History of Sudan

Arachaeological sites on the Nile and above Aswan confirm human habitation in Sudan for over 60,000 years. Prehistoric burials show northern Sudan has the earliest warfare dating from the twelfth millennium B.C. Hunting and fishing along the Nile were popular past times. Herding cattle and gathering grain were also popular. Nagadan Upper Egypt as well as Nubia were preydnastic periods that conquered and unified the whole Nile Valley.

The earliest historical records come from Egyptian sources. Egypt exerted a profound religious and cultural influence on the Kushite people. Grain was carried to Kush and returned to Aswan with hides, carnelian (a stone in jewelry and arrowheads) for shipment down the river.

Egypt established political control over Kush and destroyed forts along the Nile River in 1720 B.C. Egyptian power revived in the years 1570-1100 B.C. Egyptian became the most widely used language in every day activities. Egyptian priests and military personal, merchants, and artisans all settled in the Egyptian region.

By the eleventh century BC, the authority of the New Kingdom dynasties had diminished, allowing divided rule in Egypt, and ending Egyptian control of Kush. Kush emerged as an independent region ruled by Napata by a line of monarchs who were quite aggressive.

Another form of the Turkish population were the Ottomans in 1820-1821. The northern part of Suan was unified and conquered by them. They looked to open new markets and sources of natural resources. The pestilential swamps of Sudan disallowed expansion into the deeper south of the country. Although Egypt claimed present Sudan during most of the nineteenth century, and established a province known as Equatoria in southern Sudan to further this aim, it was unable to establish effective control over the area. This remained an area of fragmented tribes subject to frequent attacks by slave raiders. In the later years of the Turkiyah, the British missionaries traveled from what is now modern day Kenya in to the Sudd to convert the local tribes to Christianity. European initiatives in the 1870s against the slave trade, caused an economic crisis in southern Sudan, precipitating the rise of Mahdist forces.