The history of Sudan

The middle Nile valley in what is now Sudan was home to Africa's oldest kingdoms outside Egypt: Kerma, then Kush, whose kings ruled Egypt as pharaohs and later built the pyramids of Meroë. Three Christian Nubian kingdoms succeeded Kush and held out against Muslim Egypt for some seven centuries, before Arab migration, Islam and the Funj and Darfur sultanates reshaped the region. Conquered by Egypt in 1821, liberated by the Mahdist revolt in 1885 and reconquered by an Anglo-Egyptian army in 1898, Sudan became independent in 1956. Since then it has known long periods of military rule, two north-south civil wars that ended in the independence of South Sudan in 2011, mass atrocities in Darfur and, since April 2023, a war between rival military forces that has caused one of the world's largest humanitarian disasters.

People have lived along the Nile in Sudan for hundreds of thousands of years. At Jebel Sahaba, near the Egyptian border, a cemetery more than 13,000 years old contains many skeletons with arrow wounds, one of the earliest known records of repeated violence between groups. Around Khartoum, fishing and hunting communities were making pottery decorated with wavy lines by about 7000 BCE, among the oldest pottery in Africa, and later Neolithic sites such as Esh Shaheinab show the arrival of cattle, sheep and goats. In Lower Nubia the A-Group culture of the fourth millennium BCE traded with the early Egyptian state, and the C-Group herders followed it.

From about 2500 BCE a powerful kingdom grew around Kerma, above the Third Cataract. Its capital was dominated by a huge mud-brick temple, the Western Deffufa, and its kings were buried under great round mounds with hundreds of sacrificed retainers. Egypt's Middle Kingdom built a chain of forts at the Second Cataract to control the trade in gold, ivory and ebony and to hold Kerma back. When Egypt was divided under the Hyksos, Kerma expanded north and raided deep into Upper Egypt.

The pharaohs of the New Kingdom struck back. Thutmose I destroyed Kerma around 1500 BCE, and for the next five centuries Nubia was an Egyptian province governed by a viceroy called the King's Son of Kush. Egyptian temples rose along the river, including the temple of Amun at Jebel Barkal near Napata, and Nubian gold helped pay for the empire of ancient Egypt. The Nubian elite adopted Egyptian religion and writing.

As Egyptian power collapsed at the end of the New Kingdom, a new dynasty emerged at el-Kurru near Napata in the ninth century BCE. Its king Kashta extended Kushite influence into Upper Egypt, and around 727 BCE his successor Piye marched north and conquered the whole of Egypt, ending the divided Third Intermediate Period. Piye's successors ruled Egypt as its 25th Dynasty for about seventy years, restoring old temples and reviving the building of pyramids. Taharqa, who reigned from 690 to 664 BCE, was the most famous of them, but the Kushites were driven out of Egypt by the armies of Assyria under Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, and the last Kushite pharaoh, Tantamani, withdrew by 656 BCE.

The Kingdom of Kush survived in the south for almost a thousand years more. An Egyptian army sacked Napata around 592 BCE, and over the following centuries the political centre shifted south to Meroë, between the Fifth and Sixth Cataracts, where royal burials were moved around 300 BCE. Meroë grew rich on iron-working, cattle, irrigated farms and trade with the Red Sea and the Mediterranean worlds of the Ptolemaic Kingdom and Rome. Its rulers built more than two hundred small, steep pyramids, more than in all of Egypt, and from the second century BCE its scribes wrote the Meroitic language in a script of their own, which can be read aloud but is still only partly understood. Powerful queens, known by the title kandake, sometimes ruled in their own right. One of them, probably Amanirenas, fought Roman troops after the conquest of Egypt by the Roman Empire, and after a Roman force sacked Napata in the 20s BCE the two sides agreed a peace that favoured Kush. The kingdom weakened in the third and fourth centuries, and around 350 CE an army of the Kingdom of Aksum from the Ethiopian highlands campaigned on the Nile, by which time Meroë had largely ceased to function as a royal city.

By the sixth century three kingdoms had replaced Kush: Nobatia in the north, with its capital at Faras, Makuria, centred on Old Dongola, and Alodia in the south, with its capital at Soba near modern Khartoum. Missionaries from Egypt and from the Byzantine Empire converted their rulers to Christianity from about 540, and the Nubian church came under the Coptic patriarch of Alexandria. Nobatia and Makuria were merged into a single kingdom before about 700.

The Arabs of the Rashidun Caliphate, who conquered Egypt between 639 and 642, invaded Nubia twice, but Nubian archers famous for their accuracy drove them back, and after the siege of Dongola in 652 the two sides agreed the baqt. This unusual treaty, which lasted in some form for six centuries, exchanged an annual delivery of enslaved people from Nubia for grain, cloth and other goods from Egypt, and left Nubia independent. Makuria was at its strongest in the ninth to eleventh centuries, with churches, monasteries and cathedrals decorated with wall paintings, the finest of which were rescued from Faras before Lake Nasser flooded it in the 1960s. Old Nubian was written in an alphabet adapted from Coptic and Greek. Relations with Egypt were good under the Fatimid Caliphate, which recruited Nubian soldiers, but from the 1270s the Mamluk Sultanate repeatedly intervened in Makurian succession disputes. In 1317 the throne hall at Dongola was turned into a mosque, and Makuria fragmented in the late fourteenth century. Alodia lasted longer, until Soba fell around 1504.

From the fourteenth century Arab nomadic groups migrated south from Egypt in large numbers, intermarrying with Nubians and Beja and spreading Islam and the Arabic language along the Nile and across the plains. Sufi holy men founded religious lineages that remain influential. Many Sudanese groups trace genealogies to Arab ancestors, but the process was one of gradual mixing and conversion rather than replacement.

In 1504 Amara Dunqas, leader of the Funj, founded the sultanate of Sennar on the Blue Nile. Together with the Arab Abdallab, the Funj had overthrown the last of Alodia, and their state became a loose confederation of vassal chiefdoms stretching north to the Third Cataract. It stopped the Ottoman Empire, which held Suakin on the Red Sea and the far north of Nubia, from advancing up the Nile. Badi II in the seventeenth century built a standing army of slave soldiers, and the slave trade was central to the economy. From 1761 a family of viziers, the Hamaj, held real power, and the sultanate was in steep decline by 1800.

To the west, the Fur established the Sultanate of Darfur in the mid-seventeenth century under the Keira dynasty, which made El Fasher its capital in the 1790s. Darfur traded slaves, ivory and ostrich feathers to Egypt along the forty-day caravan route, the Darb al-Arbaʿin, and fought Sennar for control of Kordofan. In the Nuba Mountains the kingdom of Taqali kept its independence.

In 1820 and 1821 Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman governor who ruled Egypt as a virtually independent state, sent armies south in search of gold and of slaves to build a new army. Sennar surrendered without resistance. When his son Ismail was killed at Shendi in 1822, the reprisals were savage. The Egyptians founded Khartoum at the meeting of the Blue and White Niles as their capital, and Sudanese remember the six decades of rule that followed as the Turkiyya, after the Turkish-speaking officials who ran it.

Egyptian rule introduced heavy taxes and also pushed into the far south along the White Nile, where private merchant armies set up fortified trading stations and raided for ivory and slaves. The most powerful of these merchants, al-Zubayr Rahma Mansur, conquered Darfur in 1874. The Khedive Ismail employed European officers such as Samuel Baker and Charles Gordon, who served as governor-general from 1877 to 1879, to suppress the slave trade, which angered Sudanese merchants without ending the traffic.

In 1881 Muhammad Ahmad, a Sufi religious teacher from Dongola, declared himself the Mahdi, the redeemer expected at the end of time, and called for holy war against the Turco-Egyptian government. His movement drew on religious revival, resentment of taxes and the discontent of slave traders and Baggara cattle nomads. In 1883 his forces destroyed an Egyptian army led by the British officer William Hicks at Shaykan in Kordofan. Gordon was sent back to Khartoum to organise an evacuation, but he stayed, and on 26 January 1885 the Mahdists stormed the city and killed him, two days before a British relief force arrived.

The Mahdi died months later, and his successor, the Khalifa Abdallahi ibn Muhammad, ruled an Islamic state from Omdurman for thirteen years. He fought wars against Ethiopia, where the emperor Yohannes IV was killed at Gallabat in 1889, and an invasion of Egypt was defeated at Toshki the same year. A terrible famine struck in 1888 to 1892.

During the Scramble for Africa, Britain, which had occupied Egypt since 1882, decided to reconquer Sudan in Egypt's name, partly to keep France and others away from the upper Nile. Herbert Kitchener advanced up the river with a railway behind him, and on 2 September 1898 at Omdurman his machine guns and artillery killed around 10,000 Mahdist soldiers for the loss of a few dozen men; a young Winston Churchill rode in the cavalry charge. Weeks later Kitchener confronted a French expedition at Fashoda, which France gave up. The Khalifa was killed in 1899, and Darfur, restored as a sultanate under Ali Dinar, was annexed in 1916.

An agreement of 1899 made Sudan a Condominium, ruled jointly by Britain and Egypt but in practice by a British governor-general within the British Empire. The British built the huge cotton-growing Gezira Scheme, opened in 1925, and ruled the countryside through tribal chiefs and religious leaders. After the White Flag League rising of 1924 they expelled Egyptian troops. Under the Southern Policy of 1930 the three southern provinces were sealed off from the north, Arabic and Islam were discouraged there, and Christian missions ran what little education existed, deepening the divide between north and south.

Educated northerners organised the Graduates' Congress in 1938, and two camps formed: one, led by Ismail al-Azhari and linked to the Khatmiyya order, favoured union with Egypt, while the Umma party, backed by the Mahdi's descendants, wanted independence. After the Egyptian revolution of 1952, the new Egyptian leadership, including Gamal Abdel Nasser, agreed with Britain on self-determination. In August 1955 southern soldiers mutinied at Torit, fearing northern domination, and Sudan became an independent republic on 1 January 1956, early in the decolonisation of Africa.

Parliamentary government lasted only until 1958, when General Ibrahim Abboud seized power. A popular uprising in October 1964 restored civilian rule, but Colonel Jaafar Nimeiri took over in 1969. Meanwhile the southern rebellion that began in 1955 grew into the First Civil War, fought by the Anyanya guerrillas. Nimeiri ended it with the Addis Ababa Agreement of 1972, which gave the south regional autonomy.

Oil was found in the south in the late 1970s, and Nimeiri, seeking Islamist support, divided the southern region and in September 1983 imposed sharia law across the country. Southern army units mutinied, and John Garang founded the Sudan People's Liberation Movement and Army, launching a Second Civil War that lasted until 2005. Nimeiri was overthrown in 1985, and after a short elected government under Sadiq al-Mahdi, Brigadier Omar al-Bashir seized power on 30 June 1989 with the backing of Hassan al-Turabi's National Islamic Front. The regime hosted Osama bin Laden from 1991 to 1996 and was placed under United States sanctions. The war, fought with militias, bombing and famine as weapons, killed about two million people, most of them southern civilians, before the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of January 2005 gave the south autonomy and a vote on independence.

In 2003 rebels from Darfur's non-Arab Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa communities, the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement, took up arms against the government's neglect of the region. The government answered with air strikes and Arab militias known as the Janjaweed, who burned villages, killed and raped civilians and drove millions from their homes. United Nations estimates put the deaths from violence, hunger and disease at about 300,000 in the first years. The United States government described the killings as genocide in 2004, while a United Nations commission in 2005 found crimes against humanity but did not conclude that the government had genocidal intent. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for al-Bashir in 2009 for war crimes and crimes against humanity, adding genocide charges in 2010. He remains wanted by the court.

In January 2011 southerners voted almost unanimously for independence, and South Sudan seceded on 9 July 2011, taking most of Sudan's oil. Fighting resumed in South Kordofan and Blue Nile, and in 2013 the Janjaweed were reorganised as the Rapid Support Forces under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. Protests against rising bread prices began in December 2018 and grew into a national movement, and on 11 April 2019 the army removed al-Bashir. After security forces killed more than a hundred protesters at a sit-in in Khartoum in June 2019, the generals and the civilian opposition agreed to share power, with Abdalla Hamdok as prime minister. A peace agreement with several rebel groups was signed in Juba in 2020, but on 25 October 2021 the army chief, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and Hemedti staged a coup.

Disagreement over how and when the RSF would be merged into the regular army led to open war on 15 April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces under al-Burhan and the RSF under Hemedti. The RSF quickly seized most of Khartoum, and the army-led government moved to Port Sudan. In Darfur, RSF and allied Arab militias carried out mass killings of Masalit civilians in El Geneina in 2023, and in January 2025 the United States formally determined that the RSF and allied militias had committed genocide. The army, which has also been accused of indiscriminate air strikes on civilians, recaptured Wad Madani in January 2025 and Khartoum in March 2025, and the government returned to the capital in January 2026. The RSF set up a rival administration in 2025, and in October 2025 took El Fasher, the army's last stronghold in Darfur, after an eighteen-month siege; humanitarian workers and local officials reported mass executions of civilians after its fall. Fighting has since centred on Kordofan. By mid-2026 more than 14 million people had been displaced, including some 4.5 million refugees in Chad, Egypt, South Sudan and other neighbours, and the United Nations has confirmed famine in several areas. Foreign states have backed both sides, and the United Arab Emirates has been widely accused of arming the RSF, which it denies.