The Sudanese Nile has been inhabited since long before Egypt existed. At Affad, near Dongola, archaeologists have excavated the remains of prehistoric camps around 50,000 years old, and by the eighth millennium BC there were already mud-brick villages on the riverbank combining hunting, fishing and livestock. Cattle domestication in the region goes back some 10,000 years, and that bond with cows runs through the country's entire cultural history.
The first clearly identifiable culture is the one archaeologists call the A-Group, in Lower Nubia, between the first and second cataracts, throughout the fourth millennium BC and until around 2900 BC. It lived on trade: it exported incense, ebony, ivory, carnelian and gold from the eastern desert to predynastic Egypt, and received Egyptian and Levantine pottery and luxury goods. Its "eggshell" pottery, with extremely thin walls and a black rim, is among the most refined of the ancient Nile. In Cemetery L at Qustul, elite tombs turned up with almost two hundred vessels and costly imports, which led archaeologist Bruce Williams to argue that the Egyptian monarchy may have had Nubian roots; other specialists, such as William Y. Adams, rejected that reading as overstated. The debate is still open and is best told as a debate.
The real leap comes with Kerma, around 2500 BC, in Upper Nubia, just upstream of the third cataract. Kerma was one of Africa's first complex societies: in its classic phase (1750-1504 BC) the city covered some 25 hectares, had a monumental mud-brick temple —the Western Deffufa, built around 1750 BC— and royal necropolises with enormous tumuli ringed by white quartzite cones and accompanied by dozens of secondary burials and human sacrifices. Kerma was not an Egyptian colony: it was a rival. During the Middle Kingdom Egypt filled Lower Nubia with fortresses precisely to contain it, and around 1575-1550 BC the kingdom of Kush allied with the Hyksos and went as far as invading Egypt in what the Egyptians themselves remembered as a humiliation.
Egypt's revenge came with the New Kingdom. Around 1504 BC Pharaoh Thutmose I razed Kerma and brought Upper Nubia into the empire. For some four and a half centuries, until around 1070 BC, what is now northern Sudan was an Egyptian colony governed by an official bearing the title "King's Son of Kush", the viceroy. The rebellions never stopped: uprisings are documented for some 220 years after the conquest.
Around 1450 BC, Thutmose III reached a 104-metre-high sandstone mesa beside the Nile, fortified it and founded the city of Napata there, the southern frontier of the empire. The mountain —Jebel Barkal— has on its flank an isolated pinnacle that the Egyptians read as a uraeus cobra, the emblem of kingship, and they decided that Amun lived there. That temple, catalogued by archaeologists as B500, became the most important sanctuary on the Nile south of Thebes.
It is one of those ironies history keeps repeating: Egypt colonised Nubia and left it, as an inheritance, a god and an idea of kingship. When Egyptian power withdrew around 1070 BC, the Nubians did not go back to how things had been. They kept Amun, hieroglyphic writing and the temples, and used them to build a kingdom of their own that within a few generations would march north to claim Egypt in the name of that same god.
The kingdom of Kush was reborn with its capital at Napata. The dynasty was founded by King Alara, around 800-760 BC, who placed the cult of Amun at the heart of Kushite identity. His successor Kashta had himself recognised as king of Upper Egypt without a fight, and it was Piye —whose reign is usually dated between 747 and 714 BC— who finished the job: he went down the Nile, subdued the Delta and unified Egypt under Kushite rule, in a campaign he had carved on a very long victory stela found at Jebel Barkal. The exact dates of the conquest are debated and fall somewhere between around 744 and 727 BC.
Thus was born the 25th Dynasty, that of the so-called "black pharaohs": Piye, Shebitku, Shabaka, Taharqa and Tantamani. The greatest was Taharqa (690-664 BC), who ruled from the Nile delta to present-day Sudan and built or restored monuments at Karnak, Kawa, Qasr Ibrim and Jebel Barkal. At Nuri he had the largest pyramid in Nubia built for himself, aligned so that, seen from Jebel Barkal, the sun of the Egyptian new year rose right over its apex.
The end came from Assyria. Esarhaddon took Memphis in 671 BC; Ashurbanipal pushed south in 667 and in 663 BC sacked Thebes, and Tantamani had to flee to Nubia. The Kushite court fell back to Napata. They lost Egypt, but not the kingdom: Kush lived on, with its own kings and its own pyramids, for another thousand years.
Around 591 BC, after an Egyptian raid that went as far as sacking Napata, King Aspelta moved the centre of the kingdom much further south, to Meroe, between the fifth and sixth cataracts. The move made economic and strategic sense: there was iron ore, hardwood for the furnaces, monsoon rains that turned the Butana steppe into pastureland, routes to the Red Sea and a prudent distance from Egypt. From around 300 BC the royal burials also took place at Meroe.
Meroe was an industrial power for its time. The Egyptologist Archibald Sayce called it "the Birmingham of Africa" for its iron slag heaps, and its output fed trade with Rome alongside ivory, ebony, hides and ostrich feathers. It also developed something no other Nile culture had: an alphabet of its own, Meroitic, which appeared in the 3rd century BC in two forms —hieroglyphic and cursive— with 23 signs. The Briton Francis Llewellyn Griffith deciphered the script in 1909 by comparing Meroitic spellings of Egyptian names; we know how to read it aloud. But the language itself has still not been translated: its relationship to other languages is debated and the long texts remain, to a large extent, unreadable. It is one of the great open puzzles of linguistics.
Women ruled in Meroe too. The kandakes, or candaces, queens with power in their own right, appear again and again in the reliefs. The most famous is Amanirenas, who around 27-25 BC attacked the Roman frontier and went as far as sacking Aswan before negotiating a favourable peace with the prefect Gaius Petronius. That war left behind an extraordinary object: a bronze head of Augustus, torn from a statue and buried beneath the steps of a temple in the royal city —so that people would tread on it as they entered— which John Garstang unearthed in December 1910 and which is now in the British Museum.
The kingdom faded away in the 4th century AD, through a combination of climatic decline, internal rebellions, pressure from the Noba and campaigns by the kingdom of Aksum: the Aksumite king Ezana took Meroe around 330 AD, and the last pyramids and burials date from the mid-4th century.
Three kingdoms rose on the ruins of Kush: Nobadia, with its capital at Faras; Makuria, with its capital at Dongola (Old Dongola); and Alodia, with its capital at Soba, next to present-day Khartoum. All three converted to Christianity in the 6th century: the chronicler John of Biclaro records that around 568 Makuria "had received the faith of Christ". Nubia became a land of cathedrals, bishops and murals, with its own script for Old Nubian.
When the Arab armies conquered Egypt and pushed south along the Nile, they ran into something unexpected. The expeditions of 641-642 and 651-652 reached Dongola and could not take it; Arab chronicles remember the deadly aim of the Nubian archers. Instead of conquest came an agreement: the baqt, signed around 652 between the king of Makuria and the Arab governor of Egypt. It was neither a surrender nor a classic tribute, but a non-aggression pact with an annual exchange of goods —Makuria handed over some 360 slaves a year and received wheat, textiles and other Egyptian products. That agreement, unique in the history of the Islamic expansion, held the border for more than six centuries, until the 13th century.
Makuria absorbed Nobadia at the beginning of the 7th century and enjoyed its golden age between the 9th and 11th centuries: in 747 and again in the 960s its armies entered Egypt to protect the Coptic patriarch. Decline came with the Mamluk campaigns of the 1260s to the 1280s, which bled the kingdom dry. In 1316 the first Muslim king of Makuria, Abdallah Barshanbu, took the throne, and in 1317 the great throne hall of Dongola was turned into a mosque: it remained in use as one until 1969. The court fled in 1364; the last known king, Joel, is attested in 1463. Alodia held out even longer further south and fell at the beginning of the 16th century.
In 1504, Sultan Amara Dunqas founded the Funj Sultanate with its capital at Sennar, on the Blue Nile, after allying with the Arab chief Abdallah Jamma and destroying Soba, the last Christian capital. The origin of the Funj is debated —some hypotheses link them to the White Nile, to the Shilluk or to peoples of the south— but their path is clear: they embraced Islam quickly and by 1523 already controlled the Nile as far as Dongola. At its height, around 1700, the sultanate stretched from the third cataract to the foothills of the Ethiopian highlands, and from the Red Sea to Kordofan and the Nuba Mountains. Sennar welcomed Sufi teachers and jurists, and out of that slow process Sudanese Islam was born, woven from brotherhoods and local holy men rather than from urban ulama.
Its internal history was turbulent: around 1718 the Funj aristocracy overthrew Sultan Unsa III, and the new regime pushed a more orthodox Islamic policy and a more marked Arabisation. Between 1741 and 1744 there was war with Ethiopia; Sennar won on the Dinder River. Then came decline, and by the early 19th century the sultanate had shrunk to little more than the Gezira, the strip of land between the two Niles.
In the west a parallel power grew. Around the mid-16th century the Keira dynasty imposed itself over the Daju and Tunjur kingdoms, and it would eventually give rise to the Sultanate of Darfur. Sulayman Solong (c. 1660-1680) made Islam the state religion and extended the kingdom towards the Masalit, the Qimr and the Zaghawa. Muhammad Tayrab turned east and in 1785-1786 conquered Kordofan from the Funj. His successor Abd al-Rahman took the sultanate to its peak and in 1792 founded a new capital, El Fasher. Darfur lived off the Darb al-Arbain, the "forty days road" linking Kobbei with Asyut, in Egypt: ivory, feathers, cattle and slaves left along it. It was an empire roughly the size of present-day Nigeria, and it remained independent until 1821.
In October 1820 an army of some 5,000 men set out from Egypt under the command of Ismail Kamil Pasha, son of Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt. It was after three things: gold, slaves for his father's new army and control of the upper Nile. In the spring of 1821 the troops camped on the strip of land where the two Niles meet, and on 12 June 1821 they took Sennar without firing a shot: the last Funj sultan, Badi VII, surrendered. So began what Sudanese people call the Turkiyya, "Turkish" rule, which was in fact Turco-Egyptian.
The regime was voracious and the resistance fierce. In October 1822, at Shendi, the Ja'ali king Mek Nimr answered Ismail Pasha's humiliations and tribute demands by trapping him and setting him on fire along with his entourage. The reprisal by the defterdar Muhammad Bey was a brutal punitive campaign across the riverside region.
Khartoum grew out of that military camp at the confluence. The name is usually explained by the Arabic khurtum, "trunk", after the shape of the strip of land between the Blue Nile and the White Nile. The settlement took hold in the early 1820s, the seat of government moved there and by 1830 Khartoum was formally the capital of Turco-Egyptian Sudan. It was in those years that the country became bound to two trades that would shape its history: ivory and slaves, with expeditions travelling up the White Nile to the regions of the south. When the European powers began to press against the slave trade, Khedive Ismail appointed Europeans as governors to put on a show of cracking down on the traffic: among them, a British officer named Charles George Gordon, governor-general of Sudan between 1877 and 1879. In 1874 the merchant Zubayr Rahma had also conquered the Sultanate of Darfur for khedival Egypt.
In 1881, a Sufi teacher from Aba Island, on the White Nile, named Muhammad Ahmad proclaimed himself the Mahdi, the one guided by God who was to purify Islam and free Sudan from foreign rule. It was at once a religious, social and national revolt against taxes, corruption and Turco-Egyptian domination.
The military successes were lightning-fast. In November 1883, at Shaykan, near El Obeid, some 30,000 ansar wiped out the column of about 8,000 men led by the Briton William Hicks. London decided to evacuate Sudan and sent Gordon to organise the withdrawal; Gordon stayed in Khartoum. The city was besieged from 13 March 1884 and fell on 26 January 1885: the garrison was annihilated and a large share of the inhabitants were killed or enslaved; Gordon died in the assault. The relief expedition arrived by steamer on 28 January, two days late, and the scene became one of the great myths of the British Empire.
The Mahdi died on 22 June 1885, probably of typhus, and was succeeded by the Khalifa Abdallahi ibn Muhammad, who ruled from Omdurman, the new capital built opposite the ruins of Khartoum. The Mahdiyya years were extremely harsh: war on every border, epidemics and an appalling famine. Estimates of the population collapse are high and hotly disputed —some calculations speak of a fall from about 8 million inhabitants before the revolt to around 2.5 million afterwards— and they are best taken as orders of magnitude rather than firm figures.
The end came with the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest led by Herbert Kitchener, launched in March 1896 and backed by a railway laid across the desert. On 8 April 1898 the emir Mahmud Ahmad was defeated and captured at the Atbara River. On 2 September 1898, at Omdurman, some 52,000 ansar charged the Maxim guns and the Anglo-Egyptian artillery: around 11,000 Mahdists died, against 48 dead and fewer than 400 wounded on the Anglo-Egyptian side. Among those present was a young correspondent named Winston Churchill. The Khalifa fell fighting at Umm Diwaykarat in November 1899.
On 19 January 1899 Britain and Egypt signed the agreement that turned Sudan into a condominium: shared sovereignty on paper, British administration in practice, with a governor-general appointed by London. Kitchener rebuilt Khartoum; tradition has it that the new street plan traced a Union Jack, a detail repeated endlessly and best taken for what it is, an urban anecdote that is hard to verify on the ground.
The condominium left two decisive legacies. The first is economic: the Gezira Scheme, between the two Niles, with the Sennar Dam completed in 1925, a canal network that today runs to more than 4,300 kilometres and a tenant-farming system that made cotton the backbone of the Sudanese economy. It was financed by the London-based Sudan Plantations Syndicate until it passed in 1950 to the state-run Sudan Gezira Board.
The second is political and far heavier: the "Southern Policy". Through the Closed District Ordinances, the British administration separated the south —mostly non-Muslim and non-Arabic-speaking— from the north administratively, restricted movement between the two, held back the spread of Arabic and Islam in the south and left its education in the hands of Christian missions. When the two halves were hastily joined in the final stretch towards independence, the south arrived with no trained cadres, no infrastructure and convinced —with good reason— that it would be left subordinate.
Sudanese nationalism organised early: in 1924 Lieutenant Ali Abd al-Latif's White Flag League led an uprising that the British crushed. In 1943 an Advisory Council was created for the north; on 12 February 1953 the British, Egyptians and Sudanese signed the self-government agreement, and in 1954 Ismail al-Azhari became the first head of government. On 18 August 1955 the Equatoria Corps mutinied at Torit: the war began before the country did. Parliament declared independence on 19 December 1955 and on 1 January 1956 London and Cairo recognised it. The Republic of the Sudan was born.
The First Civil War (1955-1972) grew out of that mutiny at Torit and expanded with the Anyanya guerrillas — the name comes from a Madi word that translates as "snake venom" — who were most active between 1963 and 1969. In 1971 former lieutenant Joseph Lagu united the rebel groups for the first time under the Southern Sudan Liberation Movement. The human cost of those seventeen years is estimated at around 500,000 dead, and some estimates reach one million; only one in five victims is thought to have been a combatant. On 27 March 1972 the Addis Ababa Agreement created the Southern Autonomous Region, with its own assembly and executive, and brought eleven years of peace.
The peace was broken by a decision taken in Khartoum. President Gaafar Nimeiry, who had come to power in a coup on 25 May 1969, began hollowing out the autonomy, and in September 1983 he imposed the "September laws", which applied sharia across the whole country. That same year, a mutiny in Bor and Pibor gave rise to the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), led by John Garang, which did not call for secession but for a secular, decentralised "New Sudan".
The Second Civil War (1983-2005) was one of the deadliest of the 20th century. The most widely cited figure is around two million dead, the vast majority of them civilians who died of hunger and disease rather than in combat, and some four million displaced in the south, many of them several times over. The war was fought over the oil of the Upper Nile, tribal militias were armed, and hunger was used as a weapon. Nimeiry was toppled in a coup on 6 April 1985; in 1989 another coup brought Omar al-Bashir to power.
On 9 January 2005 the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), negotiated in Naivasha, was signed in Nairobi: six years of southern autonomy, a sharing of oil revenues, sharia in the north and an independence referendum at the end of the period. Garang died in a helicopter crash in July 2005, just weeks after taking office as vice-president. The referendum was held in January 2011, and on 9 July 2011 South Sudan became an independent country. At a stroke, Sudan lost around a quarter of its territory and most of its crude oil production.
Omar al-Bashir ruled Sudan for thirty years, from the coup of 30 June 1989 until April 2019, first in alliance with the Islamist Hassan al-Turabi and later on his own. It was a one-party regime — the National Congress Party — with omnipresent security services, a country under international sanctions and an economy that depended first on oil and then, after the secession of the south, on gold.
In Darfur, in the west, the crisis had been brewing for decades: droughts, desertification, competition for land and water between farming and herding communities, and a central government that sided with some and against others. On 26 February 2003, according to researchers Julie Flint and Alex de Waal, the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) launched their offensive against the government. The response combined aerial bombing with irregular militias known as the Janjaweed, recruited mainly from Arabised herding communities; the government publicly denied backing them, but financial assistance and arms deliveries were documented.
The figures are disputed and have to be given with their source. The United Nations estimated some 300,000 dead; the Sudanese government maintained a figure of around 10,000. On displacement, the UN spoke of between 2.85 and 3 million people, against the 450,000 acknowledged by Khartoum. The United States described the events as genocide in 2004; a UN commission of inquiry concluded in 2005 that war crimes and crimes against humanity had been committed, but did not consider genocidal intent proven. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Omar al-Bashir in 2009 and 2010 for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide: he was the first sitting head of state wanted by the ICC. In 2007 the Security Council approved, with Resolution 1769, the hybrid UN-African Union mission UNAMID. On 31 August 2020, with Bashir already out of power, the transitional government signed a peace agreement in Juba with several armed groups from Darfur and other regions.
That war also produced the decisive actor of the present: the Janjaweed militias were formalised by the state and in 2013 became the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), under the command of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, "Hemedti".
On 19 December 2018, in Atbara, a northern railway town with a century-old trade union tradition, people took to the streets against the price of bread and burned down the local headquarters of the ruling party. Within weeks the protest was nationwide. On 6 April 2019 the sit-in outside army headquarters in Khartoum began, and on 11 April 2019 the military removed and detained Omar al-Bashir after thirty years in power. On 3 June 2019 the security forces broke up the sit-in by force: counts vary, and the most widely cited figures speak of more than a hundred dead on that day alone. On 17 August 2019 the constitutional declaration opening a transitional period was signed, and on 21 August the economist Abdalla Hamdok took office as prime minister. The transition collapsed on 25 October 2021, when General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan staged a coup and detained the civilians in the government.
On 15 April 2023 the dispute between Burhan's army (SAF) and Hemedti's Rapid Support Forces over the timeline for integrating the RSF — the RSF wanted ten years, the army demanded two — erupted into open war in Khartoum. Burhan was besieged in army headquarters until 24 August 2023, and the government moved to Port Sudan. The RSF took Nyala in October 2023 and much of Darfur; the army retook Khartoum in March 2025; El Fasher, the army's last stronghold in Darfur, fell to the RSF on 26 October 2025.
The war's figures are uncertain and must always be attributed. A London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine study published in November 2024 estimated more than 61,000 deaths from all causes in Khartoum state alone between April 2023 and June 2024 — more than 26,000 of them from direct violence — and calculated that over 90% of deaths went unrecorded; across most of the country the main causes of death are thought to be preventable disease and hunger. Overall death toll estimates vary enormously depending on the methodology. UN agencies put the internally displaced at several million and refugees at more than three million, and the IPC classification has declared famine conditions in various parts of the country. According to the UN, it is one of the largest displacement crises in the world.
Heritage is also in the line of fire. In September 2024 UNESCO warned that the threat to Sudanese culture had reached an "unprecedented" level, with at least six museums looted or damaged, and described at Meroe the near-total disappearance of maintenance and surveillance, construction inside the buffer zone, graffiti on the pyramids and damage from dunes and heavy rain. The most serious case is the National Museum of Sudan, in Khartoum: Ghalia Jar al-Nabi, director of the antiquities and museums authority, told NBC News that more than 60% of its holdings — a collection of around 150,000 pieces and the largest Nubian collection in the world — was looted during the RSF occupation between 2023 and early 2025, with particular focus on the gold and jewellery of Napata and Meroe; some objects turned up for sale on eBay. UNESCO, which had been coordinating the museum's restoration with Italian funding since 2019, inventoried and digitised more than 1,700 objects and trained police and customs officers to recognise stolen antiquities.
The 5 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Al-Mogran simply means "the confluence". It is the point in Khartoum where the Blue Nile, which comes down from Lake Tana in the Ethiopian highlands loaded with volcanic silt, meets the White Nile, which arrives much more slowly from the African Great Lakes after losing half its life to evaporation in the Sudd swamps. From that union flows the Nile proper, which still has some 3,000 kilometres to go before reaching the Mediterranean.
The two rivers differ even in their colour and their calendar. The White Nile delivers a steady flow all year round; the Blue Nile brings the flood, concentrated between July and September, and with it the sediment that fertilised Egypt for millennia. For weeks you can see the line where murky water and clear water run side by side without fully mixing. The human geography of the whole country is arranged around that meeting point.
In the middle of the confluence lies Tuti Island, a patch of countryside with vegetable plots and donkeys just metres from the buildings of the city centre, linked to the three cities by a suspension bridge opened in 2009. And very close by, upstream on the Blue Nile, stood Soba, capital of the Christian kingdom of Alodia until the early 16th century: the most important city in the area many centuries before Khartoum existed.
Khartoum is not an ancient city: it was founded in 1821 as an outpost of Muhammad Ali's Egyptian army, just north of old Soba. The name is usually explained by the Arabic khurtum, "trunk", after the shape of the tongue of land between the two rivers, although some link it to the elephants that were once plentiful in the area.
The camp grew fast. Egypt moved the seat of its colonial government there in the early 1820s, and by 1830 Khartoum was formally the political centre of Turco-Egyptian Sudan. What made it grow was trade: ivory, gum arabic, ostrich feathers and, above all, slaves captured in the south and in the Nuba Mountains. In the middle decades of the 19th century, Khartoum was the great market of that trade and the base for the expeditions that travelled up the White Nile.
It is important to say this plainly, because it explains what came next: the city that sent out the slave traders and tax collectors was also the one the Mahdi destroyed, and the rift between the riverside centre and the country's peripheries that took hold in those years still lies at the root of every Sudanese war.
When the Mahdi wiped out Hicks's army at Shaykan in November 1883, London decided to evacuate Sudan and sent Charles George Gordon — governor-general from 1877 to 1879 — to organise the withdrawal. Gordon reached Khartoum in February 1884 and, instead of evacuating, dug in.
The siege began on 13 March 1884 and lasted more than ten months. Inside, hunger and typhus; outside, an ever-tightening ring. The British government was slow to send a relief expedition, and when it did, it split it in two: one column by river and another across the Bayuda Desert. The city fell on 26 January 1885. The garrison was wiped out and much of the population was killed or enslaved. Gordon died in the assault; the exact circumstances are known mainly from later accounts and from Victorian iconography, which turned him into an imperial martyr standing on the steps of the palace.
The relief expedition's first steamer arrived on 28 January: two days too late. That delay became a political scandal in Britain and fed an obsession with going back for thirteen years. Khartoum was abandoned and its stones were used to build Omdurman, the new capital on the other side of the river.
Omdurman exists as a major city because the Mahdi decided his capital would not be Khartoum. After the victory of 1885 he settled on the west bank, and when he died on 22 June that year, his successor the Khalifa Abdallahi built his tomb there along with his own house — today the Bayt al-Khalifa museum — and ordered the city to be settled. Omdurman became the capital of a state that ruled Sudan for thirteen years.
On 2 September 1898 the Battle of Omdurman was fought at the city's gates. Some 52,000 Ansar fighters charged across open ground against Herbert Kitchener's Maxim guns, artillery and Nile gunboats. Around 11,000 Mahdists were killed; on the Anglo-Egyptian side there were 48 dead and fewer than 400 wounded. It was less a battle than a demonstration of what industry could do to courage. Among those present was a 23-year-old lieutenant and correspondent named Winston Churchill, who took part in the charge of the 21st Lancers and later wrote one of the most widely read accounts of the episode.
After the victory, Kitchener had the Mahdi's tomb desecrated and its dome destroyed; according to Churchill himself, he took the Mahdi's head as a trophy, an episode that caused outrage even in Britain. The tomb was rebuilt in 1947, and its silver dome is still the city's most recognisable landmark.
Kitchener, by then governor-general, rebuilt Khartoum from scratch after 1898, with wide avenues and colonial buildings facing the river; the oft-repeated story says the street plan traced a Union Jack, a detail that is always quoted and is more urban folklore than verifiable town planning. To the north, across the Blue Nile, grew Khartoum North (Bahri), the industrial and railway city. To the west lay Omdurman, the most Sudanese city of all. Three cities, three characters, a single conurbation that grew to more than five million people.
Khartoum was the stage for almost everything that happened to the country in the 20th century: the White Flag League uprising in 1924, the raising of the Sudanese flag at the Palace on 1 January 1956, the civilian revolutions of October 1964 and April 1985 — two dictators brought down by strikes and demonstrations — and the sit-in outside army headquarters in 2019. It is a country with a very strong tradition of urban protest, and the capital is its stage.
Omdurman, meanwhile, held the cultural life: its souk is one of the largest in Africa, its camel market supplied the desert routes, and on Friday afternoons, at the Hamed al-Nil cemetery, the Qadiriyya Sufi order held the dervish ceremony, with drums, incense and trance-like whirling until sunset. National radio, haqiba music and much of modern Sudanese poetry came out of those streets.
On 15 April 2023, the Rapid Support Forces attacked army bases and Khartoum airport, and the war began in the very heart of the capital. General Burhan was besieged in army headquarters until 24 August 2023, and the government moved to Port Sudan. The RSF occupied Omdurman between April 2023 and May 2025, along with much of the metropolitan area; the army retook Khartoum in March 2025. Journalists who went in afterwards described overwhelming destruction across entire neighbourhoods.
A London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine study published in November 2024 estimated more than 61,000 deaths from all causes in Khartoum state between April 2023 and June 2024, more than 26,000 of them from direct violence, and calculated that over 90% of deaths were never recorded. These are statistical estimates, not counts, and should be read as such.
The National Museum of Sudan, on the Blue Nile, is the symbol of what has been lost. It held the largest Nubian collection in the world and, in its garden, the temples of Buhen and Semna, rescued stone by stone before Lake Nasser flooded Lower Nubia. Ghalia Jar al-Nabi, director of the antiquities and museums authority, told NBC News that more than 60% of its holdings — a collection of around 150,000 pieces — was looted, with particular focus on the gold of Napata and Meroe; some pieces turned up for sale on eBay. UNESCO, which had been coordinating the museum's restoration since 2019, warned in September 2024 that the threat to Sudanese heritage had reached an "unprecedented" level. Khartoum, Omdurman and al-Mogran appear in this guide for their historical weight: today they are not places you can visit.
In northern Sudan the Nile does something odd: it turns back on itself. Between the Fifth and Fourth Cataracts the river swings southwest, traces a huge S and then heads north again. Inside that bend lies the Bayuda Desert, some 100,000 square kilometres bounded by the river to the north, east and south and by the Wadi Muqaddam to the west.
It isn't a desert of dunes. The eastern half is a volcanic field of black cones and craters. The western half is sheets of ochre sand with rocky outcrops. It is also dotted with wells, which makes it possible to cross. That is why Bisharin and Ja'alin herders travel it with their camels, and why for thousands of years it was the natural shortcut between Meroe and Napata, skipping the river's enormous curve. The stela of Nastasen, a Napatan king of the 4th century BC, records a royal journey across the desert along that route.
Today the Bayuda is one of the harshest and loneliest landscapes in the country: nomad camps, wells with stone troughs, volcanic cones and silence. It is also an area of artisanal gold mining, with all the damage that brings. In 2020 gold prospectors' diggers were found to have partly destroyed the archaeological site of Jabal Maragha.
In December 1884, while Gordon was holding out in the siege of Khartoum, the British relief expedition split in two. A River Column would go up the Nile, and a Desert Column would cut across the Bayuda. The Desert Column, some 1,400 men under Sir Herbert Stewart, set out from Korti on camels on 30 December 1884.
On 17 January 1885, at the wells of Abu Klea (Abu Tulayh in Arabic), it ran into a Mahdist force of around 14,000 men, of whom between 3,000 and 5,000 took part in the attack. The main fighting lasted about fifteen minutes. The British infantry square held against the charge. 74 British soldiers were killed and 94 wounded, against some 1,100 Mahdist dead. It was a tactical victory that achieved nothing. Two days later Stewart was fatally wounded near Abu Kru, the column was held up, and the first steamer reached Khartoum on 28 January, two days after the city had fallen.
Abu Klea became part of British imperial memory, and both Kipling and Newbolt wrote about it. In Sudanese memory it stands as one of the battles of the Mahdist resistance. The wells are still there in the middle of the Bayuda, with no signs and no monument.
Atbara stands where the Atbara River —the last tributary the Nile receives before the Mediterranean, and the one that comes down from Ethiopia swollen with floodwater— flows into the Nile. On 8 April 1898, on its banks, Kitchener's Anglo-Egyptian army defeated Emir Mahmud Ahmad: the attack began at 6:20 in the morning with the brigades of William Gatacre and Archibald Hunter, some 4,000 Mahdists were captured and Mahmud himself was taken prisoner. It was the turning point of the reconquest, five months before Omdurman.
What made Atbara famous came later. In 1906 the workshops and headquarters of Sudan Railways moved from Wadi Halfa to Atbara, and the town became the hub of the country's rail network and a working-class town with workshops, foundries and neighbourhoods built by the company. Hence its nickname: "the city of iron and fire".
That working-class world produced the strongest labour movement in Africa and the Middle East of its day. The Workers' Affairs Association organised a series of railway strikes in 1947 and 1948 to demand recognition as a trade union, with most of the roughly 20,000 railway employees taking part. For half a century the railway workers of Atbara were the heart of the Sudanese working class and a key player in the civilian revolutions of October 1964 and April 1985.
And it was Atbara that sparked the most recent one: on 19 December 2018, in response to the rise in the price of bread and the removal of subsidies, residents burned the local headquarters of the National Congress Party. That was the start of the protest that brought down Omar al-Bashir four months later.
In the 19th century Wadi Halfa was the Nile port where the steamers coming down from Aswan ended their run, and later the point where the railway began. From here Kitchener organised the logistics of the reconquest, and from here in 1897 the military line was laid across the Nubian Desert towards Abu Hamed, a feat of engineering built at a forced pace that let the Anglo-Egyptian army bypass the cataracts and reach Omdurman.
And then Wadi Halfa disappeared. The Nile Waters Agreement signed by Egypt and Sudan in 1959 cleared the way for the Aswan High Dam and, with it, the flooding of the whole of Sudanese Lower Nubia. Around 50,000 people —figures vary and some sources put it at 52,000— were moved from 1963-64 onwards to Khashm el-Girba, in the east of the country, where New Halfa was built, more than a thousand kilometres from their river. There was resistance: on 26 October 1960 Nubians demonstrated in Khartoum, the police cracked down, and the university was even closed for a time. In 1964 the water covered the old town.
The flooding triggered UNESCO's International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, one of the largest archaeological operations in history. On Sudanese territory, temples were dismantled and moved to what is now the garden of the National Museum in Khartoum —Buhen and Semna, linked to Hatshepsut and Thutmose III— and the frescoes of the cathedral of Faras, capital of Nobadia, were rescued; today they are split between the National Museum in Warsaw and the one in Khartoum.
Today's Wadi Halfa is a new town on the shore of Lake Nubia —the Sudanese name for Lake Nasser— and it is still the ferry crossing point to Aswan: for many overland travellers, the gateway to the country.
The reconquest of Sudan wasn't won by rifles: it was won by a railway. Kitchener understood that the problem of the upper Nile was transport, and in 1897 he ordered the Sudan Military Railroad to be laid in a straight line across the Nubian Desert, from Wadi Halfa to Abu Hamed, cutting off the great bend of the river. It was a brutal job —no water along the route, with wells drilled on the go— and it advanced at a pace that astonished observers at the time. Along it came the dismantled gunboats, the artillery and the supplies that decided Atbara and Omdurman.
After 1899 that line was the backbone of the country: it was extended to Atbara, Khartoum, El Obeid and, in the 20th century, to Port Sudan and Nyala. For decades the railway was Sudan's largest employer and the real vehicle of national integration, and it was what gave Atbara its character.
Decline came with disinvestment from the 1970s onwards: the network, one of the most extensive in Africa, was reduced to a handful of slow, sporadic services. In 2020 the train from Atbara to Khartoum was partially revived, widely celebrated as a symbol of the revolution. The war that began in 2023 brought almost everything to a halt again.
Since April 2023 the Nile corridor between Khartoum and Wadi Halfa has been on the army-controlled side of the country, and it became an escape route. Hundreds of thousands of people fled the capital northwards along the Nile road and towards the Egyptian border, and towns such as Atbara, Merowe, Dongola and Wadi Halfa took in waves of displaced people far beyond their capacity. UN agencies put the number of internally displaced people at several million and refugees at more than three million, in what they describe as one of the largest displacement crises in the world.
The River Nile state, with its air bases and its dam, has been the target of drone attacks at various points in the conflict, and power and communications cuts have been recurrent throughout the region.
For travellers, the upshot is simple: the north is still the stretch of Africa with the most heritage per square kilometre, and it cannot be visited safely. The sites of the Bayuda, Atbara and Wadi Halfa appear in this guide for their historical and geographical value, not as open destinations.
Kerma is the oldest urban site in sub-Saharan Africa and the name of Nubia's first great kingdom. It arose around 2500 BC just upstream of the Third Cataract, on a fertile plain. In its classic phase (1750-1504 BC) the city covered some 25 hectares, with neighbourhoods, workshops and storehouses.
What still stands is the Western Deffufa, a solid mud-brick block about 18 metres high, built around 1750 BC. It isn't a pyramid or a fortress but a temple, with an internal staircase that led up to a ritual terrace. It is one of the oldest and largest mud buildings in the world that are still standing. In the necropolis on the outskirts, archaeologists excavated royal burial mounds up to ninety metres across. White quartz cones were set into their surface, and they held hundreds of secondary burials: servants and companions sacrificed to accompany the king.
Kerma was a serious rival to Egypt, not a backwater. During the Middle Kingdom Egypt built a chain of fortresses in Lower Nubia to hold it back. In its classic phase Kerma allied with the Hyksos and even invaded Egypt between 1575 and 1550 BC. Revenge came around 1504 BC, when Thutmose I destroyed the city.
The modern archaeology of the site was done by the Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet, who showed that Kerma was an independent African capital and not an Egyptian outpost. In 2003 his team found a cache of monumental black granite statues of the 25th Dynasty pharaohs at nearby Doukki Gel, Taharqa and Tantamani among them. They had been broken and ritually buried. Today they are the pride of the Kerma museum.
Jebel Barkal is a 104-metre sandstone mesa that rises on its own beside the Nile, next to Karima. A narrow pinnacle breaks away from one of its sides. The ancients read it as a uraeus cobra, the symbol of kingship, wearing a white crown according to some interpretations. For Egyptians and Kushites alike, this was where Amun lived.
Around 1450 BC Thutmose III conquered the area and founded the city of Napata at the foot of the mountain, the southern frontier of the Egyptian empire. The Great Temple of Amun, catalogued as B500, became the most important sanctuary on the Nile south of Karnak, and it was where kings were legitimised. Piye enlarged it and Taharqa remodelled it on a grand scale. He even had chapels cut into the rock of the mountain itself, decorated with gold leaf.
At the foot of Jebel Barkal there are also about fifteen pyramids, mostly from the Meroitic period, between the 3rd century BC and the 1st century AD. In 2003 UNESCO inscribed "Gebel Barkal and the Sites of the Napatan Region" as a World Heritage Site. The listing has five components: the mountain plus the necropolises of El-Kurru, Nuri, Sanam and Zuma. It spans the Napatan period (around 900-270 BC) through to the Meroitic (270 BC-AD 350).
On the bank opposite Jebel Barkal, at Nuri, is the pyramid field where Kushite kings and queens were buried for almost three centuries, from around 670 to about 310 BC. The first and largest belongs to the pharaoh Taharqa. At about 51.75 metres a side it is the biggest Nubian pyramid. It was placed so that, seen from Jebel Barkal, the sun of the Egyptian New Year rose exactly over its apex. More than twenty pyramids are still standing, out of what may once have been eighty.
George Reisner excavated the site in the early 20th century, and much of what we know about the succession of the Napatan kings comes from his work there. More than a thousand shabtis were recovered from Taharqa's tomb. The exception to the rule was his successor Tantamani, who chose to be buried at El-Kurru.
What makes Nuri extraordinary today is that you have to dive to excavate it. The burial chambers are cut into the rock several metres underground, and a rising water table, linked to modern irrigation and to how the river is managed, has flooded them. Since 2018-2019 a mission led by Pearce Paul Creasman has worked in the tombs with diving gear. It is one of the rarest underwater archaeology operations in the world: pharaonic chambers with hieroglyphs on the walls and water up to the ceiling.
Karima is a small town on the banks of the Nile at the foot of Jebel Barkal. It is known for its dates and is the natural base for exploring the whole archaeological north: the sacred mountain, Nuri across the river and El-Kurru a few kilometres away. Life here moves to the rhythm of the river and the date palm. Along with wheat and broad beans, dates hold up the economy of the Nubian riverbank.
A few kilometres downstream, at the Fourth Cataract, is the Merowe Dam, the project that changed the landscape of this region. It was built between 2003 and 2009 and opened on 3 March 2009. It cost about 2,945 million dollars, with 608 million put up by the China Import Export Bank and Chinese companies in charge of construction. Its reservoir is 174 kilometres long and holds 12.5 cubic kilometres, around 15% of the Nile's annual flow.
The social cost was high, and it is well documented. Between 55,000 and 70,000 people from the Hamadab, Amri and Manasir communities were resettled: the Hamadab in 2003, the Amri in 2007 and the Manasir in 2008. There were protests, resistance and formal complaints. The UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing, Miloon Kothari, warned that the project would lead to large-scale forced evictions. Before the flooding, the Merowe Dam Archaeological Salvage Project brought in missions from several countries to excavate the Fourth Cataract stretch against the clock. That rescue work was also debated among archaeologists, because it helped legitimise the project.
Old Dongola was founded as a fortress in the late 5th century, and by the mid-6th it had become the capital of the Christian kingdom of Makuria. For almost eight hundred years it was the most important city in Sudan. It was a royal seat, a bishop's seat and the centre of a culture that wrote in Greek, Coptic and Old Nubian.
The fate of Nubia was decided here. Arab armies attacked the city in 642 and again in 651-652, and both times they failed before its walls. The destruction of the great churches in the mid-7th century is the archaeological evidence of those sieges. Out of them came the baqt, a non-aggression pact with a yearly exchange of goods that held the border for more than six centuries.
The monuments tell the whole story. The Church of the Granite Columns, from the late 7th century, had sixteen granite columns with richly decorated capitals and was probably the cathedral. The most telling building is the Throne Hall, a monumental 9th-century structure of 28 by 18 metres. In 1317 it was turned into a mosque, a symbolic act that marked the end of the Christian kingdom, and it kept working as one until 1969. The court left the city in 1364. In 1812 the Mamluks founded a new Dongola downstream, and the old one was left in ruins.
The Polish archaeological mission has worked here since 1964 on a site of some 200 hectares, under directors including Stefan Jakobielski, Włodzimierz Godlewski and now Artur Obłuski. In 2023 the team announced an exceptional find: unusual wall paintings, probably from the 13th century, showing the Virgin Mary and an archangel presenting a Nubian king to Christ.
Culturally, this stretch of the Nile is still Nubia. People here speak Nubian languages: Nobiin in the far north, and Andaandi or Dongolawi around Dongola. They are related to the Old Nubian of the medieval manuscripts and have no connection at all to Arabic, even though Arabic is now the common language. It is one of the few threads of linguistic continuity linking the present to the Christian kingdoms.
The architecture is distinctive too: whitewashed mud-brick houses with wide courtyards, gates painted in bold colours and geometric patterns, plates set into the façade and decorations above the door. It has nothing in common with the architecture of central Sudan.
And there is a shared memory of forced displacement. First came the flooding of Lower Nubia by Lake Nasser in the 1960s, which wiped out Wadi Halfa and dozens of villages. Then came the Merowe Dam, which displaced tens of thousands of people at the Fourth Cataract between 2003 and 2008. That shared experience explains why any new dam project in the north runs into organised opposition. It also explains why Nubian identity is defined, to a large extent, by the loss of riverside land.
Suakin is first mentioned in the 10th century and grew into Sudan's great Red Sea port when the old port of Badi was abandoned. Its unique feature is the building material: its houses were built from blocks of madrepore, fossil coral cut into ashlars, which is easy to work and hardens in the air. Buildings up to four storeys high, with teak lattice screens brought from India and carved doorways, all of a luminous white. Hence the nickname "the white city".
In the Middle Ages Venetian merchants operated in Suakin, and through its port passed the pilgrims crossing to Jeddah on their way to Mecca —a role it kept for centuries— along with ivory, gum arabic and slaves. After the Ottoman conquest of Egypt, the empire took control of the Red Sea: Özdemir Pasha occupied Suakin in the 1550s and the Ottomans restored its two main mosques, strengthened the walls and put up new buildings.
The decline was a long one. The shift of trade to the Portuguese ocean routes gradually emptied it, and in the early 19th century the Swiss traveller Johann Burckhardt found two thirds of the houses in ruins. The final blow came with the opening of Port Sudan, between 1905 and 1909: the new port had deep water and a railway, and Suakin had neither. The island was abandoned and the coral, with no upkeep, slowly crumbled.
In December 2017 Sudan and Turkey announced an agreement under which Ankara would restore the Ottoman town; the lease, signed in January 2018, was reported as a 99-year handover and caused strong controversy in the region. The work made little progress and came to a halt.
Port Sudan was built between 1905 and 1909 on the orders of the Anglo-Egyptian administration to replace Suakin, whose anchorage was blocked by coral and couldn't take large steamships. It was linked by rail to Atbara and the rest of the network, and ever since it has been the whole country's outlet to the sea: around 90% of Sudan's foreign trade passes through its docks.
First came Gezira cotton and gum arabic —Sudan has historically been the world's largest producer of gum arabic—, then sesame and livestock, and from 1977 oil, with a pipeline linking it to Khartoum. The city grew from nothing to several hundred thousand inhabitants, with a mostly Beja population alongside Nubians, Arabs and communities of West African origin who settled along the pilgrimage routes.
Off its coast lies one of the finest coral reefs in the world, with exceptional visibility and untouched marine life that made Sudanese diving famous from the days of Jacques Cousteau and his experimental Conshelf II base, set up in 1963 on the Shaab Rumi reef. In 2016 UNESCO inscribed as a World Natural Heritage Site the Sanganeb Marine National Park —the only atoll in the Red Sea, 25 km off the coast— together with Dungonab Bay and Mukkawar Island, 125 km north of Port Sudan, with more than 300 species of fish and a globally important dugong population.
Since April 2023 Port Sudan has served as the de facto seat of government and as the entry point for humanitarian aid. In May 2025 it suffered the first RSF drone attacks on military facilities and fuel depots.
Between the Nile and the Red Sea lives a people who were there before almost everyone else. The Beja are a Cushitic group whose presence in the area goes back, according to the studies usually cited, some six thousand years; the Egyptians called them Medjay and the Romans, Blemmyes. They speak Bedawiyet (Bidhaawyeet), a Cushitic language of the Afroasiatic family, though many now use Arabic, and the Beni-Amer subgroup speaks Tigre. The main clans are the Hadendoa, Bisharin, Amarar, Beni-Amer, Hedareb and Ababda.
In the Mahdist war the Beja were not a single bloc: the Hadendoa, under Emir Osman Digna, were the backbone of the Mahdist resistance in the east and even broke a British square —an event Rudyard Kipling turned into the poem "Fuzzy-Wuzzy", whose nickname, referring to the Hadendoa hairstyle, remains an example of the condescending racism of imperial literature—, while the Bisharin and Amarar sided with the British.
In 1952 the Beja Congress was founded to demand autonomy and regional development; in the 1990s and 2000s it joined the Eastern Front together with the Rashaida and fought the Khartoum government. The conflict ended with the Eastern Sudan Peace Agreement, signed in October 2006 in Asmara, whose implementation remained disputed. The blockades of the port and of the road to Khartoum led by Beja tribal leaders in 2021 showed that the eastern question —how to share the money that comes in through the Red Sea— is still open.
Kassala was founded in 1834 as a garrison town of the Egyptian army during the Turkiyya, beside the Gash, a seasonal river that comes down from the Eritrean highlands and whose floods water the plain. That water made the land around Kassala one of the most fertile areas in the country: orchards of mango, oranges, guava and vegetables, a complete contrast with the arid land around it.
The town leans against the Taka mountains, a formation of smooth, rounded granite domes —Totil is the best known— that rise abruptly from the plain and turn red at sunset. It is one of the most photographed skylines in Sudan and a place for climbing and family picnics.
Kassala's market brings together Beja, Rashaida —camel breeders of Arab origin who arrived from the peninsula in the 19th century, famous for their silverwork and for the embroidered veils of their women—, Eritreans and traders from all over the east. It is a border town in the fullest sense: its daily life, its music and its trade are as tied to Eritrea as to the rest of Sudan, and since the 1960s it has hosted successive generations of Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees.
At the foot of Jebel Taka stands the Khatmiyya mosque, built in 1840, the shrine of one of the two great Sufi orders that shape religious and political life in Sudan. The Khatmiyya was founded by Muhammad Uthman al-Mirghani in the early 19th century and his family, the Mirghani, still lead it. During the Mahdiyya the order opposed the Mahdi —the Mahdists saw it as an enemy— and the mosque was damaged in the war: it lost its roof, and that is how it remains, open to the sky with its minaret still standing, a place of pilgrimage. The Khatmiyya gave rise to the Democratic Unionist Party, one of the country's two great historic parties, alongside the Umma of the Mahdi's descendants.
Kassala was also a bargaining chip between empires. In 1894 Italy occupied it from its colony in Eritrea and fortified it; after the Italian defeat by Ethiopia at Adwa (1896), the town was handed over to the Anglo-Egyptian administration in 1897. The Italians came back in the Second World War: in July 1940 Italian forces —some 2,500 men, a cavalry brigade and 24 tanks— took the town, which the British retook in January 1941 during the East African campaign.
In the current war Kassala has remained under army control and has become a refuge for tens of thousands of people displaced from Khartoum and the Gezira. On 3 May 2025 it was hit by RSF drones targeting fuel depots at the airport.
Since April 2023 the east has been the part of the country that holds up what is left of the state. The government operates from Port Sudan, humanitarian aid comes in through its port and airport, and the eastern towns —Port Sudan, Kassala, Gedaref— have taken in hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people. UN agencies describe the Sudanese crisis as one of the largest displacement crises in the world, with several million internally displaced and more than three million refugees in neighbouring countries, and the IPC classification has declared famine conditions in various parts of the country.
That concentration made the east a target. The drone attacks on Port Sudan in May 2025 and on Kassala on 3 May 2025 marked the spread of the conflict to a region that had stayed out of the ground fighting.
The heritage of the east is also on UNESCO's list of concerns: in September 2024 it warned of looting and damage in at least six museums in the country and of the rise in illicit trafficking of cultural property. Suakin, already fragile after decades of neglect, and the reefs of Sanganeb and Dungonab, with no effective protection, fall into that category of exposed heritage. Port Sudan, Suakin and Kassala appear in this guide for their historical value: visiting them is not advised for as long as the war lasts.
Around 591 BC an Egyptian expedition sent by Psamtik II travelled up the Nile and sacked Napata. The Kushite king Aspelta drew a practical conclusion: it was time to move further away. The centre of the kingdom shifted to Meroe, between the fifth and sixth cataracts, much further south, although coronations and the great rituals remained tied to the Amun of Jebel Barkal for generations.
The move had reasons that went well beyond fear. Meroe lies on the edge of the Butana, a steppe that receives monsoon rains and so provides grazing for livestock without depending solely on the Nile flood. It has iron ore and hardwood to fuel furnaces. And it sits at the start of the routes that cross the desert towards the Red Sea and to the south, which connected it to Indian Ocean and Mediterranean trade without going through Egypt.
From around 300 BC the kings also began to be buried at Meroe, and that completed the move: the religious, political and funerary capital became one and the same. At its height in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, the kingdom stretched from the third cataract in the north to Soba, near present-day Khartoum, in the south.
The royal necropolis of Meroe, beside the village of Begrawiya, holds more than two hundred pyramids spread across three groups (the north, south and west cemeteries), built roughly between 300 BC and AD 350. They look nothing like the Egyptian ones. They are much smaller, with very steep sides of about 70 degrees, and each has a chapel attached to its east face, decorated with reliefs showing the deceased before Osiris or before the local gods. The burial chamber is cut into the rock beneath the pyramid, not inside it.
It is by far the most recognisable image of Sudan: rows of ochre sandstone peaks rising from the dunes, with no fences, no crowds and almost nobody around. The country has more pyramids than Egypt. Counts usually put the total at over two hundred in Meroe alone, and more than two hundred and fifty once Nuri, El-Kurru and Jebel Barkal are included. The numbers matter mostly because they show how far this civilisation was left out of the popular story.
In 2011 UNESCO inscribed the "Archaeological Sites of the Island of Meroe" as a World Heritage Site. The listing covers the royal city and necropolis of Meroe plus the sanctuaries of Naqa and Musawwarat es-Sufra. The "island" isn't an island. It's the classical name for the land enclosed by the Nile, the Atbara and the Blue Nile.
In 1834 an Italian doctor named Giuseppe Ferlini arrived in Meroe. He had served in the Turco-Egyptian army and was out looking for treasure. His method was to tear the pyramids down from the top, one after another, until he found something. In the pyramid of the kandake Amanishakheto he came across an extraordinary hoard of gold jewellery: bracelets, signet rings, necklaces and shields bearing images of gods.
Ferlini took the lot to Europe. At first nobody believed such refined work could have come from Africa, and he struggled to sell the collection. It ended up split between the state museums of Berlin and the Glyptothek in Munich, where it still is. Along the way he destroyed the tops of several pyramids, damage you can still see in photographs of the site.
The episode sums up nineteenth-century Europe's relationship with Nubian heritage fairly well: first disbelief, then looting, then the display case. Calls to return Amanishakheto's jewels come up again and again in Sudan's heritage debate. They took on new weight after the looting of the National Museum in Khartoum between 2023 and 2025 put Nubian gold back into circulation on the illegal market.
Naqa lies about 170 kilometres northeast of Khartoum and about 50 from the Nile, deep in the desert. It was a temple city that lived off the caravan trade and on rainwater collected in reservoirs. Its Temple of Amun, founded by King Natakamani, is about a hundred metres long and follows the Egyptian manual to the letter, with an avenue of rams and a hypostyle hall leading to the sanctuary. Excavations that began in 1999 uncovered very high-quality inscriptions in Meroitic hieroglyphs.
A few metres away stands the temple of Apedemak, the lion god, built by Natakamani and the kandake Amanitore. On its back wall Apedemak appears with three heads and four arms, an iconography unknown in Egypt that shows how far Meroe had its own theology. On the pylon, the royal couple strike down their prisoners with lions at their feet. King and queen are shown as equals, another rarity in the Nile Valley.
And next door is the so-called Roman Kiosk, a small, puzzling building that mixes an Egyptian doorway crowned by a row of uraei with flowery Corinthian columns and round-arched Roman windows. In one spot, a day's caravan ride from the Nile, Egypt, the Greco-Roman world and Kush sit side by side. Since 2011 Naqa has been part of the Island of Meroe UNESCO site.
Nobody knows for certain what Musawwarat es-Sufra was. Its Great Enclosure, mostly dated to the 3rd century BC, covers some 45,000 square metres of courtyards, temples, corridors, columns and ramps. The archaeologist Fritz Hintze described its layout as "without parallel in the entire Nile Valley". Nothing like it exists in Nubia or in Egypt.
The most striking thing is the elephants: sculptures and reliefs of elephants everywhere, propping up walls and flanking ramps. That gave rise to the old theory that the complex was a centre for capturing and training war elephants, since the Hellenistic kingdoms bought them in Africa. Other theories see it as a pilgrimage sanctuary, a school for priests or a seasonal palace. None has won out.
The other major building is the Lion Temple, dedicated to Apedemak and built by King Arnekhamani around 235-218 BC. It is a single chamber of 14.21 by 9.13 metres, covered in hieroglyphic inscriptions and reliefs of lions and elephants. The whole complex depended on a hafir, a huge rainwater reservoir 250 metres across and about 6.3 metres deep. That was the technology that made it possible to live far from the river.
Humboldt University of Berlin excavated here systematically from 1960, under Fritz Hintze, and rebuilt the Lion Temple, which had collapsed. Since 2011 Musawwarat has also been part of the UNESCO site.
Around the royal city of Meroe rise black hills that aren't really hills. They are slag heaps, mountains of waste from iron smelting piled up over centuries. The Egyptologist Archibald Sayce called Meroe "the Birmingham of Africa". Scholars still argue over how much iron really counted in its economy compared with cattle and long-distance trade in ivory, ebony, hides, ostrich feathers and gold. They also argue over how far cutting wood for the furnaces helped degrade the Butana environment. Either way, the slag heaps are there.
Meroe was also the kingdom of the kandakes. Kandake was the title of the queen mother, and several ruled with full power: Shanakdakhete in the 2nd century BC, Amanishakheto and Amanitore. The most famous is Amanirenas. Around 27-25 BC she attacked the newly drawn Roman frontier and sacked Aswan. The prefect Gaius Petronius struck back and reached Napata, but the war ended in a negotiated peace that favoured Meroe. That clash left behind an incredible object: a bronze head of Augustus, torn from a statue and buried under the steps of a temple in the royal city so that worshippers would tread on it as they entered. John Garstang dug it up in December 1910, and today it is in the British Museum.
The kingdom faded out in the 4th century AD through a mix of worsening climate, pressure from the Noba, internal conflict and campaigns by the kingdom of Aksum. King Ezana took Meroe around AD 330. The last pyramids date from the mid-4th century.
Today the site is at risk. In September 2024 UNESCO warned that at Meroe, maintenance and surveillance have been practically non-existent since the war began. It reported buildings put up inside the buffer zone and visitors climbing and writing on the pyramids, and said that dunes and heavy rain are causing damage.
Hardly anything that happened to Sudan happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
