forests of the southwest. Chapter Six will delve into the rich and diverse history of these southern societies before the disruptive changes of the 19th century.

That disruption came in the 1820s, with the Turco-Egyptian conquest. Muhammad Ali Pasha, the ambitious Ottoman governor of Egypt, invaded Sudan seeking gold, slaves, and soldiers for his modernizing army. His conquest unified the northern regions under a single, brutal administration for the first time and pushed southward, opening the previously isolated south to the outside world. This era brought not only a colonial government but also a wave of European and Arab traders, most notoriously those dealing in ivory and human beings. The slave trade reached a devastating scale, depopulating vast areas and creating a legacy of bitterness and mistrust between north and south that endures to this day.

The rapacity of the Turco-Egyptian regime and its European officials provoked a fierce backlash. In 1881, a religious scholar named Muhammad Ahmad proclaimed himself the Mahdi, the "guided one," and declared a jihad against the foreign occupiers. His movement, a powerful fusion of religious fervor and nationalist resentment, swept across the Sudan, culminating in the dramatic capture of Khartoum in 1885. The Mahdist State he founded was a short-lived but pivotal chapter in Sudanese history, an independent theocracy that fiercely resisted foreign domination before it was finally crushed by a technologically superior Anglo-Egyptian army at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898.

The fall of the Mahdist State ushered in a new era of foreign rule: the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium. In theory, Britain and Egypt governed the Sudan jointly; in practice, the British were firmly in charge. The colonial administration pacified the country, built railways and telegraph lines, and established the vast Gezira Scheme, a massive cotton plantation that became the backbone of the northern economy. Yet the British also deepened the chasm between north and south. Through a policy known as the "Southern Policy," they administered the two regions as separate entities, restricting the movement of northern Sudanese to the south, limiting the spread of Islam, and encouraging the work of Christian missionaries and the use of the English language.

This administrative division, intended to protect the unique cultures of the south from northern domination, was abruptly reversed in 1946. As independence loomed, the British, without consulting southern leaders, decided to unite the two territories under a single government to be based in Khartoum. Southerners, trained in English and largely non-Muslim, suddenly found themselves slated to be part of a state dominated by Arabic-speaking Muslims from the north. The seeds of future conflict were sown.

Independence, when it came in 1956, was not a moment of universal celebration. A mutiny by southern soldiers in 1955, just months before the British departed, marked the beginning of the First Sudanese Civil War. For seventeen years, southern rebels fought a guerrilla war against the central government in Khartoum, which they accused of reneging on promises of a federal system and pursuing policies of Arabization and Islamization. A peace agreement in 1972 brought a decade of uneasy autonomy for the south, but the underlying issues remained unresolved.

The peace was shattered in 1983 when President Gaafar Nimeiry, in a dramatic political pivot, imposed Islamic Sharia law across the entire country. This act, coupled with the discovery of oil in the south, ignited the Second Sudanese Civil War. This conflict was longer, more brutal, and more complex than the first. It was led by the Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M), a new rebel force with the ambitious goal of creating a "New Sudan" that was secular and democratic for all its citizens. The war lasted for twenty-two years, claimed an estimated two million lives, and displaced more than four million people.

During this same period, the regime of Omar al-Bashir, who seized power in a 1989 military coup, became embroiled in another devastating conflict in the western region of Darfur. The war in Darfur, which began in 2003, pitted the government and its allied Janjaweed militias against rebel groups, leading to accusations of genocide and the issuance of an arrest warrant for President al-Bashir by the International Criminal Court.

The long and tortuous road to peace between north and south culminated in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of 2005. This landmark accord ended the civil war and, crucially, granted the south the right to a referendum on independence after a six-year interim period. In January 2011, the people of southern Sudan voted overwhelmingly to secede. On July 9, 2011, the Republic of South Sudan was born, becoming the world's newest nation.

Independence, however, did not bring an end to conflict. The two Sudans have been locked in disputes over borders and the sharing of oil revenues. More tragically, South Sudan, the nation born from a long struggle for freedom, collapsed into its own devastating civil war in 2013, a conflict driven by a power struggle between its leaders that quickly took on ethnic dimensions. In the north, the 2019 Sudanese Revolution saw the dramatic overthrow of Omar al-Bashir after thirty years in power, raising hopes for a democratic transition. But these hopes were challenged by a military coup in 2021 and shattered by the outbreak of a new, catastrophic war in 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

This book aims to navigate this long and often turbulent history in a clear and engaging manner. It seeks to present the facts plainly, without sermonizing, and to provide a neutral perspective on the controversial political and religious issues that have defined the region. From the grandeur of ancient Kush to the painful birth of South Sudan and the ongoing crises of the present day, the history of the Sudans is a powerful, complex, and deeply human story. It is a story of great civilizations and enduring peoples, of profound faith and bitter conflict, all shaped by the currents of the two Niles that give the land its life.

To understand the deep history of the Sudans, one must first imagine a very different landscape. For long stretches of the Stone Age, the Sahara was not the hyper-arid desert we know today, but a vast savanna of grasslands and lakes, teeming with wildlife. This was the world that nurtured the earliest inhabitants of the region. But environments are never static. Over thousands of years, this "Green Sahara" began to shrink, its lakes drying up and its grasses turning to sand. This slow, inexorable climatic shift was a crucial engine of history, pushing animals and people towards the one reliable, life-giving artery that cut through the landscape: the River Nile.

The story of humanity in this region is exceptionally long, its earliest chapters written in stone. Archaeological work has uncovered evidence of early humans stretching back hundreds of thousands of years. But a particularly remarkable window into this deep past was opened in the Affad region of northern Sudan. Here, archaeologists have excavated a site known as Affad 23, revealing the well-preserved remains of hunting and gathering camps some 50,000 years old. Among the discoveries were traces of what may be the oldest open-air huts in the world, suggesting that early Homo sapiens were building sizeable, permanent structures far earlier than once believed. The site also yielded a significant surprise: the oldest known remains of aurochs, the wild ancestors of domestic cattle, marking the southernmost known range of this formidable species.

For millennia, the peoples of the Nile Valley lived as hunter-gatherers, their lives dictated by the seasons and the movements of game. Their toolkit included sophisticated stone implements and beautifully crafted harpoons and spearheads made from bone, essential for exploiting the rich bounty of the river. One thing Sudan is not rich in is human fossils, but a pivotal discovery at Singa on the Blue Nile, about 350 kilometers south of Khartoum, unearthed a skull dated to around 130,000 BCE, representing an early specimen of Homo sapiens.

Around the eighth millennium BC, a revolutionary change began to ripple through the communities along the river. This was the dawn of the Neolithic period, a gradual shift away from a purely nomadic existence towards a more settled way of life. People began to establish villages, some fortified with mud-brick walls, and supplement their diet of hunted game and fresh fish with the systematic gathering of wild grains and, crucially, the herding of cattle. This transition did not happen overnight, but it marked a fundamental reordering of society, laying the groundwork for all that was to come.

A key cultural phase from this era is known to archaeologists as the "Khartoum Mesolithic." First identified at a site near the Khartoum Civil Hospital, this culture flourished from roughly 7500 to 5000 BC. These people were still primarily hunters and fishers, well-adapted to the riverine environment, as evidenced by the discovery of objects interpreted as net sinkers. Yet, they also possessed a revolutionary technology: pottery. The invention of pottery was a major leap, allowing for the efficient storage of food and water and changing the way meals were cooked.

The pottery of the Khartoum Mesolithic is distinctive and, in archaeological circles, iconic. Known as "Wavy Line" ware, the earliest vessels were decorated with incised, undulating lines, likely made by dragging the spine of a catfish through the wet clay before firing. A later style, known as "Dotted Wavy Line," featured similar patterns composed of small impressions. These ceramic styles are found across a vast area, from the edges of modern-day Sudan deep into the Sahara, indicating a wide network of shared cultural ideas among the hunter-fisher-gatherer communities of North Africa during the wet Holocene period.

The gradual drying of the Sahara, which accelerated during the fifth millennium BC, had a profound impact. People and their livestock migrated out of the desiccating interior, converging on the Nile Valley in greater numbers. This influx of new populations brought with it the more intensive practice of agriculture. The resulting blend of peoples and ideas created a dynamic cultural crucible. Over the next centuries, society grew more complex. Social hierarchies began to develop, and distinct cultural groups emerged. By 3300 BC, the societies in Lower Nubia (northern Sudan) and Upper Egypt were culturally and ethnically almost identical, so much so that they simultaneously developed the systems of pharaonic kingship that would come to define the region for millennia.

While the Nile Valley was the central stage for these developments, the story of prehistoric Sudan was not confined to its banks. To the east, in the grasslands between the Atbara River and the Gash Delta, other distinct cultures were taking shape. Around 4000 BC, a culture known as the Butana Group emerged. These people lived in small, round huts and were likely semi-nomadic herdsmen who also hunted antelope and elephant. Their pottery was simple but elegantly decorated with incised lines. They consumed vast quantities of land snails, leaving behind large shell middens, but there is also evidence for the cultivation of wheat and barley, showing they were part of the broader agricultural transition. More recent discoveries suggest the Butana Group was also in the process of domesticating sorghum, a native African cereal that would become a staple crop across the continent.

Succeeding the Butana Group around 3000 BC was the Gash Group, a culture that displayed a significant leap in social organization. Excavations at their largest known settlement, Mahal Teglinos, near modern Kassala, have revealed a large town with distinct residential areas and two large cemeteries. While most people lived in simple round huts, the center of the town featured rectangular mud-brick buildings—among the earliest found so far south in Africa. The discovery of clay seals and seal impressions strongly suggests a well-developed administrative system for managing trade or the storage of goods.

The Gash Group was not isolated. Their pottery shows connections with cultures in the Nile Valley, like the Kerma culture, as well as with peoples of the Yemeni Bronze Age across the Red Sea. Finds of Egyptian-made faience beads and Red Sea shells confirm they were part of a growing long-distance trade network. The cemeteries at Mahal Teglinos also hint at a complex society. In one, burials were marked with rough stone stelae, and some graves contained two bodies, suggesting the possibility of human sacrifice. This evidence paints a picture of a sophisticated and increasingly stratified society flourishing far from the main artery of the Nile.

Following the Gash culture, in the second millennium BC, was the Jebel Mokram Group. They appear to represent a simpler way of life, living in basic round huts and producing less elaborate pottery. Cattle breeding seems to have been the foundation of their economy. Their emergence marks another shift in the cultural landscape of eastern Sudan, a region that continued to be a crossroads of different peoples and traditions.

Meanwhile, in the vast wetlands of the Sudd in the southern part of the region, a different kind of society was solidifying. Archaeological evidence indicates that a culture based on transhumant cattle raising—the seasonal movement of livestock between grazing grounds—had been present in these marshlands since at least 3000 BC. This deep history of pastoralism, centered on the unique relationship between humans and their cattle, would become the defining characteristic of the Nilotic-speaking peoples who would later emerge from this heartland. Shielded by the formidable geography of the swamp, these early southern societies developed along a different trajectory, one whose legacy would be carried not in pottery sherds or the ruins of towns, but in the cultural DNA of the Dinka, Nuer, and Shilluk peoples.

As the prehistoric era drew to a close, the societies of the northern Nile Valley were on the cusp of a great transformation. The centuries of agricultural development and cultural mixing had given rise to a dense population and a complex social structure capable of organizing labor on a massive scale. This was the society that would soon give birth to the first great kingdom of the Sudan, a native African power that would challenge and, for a time, even conquer its famous neighbor to the north. The foundations for the Kingdom of Kush had been laid.