Kingdom of Makuria

The pupil-smiters

Drafted from Welsby, The Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia: Pagans, Christians and Muslims along the Middle Nile (2002)formation

The Arab armies took Egypt in 641 and kept going. They went west along the coast and reached the Atlantic; they went east and reached the Indus. They went south up the Nile twice and stopped.

The first expedition, in 642, was beaten. The second, under Abdallah ibn Sa'd in 651, besieged Dongola, brought up a catapult, damaged the cathedral, and made terms rather than take the city.

What stopped them, in every Arab account, was the archery. The Nubians are called rumat al-hadaq — the pupil-smiters — and the accounts describe an enemy that would not close, shot from a distance with astonishing accuracy, and specifically aimed at the eyes. One tradition has a hundred and fifty Arab soldiers blinded in a single engagement.

It was a levy, not a paid force — farmers with bows, called up — and it beat two Arab armies in ten years, which almost nothing else between Spain and the Punjab managed.

The baqt

The agreement that followed may be the most durable single treaty of the medieval world.

It was not tribute. Both sides gave. Nubia sent a fixed annual number of slaves to Egypt; Egypt sent back grain, cloth, wine and horses. Merchants had free passage in both directions. Muslims could travel in Nubia but not settle, and Nubia guaranteed the upkeep of a mosque at Dongola for Muslim travellers.

It held, with interruptions and quarrels, for about six hundred years.

Six hundred years is an extraordinary span for a negotiated arrangement. The Peace of Augsburg lasted sixty-three. The treaty between Hatti and Egypt after Kadesh — the earliest parity treaty that survives, in two languages — governed relations for about seventy. Rome's client kingship over the Nabataeans ran a hundred and sixty-nine. The baqt outlasted all of them several times over, on a frontier between two religions that were at war with each other almost everywhere else they met.

Why it worked

Because both parties wanted the same thing, which was for nothing to happen.

Egypt had no interest in occupying a narrow floodplain between deserts, five hundred kilometres of cataracts upstream, defended by archers. Nubia had no interest in provoking a power that could send an army whenever it decided the cost was worth paying. The baqt priced the arrangement and left it alone, and the frontier at the third cataract became one of the quietest in the medieval world.

That is a kind of achievement history is bad at recording, because it consists of things not happening. Six centuries of a quiet frontier produce no battles to name, no treaties to renegotiate and no chroniclers, and the result is that a kingdom which solved a problem everybody else on that religious border failed to solve is known mainly for the ten years in which it was fighting.

Three kingdoms

Christian Nubia was three kingdoms: Nobatia in the north, below the second cataract; Makuria in the middle, from Dongola; and Alodia in the south, beyond the confluence of the two Niles.

Makuria absorbed Nobatia in the seventh century and outlived Alodia. It is the one the baqt was made with, the one the Arab geographers wrote about, and the one whose archive was found — which is why it is the Nubian kingdom anybody can say anything about.

Upstream and much earlier there had been Kush, which ruled Egypt as its twenty-fifth dynasty and then held Meroë for a thousand years, writing a script that can be pronounced and not understood. Three centuries separate the end of Meroë from the first mention of these kingdoms, and nobody can fill them.

The waterwheel

Drafted from Ruffini, Medieval Nubia: A Social and Economic History (2012)expansion

Makuria absorbed Nobatia in the seventh century and became the only kingdom on five hundred kilometres of river. What let it be a kingdom rather than a string of villages was a machine.

The saqia — the ox-driven waterwheel, lifting Nile water into channels above the flood line — arrives in Nubia in this period and is what makes the middle Nile support a kingdom rather than a string of villages. A narrow floodplain between two deserts becomes farmable above the reach of the annual inundation, and Welsby's excavation record shows settlement expanding onto exactly the ground the saqia makes usable.

The second value is the river itself: everything moving between Egypt and the African interior passed through, and the baqt guaranteed merchants free passage in both directions, which is a customs regime written into a peace treaty.

What that buys

A narrow floodplain between two deserts is a set of separate oases. A floodplain with irrigation above the flood line is continuous farmland, and continuous farmland supports a tax base, a court, a cathedral and an army.

The other half of the revenue was the river itself. Everything moving between Egypt and the African interior went through, and the baqt guaranteed merchants free passage in both directions — a customs regime written into a peace treaty, which is a rare and very sensible thing to have done.

So the kingdom's economy was a waterwheel and a toll gate, and the treaty that kept the frontier quiet is what made the second of them worth anything.

A monetised economy

Drafted from Ruffini, Medieval Nubia: A Social and Economic History (2012)peak

What is known about Makuria from outside is a treaty, some archery, and a handful of embassies. What is known from inside was dug out of a fortress at Qasr Ibrim on a cliff above the Nile, and it is a different kingdom.

The Qasr Ibrim documents are Old Nubian, on parchment and paper, much of it still unpublished. They are land sales, loans, accounts, letters and legal instruments — the ordinary paperwork of people arranging their affairs — and Ruffini's book is the first attempt to build a society out of them.

What they show

A monetised economy. Prices in gold and in cloth measures, with exchange rates that track the wider medieval world's. Land bought and sold by named individuals with witnesses and dated formulae. Loans with terms. A legal vocabulary descending partly from Greco-Roman practice — the documents use Byzantine formulae five hundred years after Byzantium stopped ruling anything nearby — and partly from something local that has no obvious parallel.

Women appear as parties to transactions in their own right, buying and selling land.

That last is not an incidental detail. The Makurian throne passed to the king's sister's son, and a kingdom in which property runs through women in the conveyancing and the crown runs through women in the titulature is describing one arrangement twice.

The paintings

One more body of evidence, and it is the one that says what the kings claimed to be.

The cathedral at Faras, excavated ahead of the Aswan dam in the 1960s and now divided between Warsaw and Khartoum, had a hundred and sixty-nine wall paintings under the plaster. Bishops, saints, the Nativity, the three Hebrews in the furnace — and portraits of Nubian kings and queen mothers with Christ or the Virgin standing behind them, a hand on the royal shoulder.

That is a claim about where the right to rule came from, painted on a wall where the congregation could see it. And Ibn Selim al-Aswani, the Fatimid envoy who reached Dongola in the 970s, reports something no Christian monarch in Europe or Byzantium ever claimed: that the Makurian king could ordain priests.

Domes of red brick

Drafted from Armenian, The Churches and Monasteries of Egypt and Some Neighbouring Countries (1895)peak

A thirteenth-century Egyptian survey of Christian buildings has a Nubian chapter appended to it, and it is the fullest outside description of the kingdom that anybody wrote. The compiler does not say where he got it, and the material arrives mixed with folklore, which is a problem worth keeping in view rather than solving.

Dongola

City of Dongola. Here is the throne of the king. It is a large city on the banks of the blessed Nile, and contains many churches and large houses and wide streets. The king's house is lofty, with several domes built of red brick, and resembles the buildings in Al-'Iraq; and this novelty was introduced by Raphael, who was king of Nubia in the year 392 of the Arabs.

A dated architectural innovation, attributed to a named king, in the year 1002. That is a specific piece of information about a building programme in a kingdom whose own records are almost entirely lost, and it says something precise: the Makurian court took its palace architecture from Iraq, not from Egypt and not from Byzantium.

Downriver at Ibrim, the residence of the man the text calls the Lord of the Mountain, there was a walled town with a large and beautiful church of the Virgin, finely planned, with a high dome, and on the dome a large cross. Evetts's co-editor adds the observation that makes it matter: in Egypt, even in the nineteenth century, Copts ventured to put a cross on a cupola only in remote and desert places.

The search at the frontier

Near the cataract was a town where the kingdom's border control was conducted.

No one is allowed to pass by the inhabitants of this place, without being searched, even if he be a king; and if any one pushes on and refuses to be searched, he is put to death.

And then a sentence that sits awkwardly beside everything else known about this kingdom:

The people carry on their trade in kind; and selling and buying among them is done by exchange; thus they exchange woven stuffs and slaves; and all that is bought and sold is exchanged.

The contradiction

That is worth stopping on, because the documents the Nubians themselves left say something different.

The Old Nubian legal papers from Qasr Ibrim record sales, loans and land transfers valued in gold and in standard measures, with prices, witnesses and dates — the paperwork of people who had a unit of account and used it. An Egyptian writing about the same kingdom in the same century says they barter.

Both can be true at once, and the likeliest reading is that they are describing different things. A frontier town where foreign merchants are searched and then trade woven cloth against slaves is not the same institution as a landowner at Ibrim writing a deed valued in gold. The visitor saw the border; the documents come from the interior.

It is also possible that the compiler, who never says he went there, was simply told wrong. He also reports, on the same page, that the Nubians trace furrows in a field, lay the seed at the edge with a supply of beer beside it, walk away, and come back to find the sowing done and the beer drunk — and that they say this is performed by beings of a different order from ourselves.

How it is supposed to have started

The conversion story he gives belongs to the same register and is worth having for what it assumes.

The Nubians formerly worshipped the stars. The first of them converted was Bahriya, the king's sister's son, who was learned in the science of the sphere, and was wise and skilful; when he came over, all the blacks of Nubia followed him, and he built many churches and monasteries throughout the land, some away from the river and some on its banks.

An astronomer nephew of the king converts and the country follows. Nothing in the Byzantine or Coptic accounts of the sixth-century missions says anything of the kind. What the story preserves is what Nubians, or people who had talked to Nubians, were saying six hundred years later about how their church began: not that foreigners brought it, but that it was worked out by the cleverest man at court.

The sister's son

Drafted from Welsby, The Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia: Pagans, Christians and Muslims along the Middle Nile (2002)aside?What aside means

The Makurian throne passed to the king's sister's son.

It is in the Arabic accounts, it is in the Nubian material, and it is visible in the way the royal women are titled: the king's mother and the king's sister hold formal position, carry their own styles, and appear in the wall paintings at Faras standing beside the kings under the protection of the Virgin.

Why a kingdom would do that

Al-Bakri, writing about Ghana in the eleventh century, gives the reason he was given by people who practised it, and it is disarmingly practical: a man can be certain that his sister's child is of his own blood, and cannot be certain of his wife's.

That is a serious answer to a real problem. Every succession system has to decide what it is actually tracking, and a system that tracks descent through women is tracking something observable. The cost is that a king does not hand the throne to his own son, which requires a court to accept that the ruler's children are not the ruler's heirs — an arrangement most dynasties find intolerable and some manage for centuries.

Where else it turns up

Four times, on three continents, over about two and a half thousand years, with no possibility of contact between the earliest case and the others.

Elam, in the third and second millennia BC, where the throne passed from brother to brother and then to a sister's son.

Ghana, before 1068, where al-Bakri states the rule outright and supplies the reasoning above.

Makuria, from the seventh century to the fourteenth.

Mali, in 1352, where Ibn Battuta records inheritance through the sister's son as a general practice and disapproves of it at some length, and where the royal succession shows the same mixed shape.

And later, in the Akan forest, the Asante, whose ruler succeeded through the matriclan with the queen mother nominating from the eligible line and a council of chiefs confirming or refusing — the best-documented version of the arrangement anywhere, because it survived into a period when people wrote it down in detail.

What it did not mean

It did not mean the succession was unstable.

That is worth separating out, because an arrangement this unfamiliar invites the assumption that it must have been fragile. Makuria's rule was known, followed, and produced a kingdom that lasted seven hundred years on a frontier with the Islamic world, which is longer than almost any European dynasty of the same period managed with primogeniture.

What it did eventually mean was the opposite of instability, and much worse. Arab men married Nubian women, and under Nubian rules their sons were Nubian heirs — so the ruling families of the kingdom became Muslim by inheritance, generation by generation, without a single battle being fought about it. The rule that had kept the throne secure for seven centuries is one of the mechanisms by which the kingdom stopped being Christian.

Old Nubian

Drafted from Ruffini, Medieval Nubia: A Social and Economic History (2012)aside?What aside means

The Nubians took the Coptic alphabet — Greek letters, with a few signs from demotic Egyptian, used for writing the Egyptian language — and added three more letters borrowed from Meroitic, the script of the kingdom that had ruled this stretch of river before them and whose language is still undeciphered.

The three additions cover sounds Coptic had no signs for. The result writes Old Nubian, a Nilo-Saharan language that neither Greek nor Coptic nor Meroitic had ever been used for.

That is a rarer act than borrowing a script. Most peoples who take up somebody else's writing take it as it stands and make do with the fit; the Hittites wrote their language in Mesopotamian cuneiform, the Urartians in Assyrian cuneiform, and the Slavs in letters adapted from Greek at Preslav. Nubia's scribes changed the system instead of accommodating themselves to it, and they raided a third, dying script to do it.

Aksum, four hundred miles east across the desert, did the same kind of thing in the same centuries, taking a South Arabian consonantal alphabet and rebuilding it into a syllabary with marked vowels. Two places on one continent where a writing system was reworked rather than accepted as it came, in the same period, and as far as anybody can tell neither knew what the other was doing.

What it was used for

Ordinary business, which is the unusual part.

Most surviving early scripts are known from liturgy, monumental inscription or royal display. The Old Nubian corpus is a fortress archive: land sales, loans, accounts and letters — people writing to each other about money. Ruffini's book is built on it, and what it shows is a monetised economy with exchange rates tied to the wider world.

A script invented for a language nobody else wrote, used mainly for conveyancing, in a kingdom whose international reputation rested on archery and a treaty.

And when it stopped

With the kingdom, more or less. Old Nubian documents thin out through the fourteenth century, and the language was eventually displaced by Arabic in the Nile valley — though Nubian languages are still spoken there.

The script had no children. Nobody adapted it further, nobody carried it anywhere, and when it stopped being written the three Meroitic letters went out of use for good, having outlived the kingdom that invented them by more than a thousand years.

Ninety years

Drafted from Welsby, The Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia: Pagans, Christians and Muslims along the Middle Nile (2002)contraction

In 1276 a Mamluk expedition beat the Nubian army, took Dongola, and installed a king who agreed to pay tribute. That is the end of the baqt, which had been an exchange between two parties, and the beginning of something else.

From Cairo it was one item of business among several. Baybars made the Nubian kingdoms tributary and took the Red Sea ports in the same years he was negotiating with the Golden Horde and with Byzantium over the straits, and the Mamluk chronicles give it a clause.

From Dongola it was the end of a six-hundred-year arrangement.

Ninety years

What followed was not a conquest and was worse.

Mamluk expeditions came repeatedly, installing and deposing kings; Makurian claimants went to Cairo to be backed; the succession through the sister's son was fought over by candidates with Egyptian sponsors. In 1317 the audience hall of the royal palace at Dongola was converted into a mosque and an inscription was set up recording it — the building and the inscription both survive — and there was a Muslim on the Makurian throne.

Underneath that, two slower things. Arab groups had been moving into the Nile valley and the grasslands beside it for generations, marrying into local families; and because Makurian descent ran through the mother, the sons of Arab fathers and Nubian mothers were Nubian heirs. The rule that had kept the throne secure for seven centuries is one of the mechanisms by which the kingdom's ruling class became Muslim without anybody conquering it.

The church failed for a reason of its own. Nubian bishops were consecrated in Alexandria, and the Coptic patriarchate under Mamluk rule was under pressure and increasingly unable to supply them. The same connection had kept Ethiopian Christianity alive for a thousand years and would keep it alive for six hundred more; here is where it broke.

A kingdom losing its clergy from one direction and its ruling class from the other has perhaps two generations left, and it had about three.

1365

Drafted from Welsby, The Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia: Pagans, Christians and Muslims along the Middle Nile (2002)end

In 1365 the Makurian court left Dongola for Gebel Adda, two hundred and fifty kilometres downstream, and that is where the kingdom's record stops.

There is no last battle. There is no last king anybody can name with confidence and no account of the move. What there is, is a court that had sat at Dongola for seven hundred years abandoning it for a fortress much further north, closer to Egypt and further from the country it had governed — which is what a government does when it has stopped being able to hold the middle of its own territory and would rather be near the border it can still be protected on.

Nobody conquered it

That needs saying because the alternative is the assumption a reader will otherwise make.

Egypt never annexed Makuria and never administered the middle Nile. There was no campaign of conquest, no treaty of cession, no governor appointed. What there was was ninety years of intervention by a neighbour that mostly wanted the frontier quiet, a demographic transformation running underneath it that no army could have produced, and a church that ran out of bishops.

The Mamluks are the proximate cause and they are not a sufficient one. They installed and deposed kings, backed claimants and converted a palace hall into a mosque; they did not take the country, because taking the country was never worth what it would have cost, which had been the whole basis of the six-hundred-year peace.

Seven hundred and fourteen years

Makuria held a stretch of river between two deserts from the sixth century to the fourteenth. In that time it beat two Arab armies, negotiated a treaty that outlasted every other agreement of the medieval world, built an irrigated economy on a waterwheel, ran a monetised land market with written contracts, invented a script for its own language, painted a cathedral at Faras with a hundred and sixty-nine images, and produced kings who could ordain priests.

Almost none of that was known before the 1960s, when the Aswan dam forced the excavation of a stretch of Nubia that was about to be flooded, and archaeologists dug the Faras cathedral out from under a mound of sand and found the paintings intact underneath the plaster.

The kingdom's own archive came out of a cliff fortress at Qasr Ibrim, which is now an island in the reservoir.

The Greek churches

Drafted from Burckhardt, Travels in Nubia (1819)afterlife

In 1813 John Lewis Burckhardt went up the Nubian Nile disguised as a poor Syrian trader, on very little money, writing down the stages and the prices. He passed through the middle of what had been this kingdom, and he did not know it.

He mentions the remains four or five times, always in passing, always on his way to somewhere else, and the mentions are among the better evidence for how much of it there had been.

At Ibrim — the cliff fortress the kingdom's own archive would eventually be dug out of — he found inside the walls the remains of two public buildings, probably Greek churches, built in the same neat cut stone as the ancient wall, which he took for late Roman work. Five and a half hours out of another stage he noted, on the hills, the ruins of several Greek churches. That is the entire entry. He does not stop.

And at Meharraka he came on an Egyptian temple with a portico of fourteen columns, its southern wall lying on the ground in layers as though it had gone over all at once. On the walls were several paintings of Greek saints, and Greek inscriptions written in red ink, of which he could clearly read one.

What he was looking at

Not Greek churches. Nubian ones.

Makuria built in a Byzantine idiom because its church came from Alexandria and its books were in Greek, and to a traveller in 1813 the results looked Greek. What Burckhardt rode past was the parish architecture of a Christian civilisation that had held that river for seven hundred years and had been gone for four hundred and fifty — standing on the hills in numbers casual enough that he lists them the way one lists milestones, without curiosity, because he had no reason to think they were anything but a provincial echo of Byzantium.

The temple at Meharraka is the whole history of the middle Nile in one building. Pharaonic columns; a Nubian congregation's saints painted over them; Greek graffiti in red ink; derelict in a Muslim country; recorded by a Swiss Protestant travelling as a Muslim, who was interested in none of it.

What was under the sand

The kingdom was recovered, almost entirely, in about fifteen years, and only because it was about to be drowned.

The Aswan High Dam was going to flood two hundred and fifty miles of the Nile valley, and in the 1960s an international salvage campaign went in ahead of the water. At Faras a Polish team dug into a mound and found a cathedral, and under the plaster of its walls a hundred and sixty-nine paintings — bishops named in Greek and Old Nubian, saints, the three Hebrews in the furnace, and Nubian kings and queen mothers with Christ standing behind them and a hand on the royal shoulder. The paintings were lifted and divided between Warsaw and Khartoum.

At Qasr Ibrim, which stood high enough to become an island in the reservoir rather than disappear under it, excavators found the kingdom's paperwork: land sales, loans, accounts and private letters in Old Nubian, on parchment and paper, much of it still unpublished.

Everything anybody knows about how Makuria actually worked — the money, the contracts, the women buying land, the exchange rates — came out of that fortress, and it came out because a dam was being built.

The order of the recovery

It is worth stating the sequence plainly, because it is unusual.

A kingdom that beat two Arab armies, made a treaty that lasted six centuries, and wrote its own language in its own script was, until the middle of the twentieth century, a footnote in Arabic geography and a scatter of ruins that a passing European catalogued as Greek. Then a reservoir forced the excavation, and the cathedral and the archive came out of the ground in a rush, a decade before the water.

Faras itself is under the lake now.