eaRly states on the nile 59The Rediscovery of Sudan’s Ancient PastFor those to the north of Sudan, interest in the lands that lie south-
wards extends back over five millennia. Egyptians came to Sudan as
traders, prospectors and conquerors. The fifth century Greek histo-
rian Herodotus recorded tales of the lands to the south of Egypt. The
Romans invaded the region and sent a fact-finding mission which may
have reached as far south as the Sudd. Byzantine missionaries prosely-
tized upstream of the Nile confluence as far as Soba East, the capital of
the medieval kingdom of Alwa; Muslim travellers traversed the northern
part of the country; and a Catalan speaker, perhaps a pilgrim, visited the
southern Dongola Reach in the thirteenth century. These visitors were
followed by the prolific Ottoman writer Evliya Çelebi in the seventeeth
century. The history of the region may seem to be characterized by the
expansion of northern powers southwards. At certain times, though,
the powers that arose south of the First Cataract, that is to say in what
is now northern Sudan, were able to push back and conquer the lands
to the north.
The first significant contribution to uncovering Sudan’s past came
when the Scottish traveller James Bruce passed through a field of ruins
near the village of Begrawiya in 1772 and correctly identified it as the
site of Meroe, the Kushite capital in the first Millennium bce and early
centuries CE. From the early nineteenth century, Sudan drew the interest
of a new kind of European scholar – many of them from a background
in Egyptological or Middle Eastern studies. Almost all their activities
were focused on the northern Nile Valley. The excavations organized and
financed by Henry Wellcome, the pharmaceutical entrepreneur, at Jebel
Moya in the Gezira, between the Blue Nile and White Nile, were a rare
exception to the rule.
These researchers sought out the major monumental sites that could
be associated with Egypt and the Classical World. In central Sudan and
southern Sudan such remains did not exist and those areas were almost
totally neglected, as were the desert regions to the east and west of the
Nile. Southern Sudan became the preserve of the anthropologist and
The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors
(www.riftvalley.net).