Page 84 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

nubians 1385
nubians 1385

to take hold among them. Controlling the crucial trade territories of Alodia and the southern part of Makuria
routes between the Red Sea and the old Alodia heart- was united into a new state, the Funj kingdom, with its
land, the Hadariba appear to have siphoned away a capital at Sinnar, 200 kilometers south of the now ruined
growing portion of the wealth of the trade. By as early as city of Soba. The new rulers opted for Islam as the reli-
the mid-1200s the Alodia kingdom, which most strongly gion best able to unite their populations and consolidate
faced these new pressures, may have begun to break up their trade relations with the Red Sea countries and
into a number of independent principalities. Egypt. Nubian languages continued to be spoken, espe-
The second factor in the decline of independent Nubia cially in the old territories of Makuria. But Arabic became
was political.The new Ayyubid rulers of twelfth-century the language of commerce and, in time, of administra-
Egypt, and after them the Mamluks, instituted policies of tion, in the Funj kingdom, and gradually between 1500
more active engagement with the regions to the south. and 1800 most of the southern Nubians began to adopt
These pressures came to a head in the latter half of the Arabic as their first language and increasingly to think of
thirteenth century and in the early fourteenth century, as themselves as Arabs. The same trends came gradually
aspiring Christian Nubian rulers undermined their own also to affect the self-perceptions of other peoples includ-
political base by seeking help from Muslims in their inter- ed in the originally multi-ethnic Funj kingdom.
nal struggles for political advantage. In 1324 a new Mus-
Christopher Ehret
lim kingdom of Makuria took power at Dongola.The old
Nobadian regions to the north broke away and may have See also Egypt, Ancient; Meroë
had Christian rulers of their own for several decades
longer, as did a number of the small independent Nub-
Further Reading
ian principalities to the south, left over from the breakup
Bechhaus-Gerst, M. (1996). Sprachwandel durch Sprachkontakt am
of Alodia. Beispiel des Nubischen im Niltal (Language Change through Lan-
By the beginning of the sixteenth century, however, the guage Contact in the Case of the Nubian Languages of the Nile Val-
ley). Cologne, Germany: Köppe Verlag.
political and cultural worlds of the Nubians had changed
Welsby, D. (2002). The Medieval kingdoms of Nubia. London: The
irretrievably. In 1504 the region encompassing the former British Museum Press.