The Kingdom of Makuria — the Christian Nubian kingdom that endured a thousand years

After the fall of the Kingdom of Meroe around 350 AD, the Kingdom of Makuria rose in northern Sudan, one of three Christian Nubian kingdoms — alongside Nobadia, whose capital was Faras, and Alwa, whose capital was Soba — and made Dongola its capital on the banks of the Nile between the Third and Fifth Cataracts, controlling trade routes, oases and mines.

Makuria officially converted to Christianity in the mid-sixth century AD, and quickly became a thriving regional power: palaces, churches and magnificent artistic murals whose traces still stand witness in Old Dongola, while Polish excavations at Faras uncovered a complete cathedral with decorated walls that had remained buried under Nubian sands for long centuries.

In 651 AD, the Arab armies reached Makuria's gates, only to be fiercely repelled thanks to the Nubians' skill in archery — so much so that the Muslims called them the "archers of the eyes" — and the Baqt Treaty was signed in 652 between the King of Makuria and the Arab commander Abdallah ibn Sa'd, inaugurating some six centuries of peaceful coexistence between the Christian kingdom and Muslim Egypt.

The kingdom witnessed what historians call its "golden age" between roughly 750 and 1150, its trade with Egypt, Abyssinia and Byzantium flourishing, while Muslims crossed its lands safely and prayed in the Old Dongola mosque. But repeated Mamluk campaigns from the thirteenth century onward, then the installation of the first Muslim king on the throne in 1317, and a civil war in 1365, gradually sapped its strength until its last kings vanished in the late fifteenth century.

With the construction of the High Dam, UNESCO launched a major international rescue campaign in 1960: the Poles excavated at Faras, and the British at Qasr Ibrim, where the largest known collection of documents in Old Nubian was found, while Old Dongola — where a huge church was recently discovered, possibly containing the tomb of an archbishop — still awaits the completion of excavation of further chapters of this kingdom's history.

📚 Sources:

  • Smithsonian Magazine — "Ruins of Monumental Church Linked to Medieval Nubian Kingdom Found in Sudan" (on the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology mission, University of Warsaw, in Old Dongola)
  • Stanley Burstein, "When Greek was an African Language" — Frank M. Snowden Jr. Annual Lectures, Howard University (the conversion of the three Nubian kingdoms to Christianity in the sixth century)

— Editorial Team