*** Nubia ***

[synergy777]

india was a terrority of the african naga kings, indians are descended from africans. if you look at sudan/somlia/kenya/ethiopia, these people via the land route travelled through yemen/oman/arabia onto to india. they also took the naval route. east africa and india are very near. later these africans/indians started the hyskos migration back. they overthrew the egyptians/cushites/nubians/khemites. these hyskos indians/arabs, started a slave trade, by using africans as slaves. its not proud period of indian/arab history, but we enslaved them. then the romans later on invaded egypt, and the rest is known history. modern day egyptians are arabised/hyskos, ask them were they come from they say arabia/persia/india. look at mido, he is the modern egyptian. the ancient egyptian is the african. also romany, are falsely called gyp-sies (out of egypt), they lived there but their original name is romany/roma from panjab india. then look at he origins of south italians/sicilian/romans. it merely the migrations of a species, that species being humans.

http://www.homestead.com/wysinger/nubians.html

http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/7035/288pxnubiatodayry2.png


Ancient Nubia (Sudan) (Map). Around 5,000 years ago, a rich and powerful nation called the kingdom of Kush (also referred to as ancient Nubia) was a center of culture and military might in Africa. Ancient Nubia had a wealth of natural resources such as gold, ivory, copper, frankincense and ebony but they also produced and traded a variety of goods such as pottery. The

Nubians formed the foundation of the Proto-Dravidians, Proto-Elamites, Proto-Mande speakers and West Atlantic people.

Elusive A Group findings.

Their bowmen warriors (Exhibit 1) were known and feared by those who saw them in battles. Ancient Nubia's lands are now part of modern Egypt and Sudan. Its geographic position meant that much of ancient Nubia's development is connected to that of ancient Egypt. In fact, Egypt ruled much of Nubia between 2000 B.C. and 1000 B.C., but when Egypt collapsed into civil war, Nubian kings ruled Egypt from around 800 B.C. to 700 B.C.

The Nubians are believed to be the first human race on earth, and most of their customs and traditions were adopted by the ancient Egyptians [Diodorus; History, Book III: 2).. To the Greeks, they were known as Ethiopians and Nubia as the land of Punts, i.e. the land of gods.

Nubians are the people of northern Sudan and southern Egypt. With a history and traditions which can be traced to the dawn of civilization, the Nubian first settled along the banks of the Nile from Aswan. Along this great river they developed one of the oldest and greatest civilizations in Africa. Until they lost their last kingdom (Christian Nubia) only five centuries back the Nubians remained as the main rivals to the other great African civilization of Egypt.

Nubia is the homeland of Africa's earliest black culture with a history which can be traced from 3800 B.C. onward through Nubian monuments and artifacts, as well as written records from Egypt and Rome. In antiquity, Nubia was a land of great natural wealth, of gold mines, ebony, ivory and incense which was always prized by her neighbors.

Research Links:
Kingdom of Kush (Photos)
Nubian Culture & Civilization
QUEEN TIYE of Egypt was Nubian. Wife of Pharaoh Amenhotep III (1391-1353) B.C.

Mother-in-Law of Nefertiti and the Grandmother of King Tutankhamun (Photo Gallery)
(The Contents of the New York Times, March 1, 1979 article that appeared on pages 1 & A16)

Nubian Monarchy Called Oldest
By Boyce Renseberger
(From page 1)

Evidence of the oldest recognizable monarchy in human history, preceding the rise of the earliest Egyptian kings by several generations, has been discovered in artifacts from ancient Nubia in Africa.

Until now it had been assumed that at that time the ancient Nubian culture, which existed in what is now northern Sudan and southern Egypt, had not advanced beyond a collection of scattered tribal clans and chiefdoms.

The existence of rule by kings indicates a more advanced form of political organization in which many chiefdoms are united under a more powerful and wealthier ruler.

The discovery is expected to stimulate a new appraisal of the origins of civilization in Africa, raising the question of to what extent later Egyptian culture may have derived its advanced political structure from the Nubians. The various symbols of Nubian royalty that have been found are the same as those associated, in later times, with Egyptian kings.

The new findings suggest that the ancient Nubians may have reached this stage of political development as long ago as

3300 B.C., several generations before the earliest documented Egyptian king.

The discovery is based on study of artifacts from ancient tombs excavated 15 years ago in an international effort

(From page A16)

Clues to Oldest Monarchy Found in Nubia

to rescue archeological deposits before the rising waters of the Aswan Dam covered them.The artifacts, including hundreds of fragments of pottery, jewelry, stone vessels, and ceremonial objects such as incense burners, were initially recovered from the Qustul cemetery by Keith C. Seele, a professor at the University of Chicago. The cemetery, which contained 33 tombs that were heavily plundered in ancient times, was on the Nile near the modern boundary between Egypt and the Sudan.

The significance of the artifacts, which had been in storage at the university's oriental Institute, was not fully appreciated until last year, when Bruce Williams, a research associate, began to study them.

"Keith Seele had suspected the tombs were special, perhaps even royal," Dr. Williams said in an interview. "It was obvious from the quantity and quality of the painted pottery and the jewelry that we were dealing with wealthy people. But it was the picture on a stone incense burner that indicated we really had the tomb of a king."

On the incense burner, which was broken and had to be pieced together, was a depiction of a palace façade, a crowned king sitting on a throne in a boat, a royal standard before the king and, hovering above the king, the falcon god Horus. Most of the images are ones commonly associated with kingship in later Egyptian traditions.

The portion of the incense burner bearing the body of the king is missing but, Dr. Williams said, scholars are agreed that the presence of the crown in a form well known from dynastic Egypt and the god Horus are irrefutable evidence that the complete image was that of a king.

Clue on Incense Burner

The majestic figure on the incense burner, Dr. Williams said, is the earliest known representation of a king in the Nile Valley. His name is unknown, but he is believed to have lived approximately three generations before the time of Scorpion, the earliest-known Egyptian ruler. Scorpion was one of three kings said to have ruled Egypt before the start of what is called the first dynasty around 3050 B.C.

Dr. Williams said the dating is based on correlations of artistic styles in the Nubian pottery with similar styles in predynastic Egyptian pottery, which is relatively well dated.

He said some of the Nubian artifacts bore disconnected symbols resembling those of Egyptian hieroglyphics that were not readable.

"They were on their way to literacy," Dr. Williams said, "probably quite close to Egypt in this respect."

He said it was not known what the ancient Nubian civilization was called at the time but that he suspected it was Ta-Seti, a name known from Egyptian writings that means "Land of the Bow," referring to the weapon which, apparently, was deemed characteristic of peoples in that part of Africa.

Dr. Williams said there were accounts in later Egyptian writings of the Egyptians attacking Ta-Seti some time around

3000 B.C. This is just about the time, according to the archeological record, when a major cultural transformation began in that part of Nubia. Little is known of what was happening in this region between 3000 B.C. and 2300 B.C. when inhabitants were unquestionably governed by separate chiefdoms.

Their descendents, he suggested, may have developed the Sudanese Kingdom of Kush, based in Kurma, Egyptians for sovereignty and, in fact, prevailed over them for a while.

A detailed monograph on the discoveries is in preparation, but there is no deadline and publication is expected to be a few years away.
Nubian Man and Woman
Timeline of Nubian Royal

History & Map
THE ARTS/ARCHAEOLOGY SEPTEMBER 15, 1997, VOL. 150, NO. 11
THE NILE'S OTHER KINGDOM
NUBIA, NOT EGYPT, MAY HAVE BEEN THE FIRST TRUE AFRICAN CIVILIZATION
BY SCOTT MACLEOD

Excavations in Sudan are revealing that this area, formerly called Nubia, could have been the cradle of African civilization. Teams of archeologists from the US, Europe and Sudan are finding antiquities that show a sophisticated and original culture that could have influenced Egypt.

Archaeologist Timothy Kendall was leading an expedition in northern Sudan earlier this year when one of his diggers came across a slab of intricately carved stone hidden in rubble. Soon after, another slab turned up, and then another, until there were 25 in all, laid out in the sand like an archaeological jigsaw puzzle. Fitted together, the pieces formed a dazzling tableau: golden stars set against an azure sky, with crowned vultures flying off into the distance. Flying where, precisely? Kendall, an associate curator at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, thinks he knows. And if his hunch is correct, he may be a few tons of rubble away from a major archaeological find.

Kendall's breakthrough, when and if it comes, should be one of many arising from that corner of Africa. Long considered an archaeological after thought by scientists exploring the more famous temples and pyramids of Egypt, just to the north, Sudan is suddenly the hot place to be--and not just because of the equatorial temperatures that register as high as 100[degrees]F even during the prime winter digging season. At least 15 teams from the U.S., Europe and Sudan are sifting through the same sands for secrets of ancient Nubia, the world's first black civilization, which at its height stretched more than 1,000 miles along the Nile River, from what is today the central part of Sudan to the southern reaches of Egypt.

Everything uncovered thus far supports the conviction that has been building among scholars during the past 20 years that the Nubians were not just vassals and trading partners of the Egyptian Pharaohs but also the creators of an ancient and impressive civilization of their own, with a homegrown culture that may have been the most complex and cosmopolitan in all Africa.

That's why Kendall is particularly interested in the jigsaw tableau he has laid out on the sand. The newly discovered blocks, he believes, once made up the vaulted ceiling of a passageway that led to a temple dug into a 300-ft.-high hill known today as

Jebel Barkal. It was there, Kendall thinks, that rulers in the ancient Nubian kingdom of Napata and Meroe, which dated from 900 B.C. to A.D. 350, practiced their coronation rites, climaxing in a crowning by the god Amun.

The passage Kendall discovered was, he believes, closed by an earthquake and rockslide sometime between A.D. 100 and A.D. 200. That's the bad news--and the good news, for the same wall of rubble that separates Kendall from his temple probably kept out treasure hunters as well. Once he manages to bore through a few huge boulders and track the flight of those majestic vultures, he hopes to find that the temple's interior, and whatever treasure it holds, has been preserved intact for 18 centuries.

Such findings, according to Dietrich Wildung, curator of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, represent "nothing less than the discovery of a new dimension of the ancient world." The sense of breaking new ground, and of taking archaeology in a new direction, has contributed to what Wildung calls "the pioneer spirit in Sudan."

Archaeologists aren't the only ones who are rediscovering Sudan's ancient treasures. One of the greatest exhibitions of Nubian art ever assembled is currently touring France, Germany and the Netherlands. The show, which will continue into next year, features statues, pottery, jewelry and other artifacts that were recovered in excavations dating back to 1842, when Karl Lepsius, a Prussian archaeologist, first surveyed the region known in the Old Testament as Cush, in Greek literature as Aethiopia and by the Romans as Nubia (possibly a corruption of the Egyptian word for gold).

Although the early surveyors reported that Sudan contained more pyramids than did Egypt, the country remained what Wildung calls an archaeological "no-man's-land" until quite recently. The first excavators from Europe found Egypt to be less backward, less remote and less prone to yellow fever, and thus far more pleasant and accessible. Egypt's sites also proved to be so rich that there was little reason to search farther up the Nile.

Another problem, scholars now firmly believe, was racial prejudice, which turned many in the field away from cultures emanating from deeper in Africa. Prominent Egyptologists--including the noted American George Reisner, who worked in Sudan--thought they were excavating the remains of an offshoot of Egyptian culture. "They didn't believe black Africa was capable of producing high civilization," says Kendall.

The latest crop of discoveries is helping put such ideas to rest. French archaeologists, for example, have found exquisite ceramic figurines, bowls and funerary objects at sites that date from at least 8000 B.C. They are as old as any Neolithic sites in Africa and predate prehistoric finds in Egypt by a staggering 3,000 years. This strongly suggests to Hassan Hussein Idris, director of Sudan's National Board for Antiquities and Museums, that ancient Nubia might have been an important source of Egypt's civilization, as well as the other way around.

Not all archaeologists are prepared to go that far. But there is now enough evidence for a scientific consensus that ancient Nubia, beginning in the Stone Age, developed its own distinct civilization--or rather, a series of overlapping civilizations--influenced by Africa, Arabia and the Sahara as well as by Egypt. Moreover, many scholars believe these Nubian kingdoms hold even more clues to the origins of African culture than does Egypt, which, because of its unique position abutting Asia and the Mediterranean, is regarded by many archaeologists as having developed independently from the rest of the continent.

The new perspective owes much to the work of Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet, who has spent the past 24 years excavating Kerma, the seat of Africa's greatest empire (outside Egypt) between 2500 B.C. and 1500 B.C. Bonnet acknowledges that he went to Sudan initially to find Egyptian civilization. "But step by step," he confesses, "I came to understand that the Nubian civilizations are really extraordinary. There might be Egyptian influences, but there is a Nubian originality and a Nubian identity."

Two years ago, Bonnet excavated a funerary temple in Kerma that powerfully illustrates Nubia's synthesis of frontier influences. On one interior wall he found Egyptian motifs, including Nile fishing boats, bullfights and an enormous crocodile. Another wall was covered with rows of giraffes and hippopotamuses--African wildlife rarely seen in ancient Egypt.

At Jebel Barkal, Kendall hopes to shed new light on the symbiotic relationship of Nubian and Egyptian civilizations. The first temples there were constructed between 1460 B.C. and 1200 B.C., during the relatively brief period when Egypt ruled Nubia. Kendall believes the Egyptians chose this particular craggy hill for a royal sanctuary because, when seen from a distance, Jebel Barkal's silhouette resembles, even today, a crown adorned with a cobra, which is a symbol of royal power. The Egyptians believed Jebel Barkal to be a prime residence of the god Amun, the bestower of royal authority--a notion that was later taken up by the Nubians. About 730 B.C., when the Nubians rose up and conquered Egypt, establishing what became known as Egypt's 25th dynasty, they drew on the authority granted by Amun at Jebel Barkal to justify their rule over both lands.

Kendall doesn't know what secrets the temple will yield when he finally breaks through the pile of rubble separating him from the interior. Will he find cult goddesses? Jeweled crowns? Kingly scepters? Or perhaps the remains of a priest or two, trapped for 18 centuries by that earthquake? Alas, there will be no answers until the next digging season begins in January. It's still summer in Sudan, and much too hot for archaeology.

Two New York Times Magazine Articles:
Although Sudan had remained the main homeland of Nubians through their long history, many of their descendants is today's Egypt. But still the majority of Nubians of today are Sudanese. With only a population of slightly above 300,000 they are a minority in both countries. Nevertheless being of African descent they resemble other Sudanese people more than Egyptians.

Nubians in both Sudan and Egypt have suffered a lot from intentional overlooking to their history and culture as well as displacement, relocation due to flooding and inundation of their homeland by dams constructed south of Egypt.

In the 1930s a large proportion of the Nubian villages along the Nile were totally submerged. Some Nubians decided to move north into Egypt. The majority, however, chose to stay in their doomed country, and rebuilt their houses on higher ground above the new shoreline.

During this century the Nubian homeland had been inundated three times, however the 1960 Nubian exodus is the most painful to all Nubians. Following the construction of Aswan High Dam in 1960 the land of Nubia between Aswan in Egypt and the

4th cataract in Sudan (main area of Nubians) was the subject of flooding and inundation. Nubians were displaced and relocated in other areas in both Sudan and Egypt. Great Nubian monuments and historical sites were drowned and lost for good. The monuments of Nubia would have ultimately been lost to the depths of the lake had it not been for the joint effort of 50 countries providing financial contributions and expertise in an effort to save the monuments. Wherever feasible, monuments were dismantled or cut from the rock and reassembled at new sites in Egypt and Sudan. Cemeteries and structures that could not be moved . . . were excavated and recorded in as much detail as possible.

The Nubians lost their ancient homeland in the 1960's, but their culture and heritage remain.

The influx of Arabs to Egypt and Sudan had contributed to the suppression of the Nubian identity following the collapse of the last Nubian kingdom in 1900. A major part of the Nubian population were totally arabized or claimed to be arabs (Jaa'leen-the majority of Northern Sudanese- and some Donglawes in Sudan, Kenuz and Koreskos in Egypt). However all Nubians were converted to Islam, and Arabic language became their main media of communication in addition to their indigenous old Nubian language. The unique characteristic of Nubian is shown in their culture (dress, dances, traditions and music) as well as their indigenous language which is the common feature of all Nubians.

Nubian people - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nubia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nubia (not to be confused with Nuba a collective term used for the peoples who inhabit the Nuba Mountains, in Kordofan province, Sudan, Africa) is the region in the south of Egypt, along the Nile and in northern Sudan. Most of Nubia is situated in Sudan with about a quarter of its territory in Egypt. In ancient times it was an independent kingdom.

Nubian wedding near Aswan, EgyptIts people spoke at least two varieties of the Nubian language group, a Nilo-Saharan subfamily which includes Nobiin, Kenuzi-Dongola, Midob and several related varieties in the northern part of the Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan. A variety (Birgid) was spoken (at least until 1970) north of Nyala in Darfur but is now extinct. Old Nubian was used in mostly religious texts dating from the 8th and 9th centuries AD and is considered ancestral to modern day Nobiin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramids_of_Nubia

http://img102.imageshack.us/img102/9432/nubiapyramids1sd6.jpg

look at these pyramids, from nubia/sudan.

notice the lack of coverage these pyramids get compared to egypt, why?

look at the pyramid, look at the height/postion of the door/window, was there a back entrance/ladder? or is it stargate/fifth element fantasy? maybe in the first time, there was a civilisation in teh artic, with pyramids etc that gave birth to all egyptian/mayan/aztec/vedic/incan/olmec, the zigguarut/pyramid is the key.

[synergy777]

http://www.crystalinks.com/nubia.html

Nubia was also called - Upper & Lower Nubia, Kush, Land of Kush, Te-Nehesy, Nubadae, Napata, or the Kingdom of Meroei.

The region referred to as Lower Egypt is the northernmost portion. Upper Nubia extends south into Sudan and can be subdivided into several separate areas such as Batn El Hajar or "Belly of Rocks", the sands of the Abri-Delgo Reach, or the flat plains of the Dongola Reach. Nubia, the hottest and most arid region of the world, has caused many civilizations to be totally dependent on the Nile for existence.

Historically Nubia has been a nucleus of diverse cultures. It has been the only occupied strip of land connecting the Mediterranean world with "tropical" Africa. Thus, this put the people in close and constant contact with its neighbors for long periods of history and Nubia was an important trade route between sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world. Its rich material culture and tradition of languages are seen in archaeological records. The most prosperous period of Nubian civilization was that of the kingdom of Kush, which endured from about 800 BC to about 320 AD. During this time, the Nubians of Kush would at one point, assume rule over all of Nubia as well as Upper and Lower Egypt.

The regions of Nubia, Sudan and Egypt are considered by some to be the cradle of civilization. Today the term Nubian has become inclusive of Africans, African Arabs, African Americans and people of color in general.

The history of the Nubians is closely linked with that of ancient Egypt.

Images of early Gods are not unlike those found on heiroglyphs of Egyptian Gods - with heads of animals and birds.

More than fifty ancient pyramids and royal tombs rise out of the desert sands at Meroe. They are Sudan's best-preserved pyramids, and one of Africa's best-kept secrets.

Unlike Egypt's famous pyramids to the north, the Pyramids of Meroe are not floodlit at night. They do not form the backdrop to a dazzling laser-light multimedia extravaganza. They do not cater to the whims of camera-toting, dollar-wielding tourists. The pyramids are a silent and awesome sight, where the intrepid traveler can soak up their ancient atmosphere in solitude.

Like the Egyptians, the Kushites believed in a life after death. This was thought to bc a continuation of life on earth. For them, the afterlife resembled this one, and they built huge graves as an enduring home for the dead. The unique social position of the pharaoh, as god on earth, was reflected in his tomb.

The king was the son of Amun-Pa the sun god and as such embodied the sun on earth. Like the sun, his life followed a cyclical plan. His youth resembled the sun rising, his maturity was like the sun at noon and his old age was comparable with the setting sun. When the king died the sun disappeared below the horizon and darkness fell.

Mythology recounted that the dying or setting sun travelled through the underworld in its journey towards the east where it was to be reborn at the dawn of the day. From time immemorial the pyramid represented the rising sun and the resurrection, and people believed that a tomb in this shape would offer the dead king the chance of rising out of death. The pyramid was seen as a ladder up to heaven enabling the dead king's soul to travel and join the gods in the heavens. At night time the king, assuming the shape of Osiris, god of the afterlife and resurrection, descended in the barque of the sun god Ra and, having become one with this god, sailed through the bouts of darkness.

Building pyramids ceased towards the end of the Middle Kingdom period. The pharaohs of the New Kingdom constructed their graves in caves with underground rooms and passages symbolizing the nightly sojourn of the sun god. The black pharaohs of the Kushite Dynasty and their descendants readopted the old pyramids for their tombs. The number of pyramids in Nubia, where a total of 223 Has been Found, far exceeds that of Egypt.

The pyramids of Nubia have three important sections. These are:

1) an underground burial place symbolizing the underworld, where the mummy lies;

2) a massive steep pyramid above, symbolizing the ladder up to heaven;

3) a small chapel on the eastern side where sacrifices could bc placed, intended to sustain the dead king on his travels. Perhaps the doors to this chapel would be opened by a priest at sunrise so that the light could shine in on the stela that was placed against the rear wall. The chapel thus also functioned as a place of prayer connected with the cult of the dead.

The underground graves of the Nubian pyramids were richly decorated. The mummified kings and queens were laid upon beds in accordance with the ancient tradition of Kerma. So that the dead monarch would not have to work in the afterlife, their tombs were filled with shabtis, small statues of people which in a magical manner would come to life when summoned by the gods to perform tasks.

Pyramids from the Northern Cemetery at Meroe, 3rd c. B.C. to 4th c. A.D. By the 4th c. B.C., the Kushite kings had moved south to the Sudanese savannah and built a capitol at Meroe. Here southern cultural traditions slowly prevailed over the cultural heritage of Egypt.

Ruins of the Merotic temple at Musawwarat es-Sufra. This temple complex, called the "Great Enclosure", lies south of Meroë near the Sixth Cataract. It may have been a pilgrammage center or a royal palace. A number of towns were located on the banks of the Atbara, Blue Nile and White Nile, in which lived craftsmen who met local needs and exported along the trade route that ran from Red Sea port towns in the East to beyond Lake Chad in the West. This route eventually connected to the major center of iron production in Jenne Jeno.

Elephant statue from the "Great Enclosure" at Musawwarat es-Sufra temple. Elephants served a military function, but the cultural influence from the South is apparently the reason for their having a religious significance, now lost to us.

Elephantine Temples on the eastern bank of the Nile River.

The Lion Temple of Naqa. The architectural style is Egyptian. The entrance reliefs show the king and queen striking their enemies. The queen reflects Merotic culture in both her importance being equal to that of the king, but also in her figure style.

Relief from the Lion Temple at Naga, south of Meroë at the Sixth Cataract. King Natakamani stands before the lion god, Apedemek, and also Horus and Amun. The king's robe and the sash draped over his right shoulder, which is typical of Merotic dress. The Sudanese god Apedemek slowly displaced the divinities of Egypt.

Ancient Nubia Was this the place of creation - the Garden of Eden?

Worshipping Gods and Goddesses

Nubian Priestess - linked to creational forces - the return of the feminine energies - the tones of the dolphin the flight of the dove - transition - the flow of the collective unconscious through which all things are created

The earliest inhabitants of what is now The Sudan can be traced to African (i.e., Negroid) peoples who lived in the vicinity of Khartoum, the Sudan, in Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) times (30,000-20,000 BC). They were hunters and gatherers who made pottery and (later) objects of ground sandstone. Toward the end of the Neolithic Period (New Stone Age; 10,000-3,000 BC) they had domesticated animals. These Africans were clearly in contact with predynastic civilizations (before c. 2925 BC) to the north in Egypt, but the arid uplands separating Egypt from Nubia appear to have discouraged the predynastic Egyptians from settling there.

At the end of the 4th millennium BC, kings of Egypt's 1st dynasty conquered upper Nubia south of Aswan, introducing Egyptian cultural influence to the African peoples who were scattered along the riverbank. In subsequent centuries, Nubia was subjected to successive military expeditions from Egypt in search of slaves or building materials for royal tombs, which destroyed much of the Egyptian-Nubian culture that had sprung from the initial conquests of the 1st dynasty.

Throughout these few centuries (c. 2925-c. 2575 BC), the descendants of the Nubians continued to eke out an existence along the Nile River, an easy prey to Egyptian military expeditions. Although the Nubians were no match for the armies of Egypt's Old Kingdom, the interactions arising from their enslavement and colonization led to ever-increasing African influence upon the art, culture, and religion of dynastic Egypt.

Sometime after about 2181, in the period known to Egyptologists as the First Intermediate Period (c. 2130-1938), a new wave of immigrants entered Nubia from Libya, in the west, where the increasing desiccation of the Sahara drove them to settle along the Nile as cattle farmers. Other branches of these people seem to have gone beyond the Nile to the Red Sea Hills, while still others pushed south and west to Wadai and Darfur.

These newcomers were able to settle on the Nile and assimilate the existing Nubians without opposition from Egypt. After the fall of the 6th dynasty (c. 2150), Egypt experienced more than a century of weakness and internal strife, giving the immigrants in Nubia time to develop their own distinct civilization with unique crafts, architecture, and social structure, virtually unhindered by the potentially more dynamic civilization to the north.

With the advent of the 11th dynasty (2081), however, Egypt recovered its strength and pressed southward into Nubia, at first sending only sporadic expeditions to exact tribute, but by the 12th dynasty (1938-1756) effectively occupying Nubia as far south as Semna.

The Nubians resisted the Egyptian occupation, which was maintained only by a chain of forts erected along the Nile. Egyptian military and trading expeditions, of course, penetrated beyond Semna, and Egyptian fortified trading posts were actually established to the south at Karmah in order to protect against frequent attacks upon Egyptian trading vessels by Nubian tribesmen beyond the southern frontier.


The Kingdom of Kush

Despite the Egyptian presence in upper Nubia, the indigenous culture of the region continued to flourish. This culture was deeply influenced by African peoples in the south and was little changed by the proximity of Egyptian garrisons or the imports of luxury articles by Egyptian traders. Indeed, the Egyptianization of Nubia appears to have actually been enhanced during the decline in Egypt's political control over Nubia in the Second Intermediate Period (c. 1630-1540 BC), when Nubians were employed in large numbers as mercenaries against the Asian Hyksos invaders of Egypt.

This experience did more to introduce Egyptian culture, which the mercenaries absorbed while fighting in Egyptian armies, than did the preceding centuries of Egyptian military occupation. Conversely, the presence of these mercenaries in Egypt contributed to the growing African influence within Egyptian culture.

The defeat of the Hyksos was the result of a national rising of the Egyptians who, once they had expelled the Hyksos from the Nile valley, turned their energies southward to reestablish the military occupation of Nubia that the Hyksos invasion had disrupted. Under Thutmose I (reigned 1493-c. 1482 BC) the Egyptian conquest of the northern Sudan was completed as far as Kurqus, 50 miles south of Abu Hamad, and subsequent Egyptian military expeditions penetrated even farther up the Nile.

This third Egyptian occupation was the most complete and the most enduring, for despite sporadic rebellions against Egyptian control Nubia was divided into two administrative units: Wawat in the north, with its provincial capital at Aswan, and Kush (also spelled Cush) in the south, with its headquarters at Napata (Marawi). Nubia as a whole was governed by a viceroy, usually a member of the royal entourage, who was responsible to the Egyptian pharaoh.

Under him were two deputies, one for Wawat and one for Kush, and a hierarchy of lesser officials. The bureaucracy was staffed chiefly by Egyptians, but Egyptianized Nubians were not uncommon. Colonies of Egyptian officials, traders, and priests surrounded the administrative centres, but beyond these outposts the Nubians continued to preserve their own distinct traditions, customs, and crafts. A syncretistic culture thus arose in Kush, fashioned by that of Egypt to the north and those of African peoples to the south.

Kush's position athwart the trade routes from Egypt to the Red Sea, and from the Nile to the south and west, brought considerable wealth from far-off places. Moreover, its cultivated areas along the Nile were rich, and in the hills the gold and emerald mines produced bullion and jewels for Egypt. The Nubians were also highly valued as soldiers.

As Egypt slipped once again into decline at the close of the New Kingdom (11th century BC), the viceroys of Kush, supported by their Nubian armies, became virtually independent kings, free of Egyptian control. By the 8th century BC, the kings of Kush came from hereditary ruling families of Egyptianized Nubian chiefs who possessed neither political nor family ties with Egypt.

Under one such king, Kashta, Kush acquired control of Upper (i.e., southern) Egypt, and under his son Piankhi (c. 750-c. 719 BC), the whole of Egypt to the shores of the Mediterranean was brought under the administration of Kush.

As a world power, however, Kush was not to last. Just when the kings of Kush had established their rule from Abu Hamad to the Nile delta, the Assyrians invaded Egypt (671 BC) and with their superior iron-forged weapons defeated the armies of Kush under the redoubtable Taharqa; by 654 the Kushites had been driven back to Nubia and the safety of their capital, Napata.

Although reduced from a great power to an isolated kingdom behind the barren hills that blocked the southward advance from Aswan, Kush continued to rule over the middle Nile for another thousand years. Its unique Egyptian-Nubian culture with its strong African accretions was preserved, while that of Egypt came under Persian, Greek, and Roman influences.

Although Egyptianized in many ways, the culture of Kush was not simply Egyptian civilization in a Nubian environment. The Kushites developed their own language, expressed first by Egyptian hieroglyphs, then their own, and finally by a cursive script. They worshiped Egyptian gods but did not abandon their own. They buried their kings in pyramids but not in the Egyptian fashion.

Their wealth continued to flow from the mines and to grow with their control of the trade routes. Soon after the retreat from Egypt the capital was moved from Napata southward to Meroe near Shandi, where the kingdom was increasingly exposed to the long-established African cultures farther south at the very time when its ties with Egypt were rapidly disappearing. The subsequent history of Kush is one of gradual decay, ending with inglorious extinction in AD 350 by the king of Aksum, who marched down from the Ethiopian highlands, destroyed Meroe, and sacked the decrepit towns along the river.


Medieval Christian Kingdoms

The 200 years from the fall of Kush to the middle of the 6th century is an unknown age in the Sudan. Nubia was inhabited by a people called the Nobatae by the ancient geographers and the X-Group by modern archaeologists, who are still at a loss to explain their origins.

The X-Group were clearly, however, the heirs of Kush, for their whole cultural life was dominated by Meroitic crafts and customs, and occasionally they even felt themselves sufficiently strong, in alliance with the nomadic Blemmyes (the Beja of the eastern Sudan), to attack the Romans in Upper Egypt. When this happened, the Romans retaliated, defeating the Nobatae and Blemmyes and driving them into obscurity once again.

When the Sudan was once more brought into the orbit of the Mediterranean world by the arrival of Christian missionaries in the 6th century, the middle course of the Nile was divided into three kingdoms: Nobatia, with its capital at Pachoras (modern Faras); Maqurrah, with its capital at Dunqulah (Old Dongola); and the kingdom of 'Alwah in the south, with its capital at Subah (Soba) near what is now Khartoum.

Between 543 and 575 these three kingdoms were converted to Christianity by the work of Julian, a missionary who proselytized among the Nobatia (543-545), and his successor Longinus, who between 569 and 575 consolidated the work of Julian in Nobatia and even carried Christianity to 'Alwah in the south. The new religion appears to have been adopted with considerable enthusiasm. Christian churches sprang up along the Nile, and ancient temples were refurbished to accommodate Christian worshipers.

After the retirement of Longinus, however, the Sudan once again receded into a period about which little is known, and it did not reemerge into the stream of recorded history until the coming of the Arabs in the middle of the 7th century.

After the death of the Prophet Muhammad in AD 632, the Arabs erupted from the desert steppes of Arabia and overran the lands to the east and west. Egypt was invaded in 639, and small groups of Arab raiders penetrated up the Nile and pillaged along the frontier of the kingdom of Maqurrah, which by the 7th century had absorbed the state of Nobatia. Raid and counterraid between the Arabs and the Nubians followed until a well-equipped Arab expedition under 'Abd Allah ibn Sa'd ibn Abi Sarh was sent south to punish the Nubians.

The Arabs marched as far as Dunqulah, laid siege to the town, and destroyed the Christian cathedral. They suffered heavy casualties, however, so that when the king of Maqurrah sought an armistice, 'Abd Allah ibn Sa'd agreed to peace, happy to extricate his battered forces from a precarious position.

Arab-Nubian relations were subsequently regularized by an annual exchange of gifts, by trade relations, and by the mutual understanding that no Muslims were to settle in Nubia and no Nubians were to take up residence in Egypt.

With but few interruptions this peaceful, commercial relationship lasted for nearly six centuries, its very success undoubtedly the result of the mutual advantage that both the Arabs and the Nubians derived from it. The Arabs had a stable frontier; they appear to have had no designs to occupy the Sudan and were probably discouraged from doing so by the arid plains south of Aswan.

Peace on the frontier was their object, and this the treaty guaranteed. In return, the kingdom of Maqurrah gained another 600 years of life.


Islamic Encroachments

When non-Arab Muslims acquired control of the Nile delta, friction arose in Upper Egypt. In the 9th century the Turkish Tulunid rulers of Egypt, wishing to rid themselves of the unruly nomadic Arab tribes in their domain, encouraged them to migrate southward. Lured by the prospects of gold in the Nubian Desert, the nomads pressed into Nubia, raiding and pillaging along borders, but the heartland of Maqurrah remained free from direct hostilities until the Mamluks established their control over Egypt (1250).

In the late 13th and early 14th centuries, the Mamluk sultans sent regular military expeditions against Maqurrah, as much to rid Egypt of uncontrollable Arab Bedouins as to capture Nubia. The Mamluks never succeeded in actually occupying Maqurrah, but they devastated the country, draining its political and economic vitality and plunging it into chaos and depression.

By the 15th century Dunqulah was no longer strong enough to withstand Arab encroachment, and the country was open to Arab immigration. Once the Arab nomads, particularly the Juhaynah people, learned that the land beyond the Aswan reach could support their herds and that no political authority had the power to turn them back, they began to migrate southward, intermarrying with the Nubians and introducing Arabic Muslim culture to the Christian inhabitants.

The Arabs, who inherited through the male line, soon acquired control from the Nubians, who inherited through the female line, intermarriage resulting in Nubian inheritances passing from Nubian women to their half-Arab sons, but the Arabs replaced political authority in Maqurrah only with their own nomadic institutions.

From Dunqulah the Juhaynah and others wandered east and west of the Nile with their herds; in the south the kingdom of 'Alwah stood as the last indigenous Christian barrier to Arab occupation of the Sudan.

'Alwah extended from Kabushiyah as far south as Sennar (Sannar). Beyond, from the Ethiopian escarpment to the White Nile, lived peoples about which little is known. 'Alwah appears to have been much more prosperous and stronger than Maqurrah. It preserved the ironworking techniques of Kush, and its capital at Subah possessed many impressive buildings, churches, and gardens.

Christianity remained the state religion, but 'Alwah's long isolation from the Christian world had probably resulted in bizarre and syncretistic accretions to liturgy and ritual. 'Alwah was able to maintain its integrity so long as the Arabs failed to combine against it, but the continuous and corrosive raids of the Bedouins throughout the 15th century clearly weakened its power to resist. Thus, when an Arab confederation led by 'Abd Allah Jamma' was at last brought together to assault the Christian kingdom, 'Alwah collapsed (c. 1500). Subah and the Blue Nile region were abandoned, left to the Funj, who suddenly appeared, seemingly from nowhere, to establish their authority from Sennar to the main Nile.


The Funj

The Funj were a strange and mysterious people. They were neither Arabs nor Muslims, and their homeland was probably on the upper Blue Nile in the borderlands between Ethiopia and the Sudan. Under their leader, 'Amarah Dunqas, the Funj founded their capital at Sennar and throughout the 16th century struggled for control of the Al-Jazirah (Gezira) region against the Arab tribes who had settled around the confluence of the Blue and the White Niles. The Funj appear to have firmly established their supremacy by 1607-08.

By the mid-17th century the Funj dynasty had reached its golden age under one of its greatest kings, Badi II Abu Daqn (reigned 1644/45-80), who extended Funj authority across the White Nile into Kordofan and reduced the tribal chieftaincies scattered northward along the main Nile to tribute-paying feudatories. But as Badi expanded Funj power, he also planted the seeds of its decline. During his conquests, slaves were captured and taken to Sennar, where, as they grew in numbers and influence, they formed a military caste.

Loyal to the monarch alone, the slaves soon came to compete with the Funj aristocracy for control of the offices of state. Intrigue and hostility between these two rival groups soon led to open rebellion that undermined the position of the traditional ruling class.

Under Badi IV Abu Shulukh (reigned 1724-62), the ruling aristocracy was finally broken, and the king assumed arbitrary power, supported by his slave troops. So long as Badi IV could command the loyalty of his army, his position was secure and the kingdom enjoyed respite from internal strife, but at the end of his long reign he could no longer control the army. Under the leadership of his viceroy in Kordofan, Abu Likaylik, the military turned against the king and exiled him to Subah.

Abu Likaylik probably represented a resurgence of older indigenous elements who had been Arabized and Islamized but were neither Arab nor Funj.

Thenceforward, the Funj kings were but puppets of their viziers (chief ministers), whose struggles to win and to keep control precipitated the kingdom into steady decline, interrupted by only infrequent periods of peace and stability established by a strong vizier who was able to overcome his rivals.

During its last half century the Funj kingdom was a spent state, kept intact only through want of a rival, but gradually disintegrating through wars, intrigue, and conspiracy, until the Egyptians advanced on Sennar in 1821 and pushed the Funj empire into oblivion.


The Spread of Islam

The Funj were originally non-Muslims, but the aristocracy soon adopted Islam and, although they retained many traditional African customs, remained nominal Muslims. The conversion was largely the work of a handful of Islamic missionaries who came to the Sudan from the larger Muslim world. The great success of these missionaries, however, was not among the Funj themselves but among the Arabized Nubian population settled along the Nile.

Among these villagers the missionaries instilled a deep devotion to Islam that appears to have been conspicuously absent among the nomadic Arabs who first reached the Sudan after the collapse of the kingdom of Maqurrah. One early missionary was Ghulam Allah ibn 'A'id from the Yemen, who settled at Dunqulah in the 14th century. He was followed in the 15th century by Hamad Abu Danana, who appears to have emphasized the way to God through mystical exercises rather than through the more orthodox interpretations of the Qur'an taught by Ghulam Allah.

The spread of Islam was advanced in the 16th century, when the hegemony of the Funj enhanced security. In the 16th and 17th centuries, numerous schools of religious learning were founded along the White Nile, and the Shayqiyah confederacy was converted. Many of the more famous Sudanese missionaries who followed them were Sufi holy men, members of influential religious brotherhoods who sought the way to God through mystical contemplation.

The Sufi brotherhoods themselves played a vital role in linking the Sudan to the larger world of Islam beyond the Nile valley. Although the fervour of Sudanese Islam waned after 1700, the great reform movements that shook the Muslim world in the late 18th and early 19th centuries produced a revivalist spirit among the Sufi brotherhoods, giving rise to a new order, the Mirghaniyah or Khatmiyah, later one of the strongest in the modern Sudan.

These men, called faqihs, attracted a following by their teachings and piety and laid the foundations for a long line of indigenous Sudanese holy men. The latter passed on the way to God taught them by their masters, or founded their own religious schools, or, if extraordinarily successful, gathered their own following into a religious order. The faqihs played a vital role in educating their followers and helped place them in the highest positions of government, by which they were able to spread Islam and the influence of their respective brotherhoods.

The faqihs held a religious monopoly until the introduction, under Egyptian-Ottoman rule (see below), of an official hierarchy of jurists and scholars, the 'ulama', whose orthodox legalistic conception of Islam was as alien to the Sudanese as were their origins.

This disparity between the mystical, traditional faqihs, close to the Sudanese, if not of them, and the orthodox, Islamic jurists, aloof, if not actually part of the government bureaucracy, created a rivalry that in the past produced open hostility in times of trouble and sullen suspicion in times of peace. Recently, this schism has diminished; the faqih continues his customary practices unmolested, while the Sudanese have acknowledged the position of the 'ulama' in society.


Egyptian-Ottoman rule
Muhammad 'Ali and his successors

In July 1820, Muhammad 'Ali, viceroy of Egypt under the Ottoman Turks, sent an army under his son Isma'il to conquer the Sudan. Muhammad 'Ali was interested in the gold and slaves that the Sudan could provide and wished to control the vast hinterland south of Egypt. By 1821 the Funj and the sultan of Darfur had surrendered to his forces, and the Nilotic Sudan from Nubia to the Ethiopian foothills and from the 'Atbarah River to Darfur became part of his expanding empire.

The collection of taxes under Muhammad 'Ali's regime amounted to virtual confiscation of gold, livestock, and slaves, and opposition to his rule became intense, eventually erupting into rebellion and the murder of Isma'il and his bodyguard. But the rebels lacked leadership and coordination, and their revolt was brutally suppressed. A sullen hostility in the Sudanese was met by continued repression until the appointment of 'Ali Khurshid Agha as governor-general in 1826.

His administration marked a new era in Egyptian-Sudanese relations. He reduced taxes and consulted the Sudanese through the respected Sudanese leader 'Abd al-Qadir wad az-Zayn. Letters of amnesty were granted to fugitives. A more equitable system of taxation was implemented, and the support of the powerful class of holy men and sheikhs (tribal chiefs) for the administration was obtained by exempting them from taxation.

But 'Ali Khurshid was not content merely to restore the Sudan to its previous condition. Under his initiative trade routes were protected and expanded, Khartoum was developed as the administrative capital, and a host of agricultural and technical improvements were undertaken. When he retired to Cairo in 1838, Khurshid left a prosperous and contented country behind him.

His successor, Ahmad Pasha Abu Widan, with but few exceptions, continued his policies and made it his primary concern to root out official corruption. Abu Widan dealt ruthlessly with offenders or those who sought to thwart his schemes to reorganize taxation. He was particularly fond of the army, which reaped the benefits of regular pay and tolerable conditions in return for the brunt of the expansion and consolidation of Egyptian administration in Kassala and among the Baqqarah Arabs of southern Kordofan. Muhammad 'Ali, suspecting Abu Widan of disloyalty, recalled him to Cairo in the autumn of 1843, but he died mysteriously, many believed of poison, before he left the Sudan.

During the next two decades the country stagnated because of ineffective government at Khartoum and vacillation by the viceroys at Cairo. If the successors of Abu Widan possessed administrative talent, they were seldom able to demonstrate it. No governor-general held office long enough to introduce his own plans, let alone carry on those of his predecessor.

New schemes were never begun, and old projects were allowed to languish. Without direction the army and the bureaucracy became demoralized and indifferent, while the Sudanese became disgruntled with the government. In 1856 the viceroy Sa'id Pasha visited the Sudan and, shocked by what he saw, contemplated abandoning it altogether. Instead, he abolished the office of governor-general and had each Sudanese province report directly to the viceregal authority in Cairo. This state of affairs persisted until the more dynamic viceroy Isma'il took over the guidance of Egyptian and Sudanese affairs in 1862.

During these quiescent decades, however, two ominous developments began that presaged future problems. Reacting to pressure from the Western powers, particularly Great Britain, the governor-general of the Sudan was ordered to halt the slave trade. But not even the viceroy himself could overcome established custom with the stroke of a pen and the erection of a few police posts.

If the restriction of the slave trade precipitated resistance among the Sudanese, the appointment of Christian officials to the administration and the expansion of the European Christian community in the Sudan caused open resentment. European merchants, mostly of Mediterranean origin, were either ignored or tolerated by the Sudanese and confined their contacts to compatriots within their own community and to the Turko-Egyptian officials whose manners and dress they frequently adopted. They became a powerful and influential group, whose lasting contribution to the Sudan was to take the lead in opening the White Nile and the southern Sudan to navigation and commerce after Muhammad 'Ali had abolished state trading monopolies in the Sudan in 1838 under pressure from the European powers.

In 1863, Isma'il Pasha became viceroy of Egypt. Educated in Egypt, Vienna, and Paris, Isma'il had absorbed the European interest in overseas adventures as well as Muhammad 'Ali's desire for imperial expansion and had imaginative schemes for transforming Egypt and the Sudan into a modern state by employing Western technology.

First he hoped to acquire the rest of the Nile basin, including the southern Sudan and the Bantu states by the great lakes of central Africa. To finance this vast undertaking, and his projects for the modernization of Egypt itself, Isma'il turned to the capital-rich nations of western Europe, where investors were willing to risk their savings at high rates of interest in the cause of Egyptian and African development.

But such funds would be attracted only as long as Isma'il demonstrated his interest in reform by intensifying the campaign against the slave trade in the Sudan. Isma'il needed no encouragement, for he required the diplomatic and financial support of the European powers in his efforts to modernize Egypt and expand his empire. Thus, these two major themes of Isma'il's rule of the Nilotic Sudan--imperial expansion and the suppression of the slave trade--became intertwined, culminating in a third major development, the introduction of an ever-increasing number of European Christians to carry out the task of modernization.

In 1869 Isma'il commissioned the Englishman Samuel Baker to lead an expedition up the White Nile to establish Egyptian hegemony over the equatorial regions of central Africa and to curtail the slave trade on the upper Nile. Baker remained in equatorial Africa until 1873, where he established the Equatoria province as part of the Egyptian Sudan. He had extended Egyptian power and curbed the slave traders on the Nile, but he had also alienated certain African tribes and, being a rather tactless Christian, Isma'il's Muslim administrators as well. Moreover, Baker had struck only at the Nilotic slave trade.

To the west, on the vast plains of the Bahr Al-Ghazal (now a state of the Republic of The Sudan), slave merchants had established enormous empires with stations garrisoned by slave soldiers.

From these stations the long lines of human chattels were sent overland through Darfur and Kordofan to the slave markets of the northern Sudan, Egypt, and Arabia. Not only did the firearms of the Khartoumers (as the traders were called) establish their supremacy over the peoples of the interior but also those merchants with the strongest resources gradually swallowed up lesser traders until virtually the whole of the Bahr Al-Ghazal was controlled by the greatest slaver of them all, az-Zubayr Rahma Mansur, more commonly known as Zubayr (or Zobeir) Pasha.

So powerful had he become that in 1873, the year Baker retired from the Sudan, the Egyptian viceroy (now called the khedive) appointed Zubayr governor of the Bahr Al-Ghazal. Isma'il's officials had failed to destroy Zubayr as Baker had crushed the slavers east of the Nile, and to elevate Zubayr to the governorship appeared the only way to establish at least the nominal sovereignty of Cairo over that enormous province. Thus, the agents of Zubayr continued to pillage the Bahr Al-Ghazal under the Egyptian flag, while officially Egypt extended its dominion to the tropical rainforests of the Congo region. Zubayr remained in detention in Cairo.

Isma'il next offered the governorship of the Equatoria province to another Englishman, Charles George Gordon, who in China had won fame and the sobriquet Chinese Gordon. Gordon arrived in Equatoria in 1874. His object was the same as Baker's--to consolidate Egyptian authority in Equatoria and to establish Egyptian sovereignty over the kingdoms of the great East African lakes. He achieved some success in the former and none in the latter. When Gordon retired from Equatoria, the lake kingdoms remained stubbornly independent.

In 1877 Isma'il appointed Gordon governor-general of the Sudan. Gordon was a European and a Christian. He returned to the Sudan to lead a crusade against the slave trade, and, to assist him in this humanitarian enterprise, he surrounded himself with a cadre of European and American Christian officials. In 1877 Isma'il had signed the Anglo-Egyptian Slave Trade Convention, which provided for the termination of the sale and purchase of slaves in the Sudan by 1880. Gordon set out to fulfill the terms of this treaty, and in whirlwind tours through the country he broke up the markets and imprisoned the traders. His European subordinates did the same in the provinces.

Gordon's crusading zeal blinded him to his invidious position as a Christian in a Muslim land and obscured from him the social and economic effects of arbitrary repression. Not only did his campaign create a crisis in the Sudan's economy but the Sudanese soon came to believe that the crusade, led by European Christians, violated the principles and traditions of Islam.

By 1879 a strong current of reaction against Gordon's reforms was running through the country. The powerful slave-trading interests had, of course, turned against the administration, while the ordinary villagers and nomads, who habitually blamed the government for any difficulties, were quick to associate economic depression with Gordon's Christianity. And then suddenly, in the middle of rising discontent in the Sudan, Isma'il's financial position collapsed. In difficulties for years, he could now no longer pay the interest on the Egyptian debt, and an international commission was appointed by the European powers to oversee Egyptian finances. After 16 years of glorious spending, Isma'il sailed away into exile. Gordon resigned.

Gordon left a perilous situation in the Sudan. The Sudanese were confused and dissatisfied. Many of the ablest senior officials, both European and Egyptian, had been dismissed by Gordon, departed with him, or died in his service. Castigated and ignored by Gordon, the bureaucracy had lapsed into apathy. Moreover, the office of governor-general, on which the administration was so dependent, devolved upon Muhammad Ra'uf Pasha, a mild man, ill-suited to stem the current of discontent or to shore up the structure of Egyptian rule, particularly when he could no longer count on Egyptian resources. Such then was the Sudan in June of 1881 when Muhammad Ahmad declared himself to be the Mahdi ("the divinely guided one").


The Mahdiyah
Muhammad Ahmad ibn 'Abd Allah was the son of a Dunqulahwi boatbuilder who claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad. Deeply religious from his youth, he was educated in one of the Sufi orders, the Sammaniyah, but he later secluded himself on Aba Island in the White Nile to practice religious asceticism.

In 1880 he toured Kordofan, where he learned of the discontent of the people and observed those actions of the government that he could not reconcile with his own religious beliefs. Upon his return to Aba Island he clearly viewed himself as a mujaddid, a renewer of the Muslim faith, his mission to reform Islam and return it to the pristine form practiced by the Prophet.

To Muhammad Ahmad the orthodox 'ulama' who supported the administration were no less infidels than Christians, and, when he later lashed out against misgovernment, he was referring as much to the theological heresy as to secular maladministration.

Once he had proclaimed himself Mahdi (a title traditionally used by Islamic religious reformers), Muhammad Ahmad was regarded by the Sudanese as an eschatological figure, one who foreshadows the end of an age of darkness (which happened to coincide with the end of the 13th Muslim century) and heralds the beginnings of a new era of light and righteousness. Thus, as a divinely guided reformer and symbol, Muhammad Ahmad fulfilled the requirements of Mahdi in the eyes of his supporters.

Surrounding the Mahdi were his followers, the ansar, and foremost among them was 'Abd Allah ibn Muhammad, the caliph (khalifah; "deputy"), who came from the Ta'a'ishah tribe of the Baqqarah Arabs and who assumed the leadership of the Mahdist state upon the death of Muhammad Ahmad.

The holy men, the faqihs, who for long had lamented the sorry state of religion in the Sudan brought on by the legalistic and unappealing orthodoxy of the Egyptians, looked to the Mahdi to purge the Sudan of the faithless ones. Also in his following, more numerous and powerful than the holy men, were the merchants formerly connected with the slave trade. All had suffered from Gordon's campaign against the trade, and all now hoped to reassert their economic position under the banner of religious war. Neither of these groups, however, could have carried out a revolution by themselves.

The third and vital participants were the Baqqarah Arabs, the cattle nomads of Kordofan and Darfur who hated taxes and despised government. They formed the shock troops of the Mahdist revolutionary army, whose enthusiasm and numbers made up for its primitive technology. Moreover, the government itself only managed to enhance the prestige of the Mahdi by its fumbling attempts to arrest him and proscribe his movement.

By September 1882, the Mahdists controlled all of Kordofan and at Shaykan on Nov. 5, 1883, destroyed an Egyptian army of 10,000 men under the command of a British colonel. After Shaykan, the Sudan was lost, and not even the heroic leadership of Gordon, who was hastily sent to Khartoum, could save the Sudan for Egypt. On Jan. 26, 1885, the Mahdists captured Khartoum and massacred Gordon and the defenders.

[december]

"Yuya, Egyptian nobleman from 1400 BC, father of Tiy, the wife of Pharaoh Amenhotep III. Yuya's blond hair and Nordic facial structure have been well preserved by the embalming process; Alongside, his equally blond haired wife, Thuya, great grandmother of Tutankhamen".

http://www.white-history.com/hwr8_files/yuya.jpghttp://www.white-history.com/hwr8_files/thuya.jpg


http://www.white-history.com/hwr8_files/hor2.jpeg

An original wooden statue of the Egyptian King Hor (circa 1783 - 1633 BC, on display at the Cairo Museum, Cairo, Egypt). The eyes of the statue, inlaid with quartz or lapus lazuli, shine up with either blue or gray eyes, depending upon the lighting.

READ MORE -

http://www.white-history.com/hwr8a.htm

[synergy777]

http://www.crystalinks.com/nubia2.html

The Reign of the Khalifah

Five months after the fall of Khartoum, the Mahdi suddenly died on June 22, 1885. He was succeeded by the Khalifah 'Abd Allah. The Khalifah's first task was to secure his own precarious position among the competing factions in the Mahdist state. He frustrated a conspiracy by the Mahdi's relatives and disarmed the personal retinues of his leading rivals in Omdurman, the Mahdist capital of the Sudan. Having curtailed the threats to his rule, the Khalifah sought to accomplish the Mahdi's dream of a universal jihad (holy war) to reform Islam throughout the Muslim world.

With a zeal compounded from a genuine wish to carry out religious reform, a desire for military victory and personal power, and an appalling ignorance of the world beyond the Sudan, the forces of the Khalifah marched to the four points of the compass to spread Mahdism and extend the domains of the Mahdist state. By 1889 this expansionist drive was spent. In the west the Mahdist armies had achieved only an unstable occupation of Darfur.

In the east they had defeated the Ethiopians, but the victory produced no permanent gain. In the southern Sudan the Mahdists had scored some initial successes but were driven from the upper Nile in 1897 by the forces of the Congo Free State of Leopold II of Belgium.

On the Egyptian frontier in the north the jihad met its worst defeat at Tushki in August 1889, when an Anglo-Egyptian army under General F.W. (later Baron) Grenfell destroyed a Mahdist army led by 'Abd ar-Rahman an-Nujumi.

The Mahdist state had squandered its resources on the jihad, and a period of consolidation and contraction followed, necessitated by a sequence of bad harvests resulting in famine, epidemic, and death.

Between 1889 and 1892 the Sudan suffered its most devastating and terrible years, as the Sudanese sought to survive on their shriveled crops and emaciated herds. After 1892 the harvests improved, and food was no longer in short supply.

Moreover, the autocracy of the Khalifah had become increasingly acceptable to most Sudanese, and, having tempered his own despotism and eliminated the gross defects of his administration he too received the widespread acceptance, if not devotion, that the Sudanese had accorded the Mahdi.

In spite of its many defects, the Khalifah's administration served the Sudan better than its many detractors would admit. Certainly the Khalifah's government was autocratic, but, while autocracy may be repugnant to European democrats, it was not only understandable to the Sudanese but appealed to their deepest feelings and attitudes formed by tribe, religion, and past experience with the centralized authoritarianism of the Turks. For them, the Khalifah was equal to the task of governing bequeathed him by the Mahdi.

Only when confronted by new forces from the outside world, of which he was ignorant, did 'Abd Allah's abilities fail him. His belief in Mahdism, his reliance on the superb courage and military skill of the ansar, and his own ability to rally them against an alien invader were simply insufficient to preserve his independent Islamic state against the overwhelming technological superiority of Britain. And, as the 19th century drew to a close, the rival imperialisms of the European powers brought the full force of this technological supremacy against the Mahdist state.


The British Conquest

British forces invaded and occupied Egypt in 1882 to put down a nationalist revolution hostile to foreign interests and remained there to prevent any further threat to the khedive's government or the possible intervention of another European power. The consequences of this were far-reaching. A permanent British occupation of Egypt required the inviolability of the Nile waters without which Egypt could not survive, not from any African state, who did not possess the technical resources to interfere with them, but from rival European powers, who could. Consequently, the British government, by diplomacy and military maneuvers, negotiated agreements with the Italians and the Germans to keep them out of the Nile valley.

They were less successful with the French, who wanted them to withdraw from Egypt. Once it became apparent that the British were determined to remain, the French cast about for means to force the British from the Nile valley; in 1893 an elaborate plan was concocted by which a French expedition would march across Africa from the west coast to Fashoda (Kodok) on the upper Nile, where it was believed a dam could be constructed to obstruct the flow of the Nile waters. After inordinate delays, the French Nile expedition set out for Africa in June 1896, under the command of Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand.

As reports reached London during 1896 and 1897 of Marchand's march to Fashoda, Britain's inability to insulate the Nile valley became embarrassingly exposed. British officials desperately tried one scheme after another to beat the French to Fashoda.

They all failed, and by the autumn of 1897 British authorities had come to the reluctant conclusion that the conquest of the Sudan was necessary to protect the Nile waters from French encroachment. In October an Anglo-Egyptian army under the command of General Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener was ordered to invade the Sudan.

Kitchener pushed steadily but cautiously up the Nile. His Anglo-Egyptian forces defeated a large Mahdist army at the 'Atbarah River on April 8, 1898. Then, after spending four months preparing for the final advance to Omdurman, Kitchener's army of about 25,000 troops met the massed 60,000-man army of the Khalifah outside the city on Sept. 2, 1898. By midday the Battle of Omdurman was over.

The Mahdists were decisively defeated with heavy losses, and the Khalifah fled, to be killed nearly a year later. Kitchener did not long remain at Omdurman but pressed up the Nile to Fashoda with a small flotilla. There on Sept. 18, 1898, he met Captain Marchand, who declined to withdraw--the long-expected Fashoda crisis had begun. Both the French and British governments prepared for war. Neither the French army nor the navy was in any condition to fight, however, and the French were forced to give way. An Anglo-French agreement of March 1899 stipulated that French expansion eastward in Africa would stop at the Nile watershed.


The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium
The early years of British rule

Having conquered the Sudan, the British now had to govern it. But the administration of this vast land was complicated by the legal and diplomatic problems that had accompanied the conquest. The Sudan campaigns had been undertaken by the British to protect their imperial position as well as the Nile waters, yet the Egyptian treasury had borne the greater part of the expense, and Egyptian troops had far outnumbered those of Britain in the Anglo-Egyptian army.

The British, however, did not simply want to hand the Sudan over to Egyptian rule; most Englishmen were convinced that the Mahdiyah was the result of 60 years of Egyptian oppression.

To resolve this dilemma the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium was declared in 1899, whereby the Sudan was given separate political status in which sovereignty was jointly shared by the khedive and the British crown, and the Egyptian and the British flags were flown side by side. The military and civil government of the Sudan was invested in a governor-general appointed by the khedive of Egypt but nominated by the British government. In reality, there was no equal partnership between Britain and Egypt in the Sudan.

From the first the British dominated the condominium and set about pacifying the countryside and suppressing local religious uprisings, which created insecurity among British officials but never posed a major threat to their rule. The north was quickly pacified and modern improvements were introduced under the aegis of civilian administrators, who began to replace the military as early as 1900. In the south, resistance to British rule was more prolonged; administration there was confined to keeping the peace rather than making any serious attempts at modernization.

The first governor-general was Lord Kitchener himself, but in 1899 his former aide, Sir Reginald Wingate, was appointed to succeed him. Wingate knew the Sudan well and during his long tenure as governor-general (1899-1916) became devoted to its people and their prosperity. His tolerance and trust in the Sudanese resulted in policies that did much to establish confidence in Christian British rule by a devoutly Muslim, Arab-oriented people.

Modernization was slow at first. Taxes were purposely kept light, and the government consequently had few funds available for development. In fact, the Sudan remained dependent on Egyptian subsidies for many years. Nevertheless, railways, telegraph, and steamer services were expanded, particularly in Al-Jazirah, in order to launch the great cotton-growing scheme that remains today the backbone of The Sudan's economy. In addition, technical and primary schools were established, including the Gordon Memorial College, which opened in 1902 and soon began to graduate a Western-educated elite that was gradually drawn away from the traditional political and social framework. Scorned by the British officials, who preferred the illiterate but contented fathers to the ill-educated, rebellious sons, and adrift from their own customary tribal and religious affiliations, these Sudanese turned for encouragement to Egyptian nationalists; from that association Sudanese nationalism in this century was born.

Its first manifestations occurred in 1921, when 'Ali 'Abd al-Latif founded the United Tribes Society and was arrested for nationalist agitation. In 1924 he formed the White Flag League, dedicated to driving the British from the Sudan. Demonstrations followed in Khartoum in June and August and were suppressed. When the governor-general, Sir Lee Stack, was assassinated in Cairo on Nov. 19, 1924, the British forced the Egyptians to withdraw from the Sudan and annihilated a Sudanese battalion that mutinied in support of the Egyptians. The Sudanese revolt was ended, and British rule remained unchallenged until after World War II.

n 1936 Britain and Egypt had reached a partial accord in the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty that enabled Egyptian officials to return to the Sudan. Although the traditional Sudanese sheikhs and chiefs remained indifferent to the fact that they had not been consulted in the negotiations over this treaty, the educated Sudanese elite were resentful that neither Britain nor Egypt had bothered to solicit their opinions. Thus, they began to express their grievances through the Graduates' General Congress, which had been established as an alumni association of Gordon Memorial College and soon embraced all educated Sudanese.

At first, the Graduates' General Congress confined its interests to social and educational activities, but with Egyptian support the organization demanded recognition by the British to act as the spokesman for Sudanese nationalism. The Sudan government refused, and the Congress split into two groups: a moderate majority prepared to accept the good faith of the government, and a radical minority, led by Isma'il al-Azhari, which turned to Egypt. By 1943 Azhari and his supporters had won control of the Congress and organized the Ashiqqa' (Brothers), the first genuine political party in the Sudan. Seeing the initiative pass to the militants, the moderates formed the Ummah (Nation) Party under the patronage of Sayyid 'Abd ar-Rahman al-Mahdi, the posthumous son of the Mahdi, with the intention of cooperating with the British toward independence.

Sayyid 'Abd ar-Rahman had inherited the allegiance of the thousands of Sudanese who had followed his father. He now sought to combine to his own advantage this power and influence with the ideology of the Ummah. His principal rival was Sayyid 'Ali al-Mirghani, the leader of the Khatmiyah brotherhood. Although he personally remained aloof from politics, Sayyid 'Ali threw his support to Azhari. The competition between the Azhari-Khatmiyah faction--remodeled in 1951 as the National Unionist Party (NUP)--and the Ummah-Mahdist group quickly rekindled old suspicions and deep-seated hatreds that soured Sudanese politics for years and eventually strangled parliamentary government. These sectarian religious elites virtually controlled The Sudan's political parties until the last decade of the 20th century, stultifying any attempt to democratize the country or to include the millions of Sudanese remote from Khartoum in the political process.

Although the Sudanese government had crushed the initial hopes of the congress, the British officials were well aware of the pervasive power of nationalism among the elite and sought to introduce new institutions to associate the Sudanese more closely with the task of governing. An Advisory Council was established for the northern Sudan consisting of the governor-general and 28 Sudanese, but Sudanese nationalists soon began to agitate to transform the Advisory Council into a legislative one that would include the southern Sudan. The British had facilitated their control of the Sudan by segregating the animist or Christian Africans who predominated in the south from the Muslim Arabs who were predominant in the north. The decision to establish a legislative council forced the British to abandon this policy; in 1947 they instituted southern participation in the legislative council.

The creation of this council produced a strong reaction on the part of the Egyptian government, which in October 1951 unilaterally abrogated the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 and proclaimed Egyptian rule over the Sudan. These hasty and ill-considered actions only managed to alienate the Sudanese from Egypt until the Nasser-Naguib revolution in July 1952 placed men with more understanding of Sudanese aspirations in power in Cairo.

On Feb. 12, 1953, the Egyptian government signed an agreement with Britain granting self-government for the Sudan and self-determination within three years for the Sudanese. Elections for a representative Parliament to rule the Sudan followed in November and December 1953. The Egyptians threw their support behind Isma'il al-Azhari, the leader of the National Unionist Party, who campaigned on the slogan "Unity of the Nile Valley." This position was opposed by the Ummah Party, which had the less vocal but pervasive support of British officials. To the shock of many British officials and to the chagrin of the Ummah, which had enjoyed power in the Legislative Council for nearly six years, Azhari's NUP won an overwhelming victory. Although Azhari had campaigned to unite the Sudan with Egypt, the realities of disturbances in the southern Sudan and the responsibilities of political power and authority ultimately led him to disown his own campaign promises and to declare The Sudan an independent republic with an elected representative Parliament on Jan. 1, 1956.


The Republic of The Sudan

The triumph of liberal democracy in The Sudan was short-lived. Compared with the strength of tradition, which still shaped the life of the Sudanese, the liberalism imported from the West, disseminated through British education and adopted by the Sudanese intelligentsia, was a weak force. At first parliamentary government had been held in high esteem as the symbol of nationalism and independence. But at best Parliament was a superficial instrument. It had been introduced into The Sudan at precisely the time parliamentary forms were rapidly disappearing from other countries in the Middle East. Political parties were not well-organized groups with distinct objectives, but loose alliances motivated primarily by personal interests and loyalty to the various religious factions. When the tactics of party management were exhausted, Parliament became debased, benefiting only those politicians who reaped the rewards of power and patronage. Disillusioned with their experiment in liberal democracy, the Sudanese turned once again to authoritarianism.


The Abbud Government

On the night of Nov. 16-17, 1958, the commander in chief of the Sudanese army, General Ibrahim Abbud, carried out a bloodless coup d'état, dissolving all political parties, prohibiting assemblies, and temporarily suspending newspapers. A Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, consisting of 12 senior officers, was set up, and army rule brought rapid economic improvements. The Abbud government at once abolished the fixed price on cotton and sold all the Sudanese cotton, rebuilding the nation's foreign reserves.

On Nov. 8, 1959, the government concluded an agreement with Egypt on the Nile waters, by which Egypt not only recognized but also appeared to be reconciled to an independent Sudan. In the southern Sudan, Abbud's policies were less successful. In the name of national unity the army officers introduced many measures designed to facilitate the spread of Islam and the Arabic language. Important positions in the administration and police were staffed by northern Sudanese. Education was shifted from the English curriculum of the Christian missionaries, who had long been solely responsible for education in the south, to an Arabic, Islamic orientation. Foreign Christian missionaries were expelled between 1962 and 1964.

In the southern Sudan itself, the measures of the central government met ever-increasing resistance. In October 1962 a widespread strike in southern schools resulted in antigovernment demonstrations followed by a general flight of students and others over the border. In September 1963 rebellion erupted in eastern Al-Istiwa'iyah (Equatoria) and in the A'ali An-Nil (Upper Nile) province led by the Anya Nya, a southern Sudanese guerrilla organization that believed that only violent resistance would make the government of General Abbud seek a solution acceptable to the southerners. In return the generals in Khartoum increased repression.

Although the northern Sudanese had little sympathy for their countrymen in the south, the intelligentsia was able to use the government's failure there to assail authoritarian rule in the north and to revive demands for democratic government. By 1962, numerous urban elements, including the intelligentsia, the trade unions, and the civil service, as well as the powerful religious brotherhoods, had become alienated from the military regime. Moreover, the tribal masses and growing proletariat had become increasingly apathetic toward the government. In the end the regime was overwhelmed by boredom and overthrown by the reaction to its lassitude. The means of its overthrow was the southern problem.

In October 1964, students at the University of Khartoum held a meeting, in defiance of a government prohibition, in order to condemn government action in the southern Sudan and to denounce the regime. Demonstrations followed, and, with most of its forces committed in the southern Sudan, the military regime was unable to maintain control. The disorders soon spread, and General Abbud resigned as head of state; a transitional government was appointed to serve under the provisional constitution of 1956.


The Sudan since 1964

Under the leadership of Sirr al-Khatim al-Khalifah, the transitional government held elections in April and May 1965 to form a representative government. A coalition government headed by a leading Ummah politician, Muhammad Ahmad Mahjub, was formed in June 1965. As before, parliamentary government was characterized by factional disputes. On the one hand, Mahjub enjoyed the support of the traditionalists within the Ummah Party, represented by the Imam al-Hadi, the spiritual successor to the Mahdi, while on the other he was challenged by Sayyid Sadiq al-Mahdi, the young great-grandson of the Mahdi, who led the more progressive forces within the Ummah.

Unable to find common objectives, Parliament failed to deal with the economic, social, and constitutional problems in The Sudan. Moreover, the earlier hopes expressed by the transitional government of cooperation with the southerners soon vanished. Conflict continued in the south, with little hope of resolution. A group of young officers led by Colonel Gaafar Mohamed el-Nimeiri--tired of having no workable constitution, a stagnant economy, a political system torn by sectarian interests, and a continuing civil conflict in the south--seized the government on May 25, 1969.


The Early Nimeiri Regime

When Nimeiri and his young officers assumed power they were confronted by threats from communists on the left and the Ummah on the right. Nimeiri disbanded the Sudanese Communist Party, which went underground, and in his government's struggles with the Ummah Party under Imam al-Hadi, the latter was killed and his supporters dispersed. An abortive coup by the resilient communists in July 1971 collapsed after popular and foreign support held steadfast for the reinstallation of Nimeiri. The abortive coup had a profound effect on Nimeiri. He promised a permanent constitution and National Assembly, established himself as president of the state, and instituted the Sudanese Socialist Union (SSU) as the country's only party. The affair also produced the incentive to press for a resolution to the southern rebellion.


The Addis Ababa Agreement

In 1971 the southern Sudanese rebels, who had theretofore consisted of several independent commands, were united under General Joseph Lagu, who combined under his authority both the fighting units of the Anya Nya and its political wing, the Southern Sudan Liberation Movement (SSLM). Thereafter, throughout 1971 the SSLM, representing General Lagu, maintained a dialogue with the Sudanese government over proposals for regional autonomy and the ending of hostilities. These talks culminated in the signing of the Addis Ababa Agreement on Feb. 27, 1972. The agreement ended the 17-year conflict between the Anya Nya and the Sudanese army and ushered in autonomy for the southern region, which would no longer be divided into the three provinces of Al-Istiwa'iyah (Equatoria), Bahr Al-Ghazal, and A'ali An-Nil (Upper Nile). The region's affairs would be controlled by a separate legislature and executive body, and the soldiers of the Anya Nya would be integrated into the Sudanese army and police. The Addis Ababa Agreement brought Nimeiri both prestige abroad and popularity at home.


Economic Development

The signing of the Addis Ababa Agreement enabled economic development in The Sudan to proceed using funds that had previously been allocated for the civil war. This diversion of government resources to peaceful projects coincided with the dramatic growth of petroleum revenues in the Persian Gulf, and the Arab states there began investing large sums in The Sudan in order to transform it into the "breadbasket" of the Arab world. The resulting spate of development projects in the 1970s was followed by investments from private multinational corporations and generous loans from the International Monetary Fund. The highest priority was placed on expanding The Sudan's production of sugar, wheat, and cotton in order to provide foreign exchange. The new projects were accompanied by efforts to expand the national infrastructure and to construct the Junqali (Jonglei) Canal through the great swamps of As-Sudd.

Though these projects were laudable in conception, their flawed implementation plunged The Sudan into a severe economic crisis by 1980 from which it had yet to recover in the 1990s. Few projects were completed on time, and those that were never met their production targets. The steady decline of The Sudan's gross domestic output from 1977 left the country in a cycle of increasing debt, severe inflation, and an ever-diminishing standard of living.

There were two fundamental causes for the failure of The Sudan's economic development. First, planning was deficient, and decisions were increasingly precipitous and mercurial. There was no overall control, so individual ministries negotiated external loans for projects without the approval of the central planning authority. The result was not only incompetent management but also innumerable opportunities for corruption. The second cause of economic failure lay in external events over which The Sudan had no control. Rising oil prices dramatically increased The Sudan's bill for petroleum products, while the concomitant development projects in the Persian Gulf siphoned off from The Sudan its best professional and skilled workers, who were lured by high wages abroad only to create a "brain drain" at home. Neither the Nimeiri regime nor its successors proved successful in breaking this cycle of persistent economic decline.


The Rise of Muslim Fundamentalism

In the elections of 1965, the Islamic Charter Front, a political party that espoused the principles of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan Al-Muslimin), received only an insignificant portion of the popular vote. But the election roughly coincided with the return from France of Hassan at-Turabi, who assumed the leadership of the party, now known as the Islamic National Front (NIF).

Turabi methodically charted the Brotherhood and the NIF on a course of action designed to seize control of the Sudanese government despite the Muslim fundamentalists' lack of popularity with the majority of the Sudanese people. Tightly disciplined, superbly organized, and inspired by the resurgence of Islam in the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood consciously sought to recruit disciples from the country's youth. It was relentlessly successful, and by the 1980s the Muslim Brotherhood and the NIF had successfully infiltrated the country's officer corps, the civil service, and the ranks of secondary-school teachers.

Despite its relatively small size, the Muslim Brotherhood began to exert its influence, a fact not unnoticed by President Nimeiri. The Sudanese Socialist Union, which he had established as the sole political party in The Sudan, had failed to galvanize popular support. In the face of deteriorating relations with both the southern Sudanese and the traditionalists of the Ummah-Mahdi grouping, Nimeiri turned increasingly to the Muslim Brotherhood for support. He appointed Turabi attorney general and did not object to the latter's designs for a new constitution based partly on Islamic law. In September 1983 Nimeiri modified the nation's legal codes to bring them into accord with Islamic law, the Shari'ah. This measure was bound to be resisted by the Christians and animists of the southern Sudan. Moreover, Nimeiri was coming to accept the arguments of the Muslim Brotherhood and other northern political groups that the Addis Ababa Agreement had been a mistake. In June 1983 Nimeiri unilaterally divided the southern region again into three provinces, thereby effectively abrogating the Addis Ababa Agreement.


Southern reaction

Even before the official demise of the agreement, the civil war between the African Christians of the south and the Muslim Arabs of the north had resumed with even greater ferocity than before. There had been sporadic uprisings in the south since the signing of the Addis Ababa Agreement in 1972, but they had been quickly suppressed. In May 1983, however, an army battalion stationed at Bor mutinied and fled into the bush under the leadership of Colonel John Garang de Mabior. The rebels had become disenchanted with Nimeiri and his government, which was riddled with corruption and was contemptuous of southerners. Led by Garang, the ranks of the Bor garrison, which had taken up sanctuary in Ethiopia, were soon swollen by discontented southerners determined to redress their grievances by force of arms under the banner of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) and its political wing, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM).


Nimeiri's overthrow and its aftermath

Although Nimeiri at first sought to crush the rebels by military force, his deployment of the Sudanese army only succeeded in disrupting the distribution of food, which, when coupled with drought and diminished harvests, created widespread famine in the southern Sudan. Without popular support, Nimeiri found himself facing a successful armed rebellion in the south and growing criticism in the north over the rigour with which he sought to carry out the brutal corporal punishments prescribed under the Shari'ah.

In response, Nimeiri softened his hard-line policies; he annulled the state of emergency that he had invoked five months earlier, he rescinded the tripartite division of the south, and he suspended the more brutal aspects of the Islamic courts. But these futile gestures were too late. Nimeiri was overthrown in a bloodless coup in April 1985 by his chief of staff, General 'Abd ar-Rahman Siwar ad-Dahab.

Although the new military government held elections in 1986 that returned Sadiq al-Mahdi as prime minister, the next three years were characterized by political instability, indecisive leadership, party manipulations resulting in short-lived coalitions, and abortive attempts to reach a peaceful settlement with the SPLA. These years of indecision came to an end on June 30, 1989, when a Revolutionary Command Council for National Salvation led by Lieutenant General 'Umar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir seized power.


The emergence of the National Islamic Front

The Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) was in fact the vehicle for the NIF, the political party of the Muslim Brotherhood. Bashir and his colleagues realized that, as a minority with little popular support, they would have to resort to harsh measures to curtail the educated elites who had been instrumental in organizing populist revolutions in the past. With a ruthlessness to which the Sudanese were unaccustomed, the RCC imprisoned hundreds of political opponents, banned trade unions and political parties, silenced the press, and dismantled the judiciary. It sought to prosecute the war in the south with vigour, inhibited only by the deterioration of the national economy. With the support of the NIF, the Muslim Brotherhood, and a ruthless and efficient security system, the most unpopular government in the modern history of The Sudan remained firmly in power as the country entered the last decade of the 20th century.

The confidence of the RCC and its supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood enabled President Bashir to reintroduce Islamic law (Shari'ah), including corporal punishment, in March 1991, and emboldened the government to support Iraq in the Persian Gulf War.

Both these acts isolated The Sudan not only from the West but from its Arab neighbours as well (although the Libyan government was supportive). The economy continued to deteriorate, precipitated by this isolation and also by civil war in the south, fallen productivity, and rampant inflation. There were widespread shortages of basic commodities, particularly in the sensitive urban areas, creating disturbances which were ruthlessly suppressed. In the south the army continued to lose towns to the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA), but it managed to hold the three provincial capitals of Malakal, Waw, and Juba.

Unable to defeat the SPLA on the field of battle, the government armed and unleashed an Arab militia (mujahideen) against their traditional African rivals, principally the Dinka.

Moreover, it consistently ignored pleas for food and obstructed the efforts of Western humanitarian relief agencies to provide food aid. Caught between two armies, plundered by the Arab militia, and scourged by a persistent drought, countless Africans fled to northern towns and cities or sought sanctuary in Ethiopia.

Thousands perished fleeing the endemic East African famine, or in the camps for the displaced where they received no relief from the Khartoum government, which was determined to crush the SPLA as the initial step in a policy to Islamize the non-Muslims of the southern Sudan.

- Encyclopedia Britannica Online

Rare Nubian King Statues Uncovered in Sudan
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0227_030227_sudankings.html

Black pharaoh trove uncovered
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/2677919.stm

Artefacts represent kings Taharqa, Tanutamon, last of black pharaohs as well as two monarchs who all lived about 600 years BC. The Nubian kings ruled 2,500 years ago.

[synergy777]

december maybe the royal families of the ancient world inter-married. its quite clear egyptains were african, maybe he took a nordic wife? or maybe the nordic features are due to genetic diversity producing a white egyptian, like cleopatra etc. if the paharoah was african, then the offspring would have been mixed, and most probably asiatic in appearence. good find.

http://mindwarz.com/media/blackegyptian

Black Egyptians still there today

Black An Essay through PHOTOS by Kola Boof

About a year ago, one of my uncles wrote to me from Egypt, quite bitterly.
He said:People are so busy discussing and fighting over whether or not
the ancient Egyptians were "black" ---that they forgot we're still here.
We still exist. The Arabs who claim to be Egyptians have not exterminated ALL of us yet. Kola, you live in America, you're somebody over there. Why don't you say something? You're only claiming SUDAN. But that's not right. Your father was an Egyptian

And he's right. Because of my own bitterness...my hatred and loathing
for my father's country...I have been remiss to mention anything about the
country.

My only real memory is a very painful one...the memory of my White
Arab grandmother going to the Mullahs after my birth parents had been executed in SUDAN for speaking out against slavery to get PERMISSION to put me up for adoption (as adoption is primarily illegal in EGYPT)...because of course, my black skin would have exposed her --Miss Najet Kolbookek---as having BLACK African blood in her family's veins. A fact that she, unlike my Uncle, has spent her whole life trying to hide from the Arab Muslim social set.

BUT my uncle is right. The true Egyptians--the Black Egyptians
do still exist, and instead of debating about the "ancient" people....why do
we never force the WHITE MEDIA to show images of the black ones?

Why is it that in America--only the WHITE ARAB INVADER groups, the BEJA
and the Noor are ever shown on television or in magazines?

Why do they insist on painting EGYPTas a WHITE nation with no connection
to Africa? Clearly..these photos of EGYPTIAN Black people---photos that are NOW TODAY---demonstrate that Egypt is not a White nation. There are millions of BLACK EGYPTIANS who still exist.

look at the pictures.

[mountain]

You are an excellent observer, Synergy777. I have an old book titled African Kingdoms that has a great photograph of these Pyramids of Kush.

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en-commons/thumb/d/d7/350px-Sudan_Meroe_Pyramids_2001.JPG

Also, find it interesting that no one talks about Xian pyramid in China, which is said to be largest in the world.

http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/chpyr.gif

[synergy777]

funnily enough the mummy 3 is about the chinese pyramids, a global culture. look at aztecs/incas/mayans/olmecs, egypt/china/india, even europe has pyramids.

i have always felt connected to africa/arabia.

[december]

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en-commons/thumb/d/d7/350px-Sudan_Meroe_Pyramids_2001.JPG


The only problem with Sudan pyramids is that their top is missing and it is not the case with the Egyptian pyramids.

http://www.cap.nsw.edu.au/bb_site_intro/specialPlaces/special_places_st2/africa/pyramid3.jpg

[synergy777]

who else uses the pyramids with a missing capstone.

[december]

who else uses the pyramids with a missing capstone.

The Russian people do.

[adimon]

Also, find it interesting that no one talks about Xian pyramid in China, which is said to be largest in the world.

No, the Giza pyramid is much larger. Until the construction of the Eiffel Tower it was the tallest man-made structure.

[mountain]

http://C:\Documents and Settings\shannon\My Documents\My Scans\2007-09 (Sep)Here are pictures ferom my book. They gave me the impression that something had blown off the tips!!

[mountain]

How do you post pictures from My Scans???

[mountain]

No, the Giza pyramid is much larger. Until the construction of the Eiffel Tower it was the tallest man-made structure.

Might be tallest, but Xian is largest.

http://www.cyberspaceorbit.com/text/dnew54x.htm