Kingdom of Alodia — Soba, Capital of Nubian South
After the fall of the Kingdom of Kush in the fourth century CE, the Kingdom of Alodia (Alodia / Alwa) arose in central Sudan, and took as its capital the city of Soba at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles, near present-day Khartoum. Its first mention in historical sources dates to the year 569 CE.
Alodia was the last of the three Nubian kingdoms to embrace Christianity, embracing it in 580 CE after Nobadia and Makuria, according to the account of the contemporary bishop John of Ephesus. It reached its height in the ninth and twelfth centuries, when it surpassed — according to the Arab accounts — its northern neighbor Makuria in area, military strength and economic prosperity, with close dynastic relations between the two kingdoms.
The Arab geographers who visited it — al-Yaqubi in the ninth century, and Ibn Hawqal and al-Aswani in the tenth century — described Soba as a city of "broad houses, churches full of gold, and gardens." It was a multi-ethnic capital and a flourishing trading center, receiving goods from Makuria, the Middle East, West Africa, India and even China, and reading and writing flourished in it in the Nubian and Greek languages.
From the twelfth century, and more so in the thirteenth, the kingdom began to decline for reasons historians mention: invasions from the south, drought, the shifting of trade routes, and perhaps the plague in the fourteenth century with the migration of Arab tribes to the Upper Nile Valley. Soba fell around the year 1500 CE at the hands of the Arabs or the Funj, and the Funj then founded the Sultanate of Sennar, opening the phase of Islamization and Arabization.
Alodia remains the least studied of the three Nubian kingdoms, but a multidisciplinary research project of the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw began in 2019 to explore Soba, which extends over about 275 hectares and of whose area only a small part has been excavated. The excavations revealed a garden a thousand years old, and royal stores and kitchens with unique pottery vessels — a window onto a capital whose stones vanished when they were looted to build Khartoum in 1821.
📚 Sources: Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, University of Warsaw (Soba research), Arab historical chronicles (al-Yaqubi, Ibn Hawqal, al-Aswani) and the account of John of Ephesus — Editorial Team