Abstract
The Middle Nile Valley, from Aswan to south of Khartoum, was dominated in the Middle Ages by the Nubian kingdoms that succeeded the fall of Meroe in the 4th century AD. The Nubians, who came from Kordofan, substituted their elites for those of the Meroitic state. In the middle of the 6th century, the three kingdoms of Nobadia in the north, Makouria in the center and Alwa in the south successively converted to Christianity. In the following century, the Makourite kingdom, which had just annexed Nobadia, faced the advance of Muslim conquerors from recently conquered Egypt. But the Nubians resisted, and a peace treaty with reciprocal clauses was signed in 652. For almost seven centuries, Nubia was a singular territory on the bangs of Islam, belonging neither to the "House of Islam" nor to the "House of War" (Dar Al-Harb). Its history is still being written in dotted lines, since the main sources are a few passages from Arab-Persian chroniclers (Ibn Hawqal, Al-Uswani, etc.) and archaeological excavations at the main sites of Qasr Ibrim, Faras, Old Dongola (capital of Makouria), Banganarti and Soba (capital of the Alwa kingdom). The meagre literature in Old Nubian, written in Coptic script, consists mainly of pious texts, letters and legal documents, which provide little information on the history of the region. On the eastern margins, the Bedja are the main ethnic group. Essentially nomadic, they quickly converted to Islam and formed a link between Egypt and Nubia. When Makuria faltered under the blows of the Mamluks, it was a prince of Bedja descent whom the latter placed on the throne in 1315. Little is known about the western regions of Sudan, due to a lack of written sources and insufficient archaeological work. Excavations carried out by the University of Lille on the border between Kordofan and Darfur show an urbanized society, but with no links to the Nile kingdoms. In Darfur and Ouaddaï, two ethnic groups, the Zaghawas in the north and the Dadjos in the south, shared the country until the 14th century. Incursions by the Kanem kingdom from the west and invasions by Arabized tribes destroyed the Zaghawa kingdom. In the south, the Dadjos were defeated by a new ethnic group, the Tounjours, who were none other than Christian settlers from Makouria, as a recent linguistic study by the author has shown. In the mid-sixteenth century, they were ousted from power by the Fur ethnic group, who gave their name to Darfur and established a Muslim sultanate that lasted until the twentieth century.
