Page 83 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

1384 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

NUBIA

Egypt
Alodia, the Nubian kingdom about which we know
Saudi Arabia
the least, was generally reckoned the more powerful of the
0 400 mi
two states, and it was certainly the more populous and
0 400 km
Nubia
probably the wealthier of the two.Travelers to Soba, the
Red Sea
capital city, describe a wealthy court and a thriving urban
Eritrea Yemen
sector with important trade links to the Red Sea.Among
Sudan the notable products of country in its heyday was gold,
Djibouti
mined in the southeastern borderlands of the kingdom,
near the edges of the Ethiopian highlands. While the
Ethiopia
northern kingdom ruled primarily over people of Nubian
Somalia language and culture, Alodia was very much a multi-
N ethnic state, with a variety of other peoples besides Nub-
Uganda Kenya Indian ians making up its population, especially in most of the
peripheral areas of the state. Alodia was too far south to
Ocean
be involved in conflicts with Egypt, but we suspect that
Rwanda
its kings, like those of Makuria, must have had very im-
portant relations with the Beja, whose lands lay between
The Muslim conquest of Egypt (639–641 CE) and the them and the Red Sea entrepots. The existence in the
subsequent Muslim invasions of northern Nubian areas tenth and eleventh centuries of several small, nominally
in 642 and 652 CE mark a major transition in the history Christian principalities among the Beja surely reflects the
of the Nubian states. Makuria effectively turned back political and material preeminence of Nubian influences.
both invasions, and the treaty of peace that ended hos-
tilities established at first a regular annual, and then, after Decline of the
835 CE, a triennial exchange of goods between Makuria Nubian Kingdoms
and the governments of Egypt that lasted until the later From the twelfth century two new factors began to shift
thirteenth century. Muslim interpretations in much later the balance of power away from the Nubian kingdoms.
times sought to portray the relationship as a tributary The factor of greatest long-term effect was the emergence
one. But the contemporary evidence shows this to have and spread of a new ethnic element, Bedouin Arabs, who
been a treaty among equals. Over the next several cen- infiltrated southward from Egypt through the areas east
turies, although there were a number of outbreaks of war of Nile. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries these
between the Makurians and their northern neighbors, the Arabs began increasingly to displace or absorb the ear-
Nubian states appear generally to have prospered. In the lier Nubian and related Daju pastoral peoples of the
tenth century, Nubian kings in fact intervened in upper desert steppes along the southern Sahara fringes, spread-
Egypt on behalf of their Coptic Christian coreligionists ing a competing religion, Islam, as well a new ethnicity,
and ruled southern Egypt for several decades. It is clear language, and economy over large areas.The key to their
that through much of this period the Makurian state and success may have been that they introduced the first full-
its merchant class continued to be prosperous partici- fledged camel nomadism into the most marginal areas,
pants in trade northward to Egypt. From the ninth before then precariously dependent on goat and sheep
through the twelfth centuries its kings also undertook to raising.Another complicating factor in the thirteenth and
control overland access eastward to the expanding com- fourteenth centuries was the disappearance of the earlier
merce of the Red Sea, launching military campaigns when Beja principalities of the Red Sea hills and in their place
necessary to maintain a loose hegemony over the no- the rise of a new confederation of Beja clans, the
madic Beja inhabitants of the intervening areas. Hadariba, at the same time as Islam increasingly began