Old Dongola tells a chapter of Sudan's history that almost nobody expects: the thousand years when the Nile valley south of Egypt was Christian. Between the 6th and 14th centuries, this city (Tungul in Old Nubian) was the capital of the kingdom of Makuria. Makuria halted the Arab advance in the 7th century, signed a treaty with the caliphate that lasted six hundred years, kept up relations with Byzantium and Egypt and produced a school of wall painting unlike any other.
What remains today is a huge site on a cliff above the Nile. You find the foundations of the Church of the Granite Columns, with its carved capitals, and Building X and the Cruciform Church. There is the Throne Hall, a monumental 9th-century palace that was turned into a mosque in 1317 and served as one until well into the 20th century. There is also the Great Monastery of Kom H, with the crypt of Archbishop Georgios and around a hundred painted compositions, along with the remains of the city wall. Spread across the plain is a field of qubbas, domed Islamic tombs from the Funj period, which make up one of the most photographed scenes in northern Sudan.
The site keeps producing surprises. In 2023, while excavating Funj-period houses, the Polish mission came across the opening of a painted chamber. Its walls show the Virgin, Christ, the Archangel Michael and a Nubian king named David, a scene with no parallel anywhere in Nubian painting. The find made the lists of the year's top archaeological discoveries. This guide does not suggest travelling there, because Sudan is at war and access is suspended. Instead, it explains what Old Dongola is, what we know about Makuria and what state its heritage is in today.
Old Dongola began in the 5th century as a fortress on the banks of the Nile and, after Nubia became Christian in the 6th century, became the capital of the kingdom of Makuria. In 651-652, after a failed Arab siege, its rulers signed the baqt with Egypt. This non-aggression and trade pact held for about six centuries and allowed a Christian kingdom to survive while surrounded by the Islamic world. Its golden age came between the 9th and 11th centuries, with the Church of the Granite Columns, the Throne Hall, the Great Monastery of Kom H, a powerful bishopric and a remarkable output of manuscripts in Old Nubian, Greek and Coptic. From the 13th century onwards, Mamluk raids and internal tensions gradually weakened the city. In 1317 the throne hall was turned into a mosque, and in 1364 the court moved elsewhere. The city lost its importance and centuries later was replaced by the new Dongola, founded downriver in 1812. Since 1964, the Polish PCMA mission has been excavating the site continuously.
Read the full history ↓The stretch of the Nile where the black pharaohs came from: the city of Kerma with its mud-brick Deffufa, Amun's sacred mountain at Jebel Barkal, the pyramids of Nuri and the Christian capital of Old Dongola.
Read the history of The Nubian north: Napata, Karima and Kerma →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
When the kingdom of Meroe crumbled in the 4th century AD, the Sudanese Nile valley entered a dark period from which three new kingdoms emerged: Nobadia, between the First and Third Cataracts; Makuria, along the central stretch; and Alodia, further south, with its capital at Soba, near present-day Khartoum. Old Dongola (Tungul in Old Nubian, Dunqula al-Ajuz in Arabic) was the capital of the second of them.
The settlement began in the 5th century as a fortress on a rocky escarpment on the east bank of the Nile. The location was no accident. The cliff gave an excellent defensive position over the river, and the city stood where the caravan routes set off across the desert to the west, towards Darfur and Kordofan. That double role, as a fortified river stronghold and as a caravan starting point, explains its rise.
The great transformation came with Christianity. During the 6th century, missions sent from Egypt and from Constantinople converted the three Nubian kingdoms one after another. The process was complete by around 580, when the missionary Longinus Christianised Alodia. Makuria adopted the new faith around the middle of the century, and Dongola became the seat of royal power and of a church hierarchy that ultimately answered to the Coptic Patriarchate of Alexandria.
With Christianity came the churches. The city filled with churches built first in mud brick and later in stone and fired brick, and it took on a written culture in three languages: Old Nubian for the local tongue, Greek for the liturgy and many documents, and Coptic for religious texts. This mix is one of Makuria's defining features and one of the reasons its manuscripts are so valuable. They make it possible to reconstruct the administration, the church and even the royal genealogy of a medieval African state in a detail that is rarely available.
In 639 Arab armies conquered Egypt, and within a few years they reached the Nubian frontier. The first raids south got nowhere. The decisive expedition came in 651-652 under Abdallah ibn Sa'd ibn Abi Sarh, governor of Egypt, who sailed up the Nile and laid siege to Dongola. Arab chroniclers recorded the fighting: catapults damaged the city's cathedral, but the Nubian archers held off the assault and the city did not fall. The texts nicknamed them “the pupil-smiters” for their accuracy.
Instead of a conquest, an agreement was signed. The baqt (from the Greek pakton, “pact”) set up an open-ended truce and a regular exchange of goods between Egypt and Nubia, with obligations on both sides. It was not exactly tribute, nor exactly a trade treaty. It was a one-of-a-kind arrangement that in practice recognised the independence of a Christian kingdom south of an expanding Islamic empire. And it worked for about six hundred years, which makes it one of the longest-lasting pacts in medieval history.
Under the baqt, Makuria thrived. It absorbed Nobadia and unified the Nubian Nile from the First Cataract to beyond the Fourth. It traded with Egypt and, through Egypt, with the Byzantine world, and with other African kingdoms to the south and east. Its kings even meddled in Egyptian politics: in the 8th century, King Cyriacus marched on Egypt to demand the release of the Coptic patriarch.
The 9th to 11th centuries were the golden age. This is the period of the Church of the Granite Columns, the cathedral, with its sixteen granite columns topped by richly carved capitals. It is also when the Cruciform Church went up over Building X, and when the Throne Hall was built. This monumental two-storey palace overlooking the cliff served as the royal audience hall and is the best-preserved medieval civil building in all of Nubia. North of the city grew the Great Monastery, the Kom H complex, which holds around a hundred painted compositions from the 11th to 13th centuries.
If Makuria has its own place in art history, it owes it to its painters. Between the 9th and 13th centuries, the walls of Nubian churches and monasteries were covered with saints, archangels, bishops, kings and Gospel scenes. The imagery starts from Byzantine and Coptic models but grows into a style that is clearly its own: front-facing figures with huge eyes, flat colours and a particular focus on protection, with the saint or archangel embracing the human figure and covering them with a cloak or with wings.
The largest group still in place is at the Great Monastery of Kom H, with close to a hundred compositions. Its most unusual piece is not a church but a tomb: the crypt attributed to Archbishop Georgios, who died in the early 12th century. Its walls are entirely covered with texts in Greek and Coptic (Gospel passages, prayers, litanies and protective formulas) written to protect the dead man on his passage to the next world. It is an exceptional record of funerary religion in Christian Nubia, where the official liturgy sits comfortably alongside a tradition of protective magic.
The latest chapter of this story was written in 2023. While working on houses from the Funj period (16th to 19th centuries), the team from the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology (PCMA) came across the opening of a small painted chamber, about seven metres above the medieval ground level. Inside were the Mother of God, Christ seated among clouds, the Archangel Michael with outspread wings, and a Nubian king named David bowing before Christ while the archangel holds him and shelters them both with his wings. The scene has no known parallel in Nubian painting.
The chamber looks like a crypt, but its height above the medieval ground level rules that out. The researchers suspect it is a royal memorial complex. The historical detail is chilling. David was one of the last rulers of Christian Makuria, and his reign marked the beginning of the end. For reasons we do not know, he attacked Egypt, and the Mamluk reprisal led to the invasion of Nubia and the first sack of Dongola in its entire history. The painting may have been made as the Mamluk army was approaching the city, or while it was already under siege. The find was named one of the top archaeological discoveries of 2023.
The 13th century brought the decline. The Mamluk sultans of Egypt began to interfere systematically in Makuria's internal affairs: they backed claimants to the throne, imposed tribute and sent military expeditions. On top of this outside pressure came dynastic quarrels and a growing number of Arabised groups moving into the valley. Together these proved fatal for a state that had stood for more than seven hundred years.
The symbolic date is 1317. That year the Throne Hall, the Christian royal palace, was turned into a mosque, and the change was recorded on a foundation stela that still survives in the building. Christian power did not vanish overnight, but the gesture marks the end of an era. In 1364 the court left Dongola for good and the kingdom broke up into smaller principalities. Over the following centuries, the Nubian valley became fully Islamic.
And yet the city did not die. Old Dongola stayed inhabited for centuries as a Muslim town, first within the orbit of the Funj Sultanate of Sennar and later under other local powers. From that period come the houses dug up in recent seasons and, above all, the field of qubbas: dozens of whitewashed domed tombs built between the 17th and 19th centuries over the graves of sheikhs and holy men, scattered across the plain north of the site. They are the most photographed view of the place, and the best reminder that the story of Old Dongola does not end with Christianity.
The final blow to its importance came in 1812, when a new Dongola, today the capital of Northern State, was founded downstream, at the time Mamluks fleeing Egypt were arriving in the area. Since then, the old capital has been what it is today: an uninhabited site on an impressive scale.
Modern archaeology arrived in 1964, when the Polish mission of what is now the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw began excavating the site. More than half a century of continuous work has uncovered churches, palaces, the monastery complex, stretches of the city wall and hundreds of houses. In recent years, the UMMA project, led by Artur Obłuski and funded by the European Research Council, turned to a period that had been largely ignored: the social, political and religious transformation of Dongola between the 14th and 18th centuries. In other words, the Islamic city that historians had written off as unimportant.
On 15 April 2023, fighting broke out in Khartoum between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, and Sudan entered a civil war that is still going on. The heaviest fighting has been in the capital, in Darfur and in Kordofan. Northern State, where Old Dongola lies, has stayed relatively far from the front line, but the site has suffered the indirect effects of the conflict: excavation seasons were suspended, maintenance stopped and security grew weaker.
A review published in the journal Antiquity in 2025 documents the war's impact on Sudanese archaeology between 2023 and 2025 and lists Old Dongola among the affected sites in the north. The specific risks in that region are illegal gold mining and the looting of dig houses. Illegal mining destroyed the British Museum project's storeroom at Amara West between April and May 2023 and damaged storerooms on Sai Island. Looting hit Naqa, where RSF raids to the north turned into gunfights with local police.
In Khartoum the damage was of another order. The National Museum of Sudan, which held many of the finds from the Nubian excavations, was occupied by the RSF from June 2023 and looted on a massive scale. When the army retook the area in March 2025, the head of Sudan's antiquities authority put the losses at more than sixty per cent of the collection, and later statements went as high as ninety per cent, including the collection of archaeological gold. The Ethnographic Museum was looted and set on fire, and the Khalifa House in Omdurman was robbed. By September 2025 the count had passed twenty damaged museums and 110 million dollars in losses.
UNESCO has repeatedly warned of the risk of illicit trafficking in Sudanese cultural property and has asked the international art market not to buy objects from the country. It also took emergency measures at five archaeological museums: Kerma, Jebel Barkal, the Red Sea, El Damer and Sennar. These included packing and securing collections, setting up secure storerooms, and cataloguing and digitising around 1,700 objects.
Old Dongola is still there, with its churches, its throne hall and its white domes on the sand, waiting for archaeologists to come back. Its painted walls have survived sieges, looting and changes of religion for a thousand years. Today the threat is not so much deliberate destruction as long-term neglect and the pressure of illegal mining on land that no one is guarding.
