The Christian Kingdom of Makuria — A Thousand Years of Nubian Independence
After the collapse of the Kingdom of Kush in the fourth century AD, three Christian kingdoms arose in Nubia: Nobatia in the north, with its capital at Faras; Makuria in the center, with its capital at Dongola; and Alodia in the south, with its capital at Soba. Makuria took Old Dongola as its capital, on the eastern bank of the Nile between the Third and Fourth Cataracts, about 105 kilometers south of the present-day city of Dongola, and fortified it with a massive citadel whose earliest construction dates to the end of the fifth century AD.
Makuria embraced Christianity in the mid-sixth century AD through missionary expeditions coming from Byzantine Egypt, and by the end of that century it had become the kingdom's official religion. Dongola and Faras became the two main centers of the Nubian Church, whose bishops were appointed from Alexandria, and at its peak the kingdom's borders extended from the Third Cataract to between the Fifth and Sixth Cataracts, controlling trade routes, mines and oases to the east and west.
In 652 AD, the armies of Abdullah ibn Sa'd ibn Abi al-Sarh besieged the city of Dongola, but Makuria's forces repelled them, and then the famous Baqt Treaty was signed, guaranteeing the independence of the Christian Nubian kingdoms for nearly five centuries, until the thirteenth century. Among the effects of that treaty was the building of the Mosque of Abdullah ibn Abi al-Sarh in Old Dongola, one of the oldest mosques in Sudan — a Christian state with a mosque in its capital, a unique precedent in medieval history.
Between the ninth and eleventh centuries, Makuria lived its golden age: the royal Throne Hall in Dongola, the great Cruciform Church, the Monastery of Bangnarti, and more than one hundred murals in the Monastery of the Holy Trinity depicting Christ, Mary and the apostles, and scenes from the Old and New Testaments, while the walls of the crypt of Archbishop Georgios were covered with texts in Greek, Coptic and Old Nubian. The city extended over some 200 hectares and included dozens of churches and two-story houses with hot water, upper toilets, and kilns for pottery and iron smelting. As for the famous paintings of Faras Cathedral, uncovered by the Polish archaeological mission, they are preserved today in the museums of Khartoum and Warsaw.
In the fourteenth century, amid Mamluk pressure and internal divisions, Dongola fell around 1317 AD, and Makuria thereby folded away nearly a thousand years of Nubian independence — the longest-lived independent Christian state to endure in the region, whose legacy remains alive in the world's museums and in the ongoing research at Old Dongola to this day.
📚 Sources: Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology — University of Warsaw (research at the Dongola site); State Museum of Egyptian Art in Munich (educational guide "Nubia and Sudan"). — Editorial Team