The Sudan Handbook

eaRly states on the nile 69

their leaders Abdallah Gamaa and Omarah Dongus. The Funj state

occupied the Gezira between the Blue and the White Niles and the upper

reaches of the Blue Nile and extended its control into Kordofan and to the

Red Sea in the region of Suakin. The emergence of this state facilitated

the emergence of Islamic kingdoms in other parts of the Sudan, such

as the Fur and el-Masabaat kingdom in western Sudan, the Sheikhdom

of el-Abdallab, with its capital firstly in Gerri and later at Halfaya near

Khartoum, and the Sheikhdom of the Red Sea and Fazogli.

Egypt was under Ottoman control from the early sixteenth century,

and there was an Ottoman presence on Sudan’s Red Sea coast, at

Suakin, from 1524. In the Nile Valley the Ottoman frontier was pushed

south from Aswan to the First Cataract, then on to the Third Cataract.

Advancing north down the Nile, the expanding Funj came face to face

with the Ottomans pushing in the opposite direction. After a battle at

Hannek near the Third Cataract in 1584, the protagonists left a wide

loosely controlled region between the Ottoman outpost on Sai Island and

the area of direct Funj control, corresponding to the ancient boundary

between Nobatia and Makuria. This frontier marked the southern limit

of the Ottoman Empire’s North African territory. By the early nineteenth

century, however, Ottoman control over the north had lapsed and the

Funj state was in terminal decline.

Recommended Reading
Adams, William Y. Nubia: Corridor to Africa. London: Princeton, 1997.
Edwards, David N. The Nubian Past: an Archaeology of the Sudan. London:
Routledge, 2004.
Hassan, Yusuf F. (ed.) Sudan in Africa. Khartoum: University of Khartoum
Press, 1971.
Török, Laszlo. The Kingdom of Kush. Handbook of the Napatan–Meroitic
Civilization. Leiden: Brill, 1997.
Welsby, Derek A. The Kingdom of Kush, the Napatan and Meroitic Empires.
London: The British Museum Press, 1996.
Welsby, Derek A. The Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia: Pagans, Christians and Muslims
The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors on the Middle Nile.^ London:^ The^ British^ Museum^ Press,^ 2002.

(www.riftvalley.net).