The Christian Kingdom of Makuria — a Thousand Years of Nubia
The Kingdom of Makuria (Makuria) arose in the fifth century CE after the collapse of the Kingdom of Kush in the fourth century, along the Nile Valley between the Third and Fourth Cataracts in what is known today as northern Sudan and southern Egypt, and made its capital Old Dongola, which was founded around the year 500 CE.
In the middle of the sixth century, the kingdom embraced Christianity through Byzantine missionary missions, and the historian John of Biclaro recorded that Makuria "received the Christian faith" around the year 568, and churches and architecture flourished, and texts were written in the Old Nubian, Greek and Coptic languages alongside Arabic.
In 652, a Rashidun army led by Abdallah ibn Sa'd ibn Abi Sarh attacked Dongola, besieged it and bombarded it with catapults, and the Nubian archers, famous for their skill, repelled it, and the first known king of the kingdom was Qalidurut. The siege ended with the Baqt Treaty, which recognized Makuria's independence, and under it Muslims enjoyed protection while passing through and a mosque was established for them in Old Dongola, and that established a peace between Egypt and the kingdom for more than six centuries.
The kingdom reached the peak of its civilizational prosperity between the ninth and eleventh centuries: the Cruciform Church in Dongola (about 28 meters, the kingdom's largest buildings), the Throne Hall with Byzantine influences, the Monastery of Banganarti, and mural arts and decorated pottery. The excavations of the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology at Old Dongola revealed more than twelve churches, a monastery, and murals from the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, and the crypt of Archbishop Georgios with Greek, Coptic and Old Nubian texts.
The kingdom's decline began in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries under the pressure of the Mamluks, Bedouin raids and perhaps the plague, then a civil war in 1365 after which it lost Dongola, and its last known kings remained around the year 1460 at Jebel Adda, before it collapsed definitively in the late fifteenth century — after a history that extended for about a thousand years.
📚 Sources: Wikipedia encyclopedia — article "Makuria"; Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology — University of Warsaw (Old Dongola mission); Smithsonian Magazine — discovery of a Nubian cathedral in Sudan. — Editorial Team