History

Meroe, Sudan — the "Birmingham of Africa" — capital of the Kandakat, 300 BCE to 350 CE The word Kandaka appears in the New Testament. A treasury official travelling from the court of the “Kandake, queen of the Ethiopians” – the Greek word for any land south of Egypt – is described returning from Jerusalem in the Acts of the Apostles. The Roman geographer Strabo wrote about the one-eyed Kandake who led her armies against the legions of Augustus Caesar. Pliny the Elder mentioned the Kandakai in his encyclopaedia. These women were not legendary figures or mythological queens. They were heads of state, military commanders, and economic administrators of one of the most sophisticated civilisations in the ancient world – a civilisation located, for most of its history, in what is now Sudan. ...

Robert O. Collins · Cambridge University Press · Available in the Kandaka Library Collins’s A History of Modern Sudan is the standard English-language reference for Sudan’s political history from the Turco-Egyptian conquest of 1820 through the late post-independence period. It is the work that contextualises every economic analysis, every development plan failure, and every institutional crisis discussed elsewhere in the Kandaka library. You cannot read the World Bank’s 2015 Country Economic Memorandum, or the Industrial Location Analysis, or any analysis of the Gezira Scheme, without the political and institutional history this book provides. ...