page_title: Alodia
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Alodia / History / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: Error in the file title: this image does NOT present Badi VII, the king of Sennar, but a provincial king in Fazughli.
context_page_description: Alodia, also known as Alwa, was a medieval Nubian kingdom in what is now central and southern Sudan. Its capital was the city of Soba, located near modern-day Khartoum at the confluence of the Blue and White Nile rivers.
  Founded sometime after the ancient kingdom of Kush fell, in around 350 AD, Alodia is first mentioned in historical records in 569. It was the last of the three Nubian kingdoms to convert to Christianity in 580, following Nobadia and Makuria. It possibly reached its peak during the 9th–12th centuries when records show that it exceeded its northern neighbor, Makuria, with which it maintained close dynastic ties, in size, military power and economic prosperity. Being a large, multicultural state, Alodia was administered by a powerful king and provincial governors appointed by him. The capital Soba, described as a town of "extensive dwellings and churches full of gold and gardens", prospered as a trading hub. Goods arrived from Makuria, the Middle East, western Africa, India and even China. Literacy in both Nubian and Greek flourished.
context_section_description: Historian Jay Spaulding proposes that the fall of Soba was not necessarily the end of Alodia. According to the Jewish traveler David Reubeni, who visited the country in 1523, there was still a "kingdom of Soba" on the eastern bank of the Blue Nile, although he explicitly noted Soba itself was in ruins. This matches the oral traditions from the Upper Blue Nile, which claim that Alodia survived Soba's fall and still existed along the Blue Nile. It had gradually retreated to the mountains of Fazughli in the Ethiopian-Sudanese borderlands, forming the kingdom of Fazughli. Recent excavations in western Ethiopia seem to confirm the theory of an Alodian migration. The Funj eventually conquered Fazughli in 1685 and its population, known as Hamaj, became a fundamental part of Sennar, eventually seizing power in 1761–1762. As recently as 1930 Hamaj villagers in the southern Gezira would swear by "Soba the home of my grandfathers and grandmothers which can make the stone float and the cotton ball sink".
  In 1504–1505 the Funj founded the Funj sultanate, incorporating Abdallah Jammah's domain, which, according to some traditions, happened after a battle where Amara Dunqas defeated him. The Funj maintained some medieval Nubian customs like the wearing of crowns with features resembling bovine horns, called taqiya umm qarnein, the shaving of the head of a king upon his coronation, and, according to Jay Spaulding, the custom of raising princes separately from their mothers, under strict confinement.
  The aftermath of Alodia's fall saw extensive Arabization, with the Nubians embracing the tribal system of the Arab migrants. Those living along the Nile between al Dabbah in the north and the confluence of the two Niles in the south were subsumed into the Ja'alin tribe. To the east, west and south of the Ja'alin the country was now dominated by tribes claiming a Juhaynah ancestry. In the area around Soba, the tribal Abdallab identity prevailed. The Nubian language was spoken in central Sudan until the 19th century, when it was replaced by Arabic. Sudanese Arabic preserves many words of Nubian origin, and Nubian place names can be found as far south as the Blue Nile state.
  The fate of Christianity in the region remains largely unknown. The church institutions would have collapsed together with the fall of the kingdom, resulting in the decline of the Christian faith and the rise of Islam in its stead. Islamized groups from northern Nubia began to proselytize the Gezira. As early as 1523 King Amara Dunqas, who was initially a Pagan or nominal Christian, was recorded to be Muslim. Nevertheless, in the 16th century large portions of the Nubians still regarded themselves as Christians. A traveler who visited Nubia around 1500 confirms this, while also saying that the Nubians were so lacking in Christian instruction they had no knowledge of the faith. In 1520 Nubian ambassadors reached Ethiopia and petitioned the Emperor for priests. They claimed that no more priests could reach Nubia because of the wars between Muslims, leading to a decline of Christianity in their land. In the first half of the 17th century, a prophecy made by the Sudanese Sheikh Idris Wad al-Arbab mentioned a church in the Nuba Mountains. As late as the early 1770s there was said to be a Christian princedom in the Ethiopian-Sudanese border area, called Shaira. Apotropaic rituals stemming from Christian practices outlived the conversion to Islam. As late as the 20th century several practices of undoubtedly Christian origin were "common, though of course not universal, in Omdurman, the Gezira and Kordofan", usually revolving around the application of crosses on humans and objects.
  Soba, which remained inhabited until at least the early 17th century, served, among many other ruined Alodian sites, as a steady supply of bricks and stones for nearby Qubba shrines, dedicated to Sufi holy men. During the early 19th century many of the remaining bricks in Soba were plundered for the construction of Khartoum, the new capital of Turkish Sudan.
caption: Early 19th century Funj manjil ("kinglet") of Fazughli as depicted by Frédéric Cailliaud. On his head he wears a taqiya umm qarnein.
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