Makurians/History

Makuria was a Nubian kingdom that existed from 500 to 1276 and from 1286 to the 1560s, with Dongola serving as its capital. It was one of the kingdoms to emerge from the ashes of the Kingdom of Kush, and it converted to Christianity by the end of the 6th century. During the 7th century, Egypt was conquered by the Islamic armies, and Nubia was isolated from the rest of Christendom. In 651, an Arab army invaded, but it was repulsed, and the two sides had a peace treaty until the 13th century. Makuria expanded by annexing Nobatia to the north, and it maintained close dynastic ties with Alodia to the south. From the mid-8th to mid-11th centuries, Makuria entered into a golden age, and it was stable and prosperous. Increased aggression from Egypt, internal discord, Bedouin incursions, the plague, and the shift of trade routes led to the state's decline in the 13th and 14th centuries, and the kingdom was reduced to a rump state by a 1365 civil war. During the 1560s, the empire was ended when the Ottoman Empire occupied Lower Nubia. Nubia was subsequently Islamized, while the Nubians of Kordofan were Arabized.

Ancient Glories: The Nubians
By 760 BCE, all of Nubia would be united under King Kashta, from the First to the Sixth Cataract. This period was known as the Napata period, as the Nubians took to burying their kings at the former Egyptian stronghold, taking it as their own. The Nubians would go even further: in 743 BCE the Kushite King Piye invaded Upper Egypt, seizing control of it from the Egyptians. His successor Shabaqo would establish the 25th Pharaonic dynasty by uniting both Upper and Lower Egypt under Kushite rule, establishing the Empire of Kush. However, about a hundred years after its establishment, under Pharaoh Taharqo the Empire intervened in the area of modern Syria in opposition to the Assyrians. The Assyrians responded by invading Egypt and driving the Nubian king out of Egypt and forcing him to withdraw back to their homeland and return the dynasty to Napata. In 590 B.C., they would again have to move their capitol, when an Egyptian army sacked Napata. This time, to the city of Meroe situated near the sixth cataract, well away from northern aggression. Napata would still remain an important religious center for the Nubians but the royal necropolis was also moved to Meroe ushering in the Meroitic period of Nubian history.

For several centuries thereafter, the Kushite Kingdom centered in Meroe developed independently of Egypt. While still preserving the Pharaonic traditions like the raising of stelae to record the achievements of their reigns and erecting pyramids to contain their King's tombs. The city of Meroe was ideally situation at the convergence of a network of trade routes that ran along the White and Blue Niles. Meroe became East Africa's most important center of trade. The civilization thrived on trade with Egypt and the Greco-Roman World, in addition to Arab and Indian traders along the Red Sea. The Kushite Kings even managed to create an irrigation system that was capable of supporting a higher population density during this period then had been or would be possible in the future. The Nubians also developed a new Meroitic script based on the Egyptian writing system to better represent the indigenous spoken language of its people.

Despite mostly peaceful relations with it neighbors, Nubian ambitions in Upper Egypt provoked the Roman Army in 23 BCE to move south against them razing Napata to the ground. The Romans however abandoned the area as being unfit for Roman colonization. During the 2nd century A.D., a tribe known as the Nobatae that occupied the Nile's west bank in Northern Kush integrated themselves first as mercenaries then as a military aristocracy into the Meroitic Kingdom, introducing camelry as a weapon of war into the Nubian culture. However the fortunes of the Kushite Kingdom would come to an end in the 4th century A.D., when it was overwhelmed by the kingdom of Aksum that had developed in Abyssinia (or modern Ethiopia) to the southeast.

The Birth of Makuria
The Nubian people would re-emerge as three successor kingdoms in the 6th century CE: Makuria lay in the middle, while Nobiatia lay to the north and Alodia or Alwa was situated south of Makuria. All three kingdoms were ruled by a Christian military elite using Greek titles in emulation of the Byzantine court and Christian, owing to Egypt and Abyssinia having both been converted to Christianity in the previous century by the Byzantines. The Nubians, as they seemed to have always done in the past, adopted Egyptian traditions while accepting religious suzerainty from the Coptic Church based in Alexandria. This period saw a resurgence of the cultural and ideological connections between the Mediterranean world with the Nubians for the first time since Dynasty XXV of Egypt. The Greek language infiltrated Nubian society through religious teachings, and remained strong even until the 12th century A.D.

However, after the Arabs invaded Egypt in 639 A.D. and as Muslims began to dominate Egypt this connection as well as to the rest of the Christian World was lost. The Arabs invaders that had taken control of Egypt tried to take the Nubian Kingdoms by force but was repelled, not once but twice, in 642 A.D. and again in 652 A.D. This forced the successor states to reunite. The Arabs then turn to seek peaceful relations with the Nubians to facilitate trade between the two cultures. The Christian Nubian Kingdoms reached its height in the 9th and 10th century. However, over the next 1000 years the Islamic influences brought about by Arab merchants as they began to establish trade posts and intermarried into the population gradually turned the Nubians into a majority Islamic, Arabic speaking nation. The turning point was in the 13th century A.D., when the Mamelukes from Egypt intervened in a dynastic dispute within the Nubian monarchy forcing the Northern Kingdoms of Nubia to be satellite state to Egypt. By the 15th century A.D. as the Christian church declined in influence, a period of political instability and fragmentation ensued..