Evidence-based articles on Sudan’s past, its institutions, and the histories that continue to shape the country.
The Funj Sultanate: Three Centuries of Power on the Blue Nile
Sennar in 1821, sketched around the time of the Turco-Egyptian conquest — by then a city already reduced to ruins. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain. In June 1821, a Turco-Egyptian army under Ismail bin Muhammad Ali reached the banks of the Blue Nile and marched on a city they had been told, for three centuries, was one of the wealthiest in Africa. What they found instead was a heap of ruins. The last Funj sultan, Badi VII, surrendered without a fight. A kingdom that had once stretched from the Third Cataract of the Nile to the Ethiopian highlands, that had governed an ethnically diverse population under a divine monarchy, and that had for a time made its capital “close to being the greatest trading city” on the continent, ended not in a great battle but in a quiet capitulation to an empire that no longer had to fight for what it wanted. ...