The Christian Kingdom of Makuria — Eight Centuries on the Banks of the Nile

After the fall of the Kingdom of Kush in the fourth century CE, the Kingdom of Makuria (Makuria) arose in northern Sudan, and took Old Dongola (Old Dongola) as its capital from about the year 500 CE, when the city was a fortress on the eastern bank of the Nile between the Third and Fourth Cataracts.

Makuria embraced Christianity in the sixth century CE through missions coming from Byzantine Egypt, and at the beginning of the seventh century it annexed its northern neighbor, the Kingdom of Nobatia, and its influence extended to the borders of Byzantine Egypt. It repelled the armies of the Rashidun Caliphate twice before the walls of Dongola, in 642 and 652 CE, then the "Baqt" treaty was signed, which preserved a peace that lasted about six centuries between Christian Nubia and Muslim Egypt.

Makuria reached its civilizational peak between the ninth and eleventh centuries: successive cathedrals, the royal palace and the Monastery of Banganarti were built, the art of religious wall paintings and decorated pottery flourished, and the Nubian language became a written language with an alphabet derived from Coptic, alongside Coptic, Greek and Arabic.

The continuous Polish archaeological excavations at Old Dongola since 1964, under the supervision of the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw, bear witness to that, having revealed four successive cathedrals, and a huge church discovered in 2021 that may be the largest known Nubian church, in addition to colored wall paintings from the Middle Ages.

The kingdom's star faded in the twelfth century, and it fell at the beginning of the fourteenth century before the Mamluk invasions, but Dongola's wall paintings and manuscripts still bear witness to a kingdom that ruled the Nile for about eight centuries.

📚 Sources: Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology — University of Warsaw (pcma.uw.edu.pl); World History Encyclopedia — article "Old Dongola" (worldhistory.org) — Editorial Team