Saturday, September 26, 2026
The Christian Kingdom of Makuria — The Nubia That Endured Eight Centuries
In northern Sudan, on the eastern bank of the Nile, stood the Kingdom of Makuria, one of the three Christian Nubian kingdoms alongside Nobatia in the north and Alodia in the south, and it took Old Dongola as its capital. The kingdom arose in the fifth and sixth centuries AD after the fall of the Kingdom of Kush, and embraced Christianity in the sixth century, so Dongola developed from a military fortress into a major urban center that reached its peak between the ninth and eleventh centuries AD.
In the first half of the seventh century, Makuria's army repelled the pressure of the Muslim armies advancing from the north, and then in 652 a peace known as the "Baqt" was signed, beginning a peaceful relationship with Egypt that lasted some six centuries. The kingdom guaranteed protection to Muslims crossing its lands, allowed them to pray in a mosque inside Old Dongola, and traded with Egypt, the Byzantine Empire and Ethiopia — an early model of religious coexistence across borders.
The excavations ongoing since 1964, led by the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw, reveal the scale of this civilization: four successive cathedrals built from the late sixth century to the end of the ninth, royal palaces, a fortress, private two-story houses with private baths and heating, a huge monastery — the Monastery of St. Anthony — workshops for pottery, iron and glass, and religious murals extending from the sixth to the fourteenth century.
In 2021 the team discovered, in the heart of the city, the remains of a church believed to be the largest known church building in Christian Nubia: an apse about 85 feet wide and three stories high, decorated with tenth- or early eleventh-century murals depicting the apostles, and beside it a domed tomb believed to belong to an archbishop of Dongola. The crypt of Archbishop Georgios also revealed texts in Greek, Coptic and Old Nubian.
This long era ended when King David — one of the last rulers of Christian Makuria — attacked Egypt, and the Mamluks responded by invading Nubia and Dongola fell for the first time in its history; then the massive Throne Hall building was converted into a mosque in 1317, and the kingdom was extinguished in the fourteenth century after some eight centuries of continuous life.
📚 Sources: Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, University of Warsaw — Dongola project page (pcma.uw.edu.pl); Smithsonian Magazine — "Remains of a monumental church linked to a Nubian kingdom" (July 2021); Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology — "The largest collection of paintings from the turn of the eighth and ninth centuries in the Church of Raphael at Dongola" (2016); Heritage Daily — Discovery of frescoes and inscriptions of King David at Old Dongola (2023).
— Editorial Team