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History of Sudan: Nubia, Sennar and Darfur in the Accounts of Early Travellers

To the ancient world, Sudan was the land of Kush, which the Greeks called Ethiopia. Around 450 BC Herodotus travelled up the Nile as far as Elephantine and knew Meroë only by hearsay, as a distant city ruled by black kings. Around AD 61 two centurions sent by Nero pushed beyond Meroë and turned back before the endless swamps of the White Nile; Seneca and Pliny preserve their report. Yet the pyramids of Napata and Meroë remained almost unknown in Europe for eighteen centuries.

In the sixth century the Nubian kingdoms of Nobadia, Makuria and Alodia became Christian, and in 652 a treaty with Arab Egypt, the baqt, gave them some six hundred years of uneasy peace. Around 970 the Fatimid envoy Ibn Sulaym al-Aswani described Dongola, its churches and its kings, in a text that survives through the historians of Cairo. Islam spread slowly, and in 1504 the Funj sultanate of Sennar arose on the Blue Nile.

The first Europeans came by way of Ethiopia. The Jewish traveller David Reubeni crossed Sennar around 1523. In 1699 the French physician Charles-Jacques Poncet stopped there on his way to treat the Ethiopian emperor; the Franciscan Theodor Krump stayed in 1701, and Louis XIV's envoy Lenoir du Roule was murdered there in 1705. In 1772 the Scot James Bruce, returning from Abyssinia, described the Funj court in its decline. William George Browne reached Darfur with a caravan in 1793 and was held there for nearly three years.

The Egyptian conquest of 1820 and 1821, led by Ismail, son of the viceroy, opened the country. Frédéric Cailliaud followed the army and reached the pyramids of Meroë in 1821, which Louis Linant de Bellefonds drew that same year. Khartoum grew at the meeting of the two Niles; Ferdinand Werne sailed up the White Nile in 1840 with Selim Bimbashi's flotilla, and Richard Lepsius recorded the Nubian monuments in 1844. Sudan also told its own story: the Tunisian Muhammad al-Tunisi, who lived in Darfur from 1803 to 1811, wrote a full account of it, and scholars of Sennar compiled the Funj chronicle and Wad Dayf Allah's lives of holy men.

The Mahdist rising, the fall of Khartoum in 1885 and the death of Gordon closed the century. Two captives at Omdurman, the priest Joseph Ohrwalder and the officer Rudolf Slatin, published their memoirs before the battle of Omdurman in 1898.

This collection brings together our editions of eyewitness accounts and a directory of other early narratives about Sudan.

Our titles on this subject

Thirty Years on the Seas of the Indies

Alexander Hamilton, 1688-1723

A Scottish merchant spends thirty-five years crossing the Indian Ocean, from the Cape to Basra and Bombay. Shipwrecks, trading posts, the court of the Great Mughal: up to the reckless war Aurangzeb wages against the English Com...

Around 1700 the western Indian Ocean was changing masters: the Omanis of Muscat drove the Portuguese from the Swahili coast, Safavid Persia collapsed before the Afghans, and the English Company risked its first war against Aurangzeb. Hamilton, an independent trader whom the companies regarded as an interloper, watched these upheavals from the coffee ports, the Persian Gulf and Gujarat. Free of any official tie, his testimony lights up the merchant side of a world being reshaped.

Volumes I II III

Travels in Nubia

Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, 1813-1814

After Nubia, this Swiss traveller disguises himself as a pilgrim to enter Mecca and Medina.

In 1813, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt travels alone up the Nile from Aswan to the Mahass, at the gates of Dongola, then comes back down by the temples of the western bank. His journal is the first detailed, day-by-day survey of Nubia as it was before the Egyptian conquest of 1820: villages, Kashefs, Mameluke refugees, Nubians and nomads. In it he also reports the sand-buried colossi of Abu Simbel, opened four years later by Belzoni.

Volumes I II III

Beyond the Second Cataract

George Waddington and Barnard Hanbury, 1820-1821

Two Cambridge antiquaries follow an invading army up the Nile as far as Meroë.

In 1820 Ismail Pasha, son of Muhammad Ali, launched the Egyptian army on the conquest of Nubia and the Sudan. Two young Englishmen, George Waddington and Barnard Hanbury, followed it beyond the Second Cataract as far as the camp at Jebel Barkal. Their journal, published in London in 1822, bears witness to this war, to the defeated Shaigiya and the Nubian kings, and describes the temples and pyramids of ancient Napata, which they were among the first Europeans to measure.

Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme

Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.

Marco Polo, Le Devisement du monde (1298)

On his way back from China, the Venetian sails along the Coromandel coast, stops at the tomb of Saint Thomas, describes the pearl fisheries, the naked kings covered in jewels, the widow-burning pyres and the kingdom of Ceylon with its sacred peak. All the marvels that Hamilton finds diminished or disputed, Marco Polo sees in their full brilliance, four centuries earlier. To read one after the other is to follow the slow transformation of the same shore, from medieval splendors to the fortified trading posts of the age of the companies.
Ibn Battuta, Voyages (1325-1354)

Three centuries before Hamilton, the great Moroccan traveler already sails along the Swahili coast of Mombasa and Kilwa, journeys up the Persian Gulf, reaches India, and serves the Sultan of Delhi. He sees these same Muslim ports at the height of their prosperity, before the Portuguese extort them and the Arabs of Muscat retake a few of them. His testimony provides the depth of time that the captain's account, hurried along by trade, lacks.
Ludovico di Varthema, Itinéraire (1510)

A Bolognese adventurer of the early sixteenth century, Varthema is one of the first Europeans to visit Mecca disguised as a pilgrim, then to sail down the Red Sea to Aden and reach India. He travels the Arabian coast that Hamilton will follow two centuries later, stops at the same coffee ports, and describes the same sheikhs greedy for tribute. His picaresque account illuminates, in advance, the Arab world that the captain will later observe with the colder eye of a merchant.
Antonio Pigafetta, Relation du premier voyage autour du monde (1519-1522)

Two centuries before Hamilton, the gentleman of Vicenza embarks with Magellan and survives the expedition that first crosses the Pacific. He touches at the Philippines, where the captain will meet his death, reaches Borneo and its splendid court, loads cloves from the Moluccas and sails along Timor, these same islands the Scottish merchant will visit two hundred years later. His wonder-struck journal shows the spice archipelago at the very moment Europe discovers it, when Hamilton will see nothing of it but the trading posts the companies fight over. To read one after the other is to follow the passage from the dream of spices to their ordinary trade.
Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault, Histoire de l'expédition chrétienne au royaume de la Chine (1615)

The Jesuit Ricci, who entered China at the end of the sixteenth century, learns the language and the classics, wins the friendship of the scholars and makes his way to Peking. His account, set down by Trigault, reveals to Europe a refined civilization that the captain, a century later, will encounter only through the customs gate at Canton. Where Hamilton rages against the Hoppo and his extortions, Ricci describes the court from within, the examination of the mandarins and the wisdom of Confucius, and lends to the China of the merchants a learned depth that the trader's eye alone lacks.
Tomé Pires, Suma oriental (c. 1515)

A Portuguese apothecary and agent, Pires writes around 1515, from Malacca itself, the most complete description of the great Asian trade of his time, before dying a prisoner in China. He lists the cargoes, the routes and the nations that cross paths at the strait, that same chokepoint where Hamilton ends his second volume. His meticulous inventory shows Malacca at the height of its mercantile fortune, when the Scottish captain will see in it no more than a Dutch colony, still rich but fallen from its former glory.
Duarte Barbosa, Le Livre de Duarte Barbosa (c. 1516)

A Portuguese factor of the early sixteenth century, Barbosa describes the Indian Ocean at the moment his nation holds its keys, two centuries before Hamilton observes its decline. Cambay, Diu, Hormuz, Mombasa, Mozambique: every stronghold the Scottish captain finds fortified, besieged, or lost, Barbosa sees new, in the hands of the Crown of Portugal. Reading the two in succession is to measure the slow tide that draws Lusitanian power back from these shores.
Nicolas Sanson and the Cartographers of the Grand Siècle (1650-1700)

Before modern surveys, the Indian Ocean can be read on the maps of the king's geographers, where the coastlines Hamilton calls so poorly rendered gradually take shape. Following these maps, from the Ethiopic Sea to the mouths of the Indus, helps explain why the captain constantly complains of shoals and rocks missing from the charts: he sails through a world still only half guessed at, one that others, after him, would finish drawing.
Johan Nieuhof, L'Ambassade de la Compagnie orientale des Provinces-Unies vers l'empereur de la Chine (1665)

A member of the first great Dutch embassy to Peking, in the middle of the seventeenth century, Nieuhof travels up China from Canton to the capital and brings back hundreds of drawings that fix, for a long time to come, Europe's image of the country. He sees, fifty years before Hamilton, the same rivers, the same bridges and the same cities, but from the side of the pleading embassy rather than the deceived merchant. His book sheds light on the ceremony and the haughtiness of the imperial administration that the captain will suffer in his turn, without ever penetrating its ways.
Arnoldus Montanus, Ambassades mémorables vers les empereurs du Japon (1669)

A Dutch compiler of the seventeenth century, Montanus gathers the accounts of the Company's envoys to the Japan of the shoguns, that country closed upon itself which only the Dutch may still approach, through the narrow window of Nagasaki. His book, alive with processions and marvels, shows the closed empire that Hamilton only glimpses from afar, and tells in full the suppression of Christianity and the cunning of the merchants that the captain sums up in a few forceful pages. It is the great European picture of forbidden Japan, of which Hamilton gives only the sketch.
Gemelli Careri, Voyage autour du monde (1699-1700)

At the end of the seventeenth century, the Neapolitan jurist travels around the world at his own expense. He crosses China, goes up to Peking, contemplates the Great Wall, then embarks at Manila on the galleon that links the Philippines to America. Almost a contemporary of Hamilton, he sails exactly the seas of this third volume, but as a free-roaming man of curiosity rather than a merchant. His testimony confirms, corrects or colors many a scene of the captain's, from the court of Canton to the streets of Manila, and gives a learned traveling companion to the crossing of the Malay Archipelago and the China seas.
James Bruce, Voyage aux sources du Nil (1790)

Half a century after Hamilton, the Scotsman James Bruce finally enters the Abyssinia his countryman had known only through the accounts of fleeing missionaries. He lives at the court of the ruler Europeans called Prester John, and sees with his own eyes the customs, the raw meat, and the salt currency that Hamilton had known only by hearsay. His account confirms, corrects, and extends the astonished pages the captain devotes to the Christian kingdom of the mountains.
Frédéric Cailliaud, Voyage à Méroé, au fleuve Blanc, au-delà de Fâzoql (1819-1822)

Six years after Burckhardt, the Nantes mineralogist Frédéric Cailliaud ascends the Nile in the wake of the army with which Ismail Pasha, son of Muhammad Ali, is conquering the Sudan. He passes through Berber and Shendy, which the Egyptian invasion is in the process of subduing, then reaches the pyramids of Meroë, of which he makes the first precise surveys, and presses on to Fazoghli, on the borders of Ethiopia. His book, published in Paris from 1823 with an atlas of plates, shows the places described by Burckhardt at the very moment their world tips over: the end of the independent meks and the beginning of Turco-Egyptian rule.
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Giovanni Battista Belzoni, Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations, in Egypt and Nubia (1820)

A former fairground strongman turned antiquities hunter, the Paduan Belzoni meets Burckhardt in Cairo; it is through him that he hears of the sand-buried colossi of Ebsambal, which the traveller from Basel had glimpsed in March 1813 without being able to clear the entrance. Belzoni goes up into Nubia and, in 1817, after weeks of clearing, is the first to enter the great temple of Abu Simbel. His account, published in 1820, mixes heavy labour, rivalries between collectors and bargaining with the Kashefs whom Burckhardt had already faced. It is the direct sequel to this volume: the temple guessed at beneath the sand, at last opened.
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George Bethune English, Récit de l'expédition de Dongola et de Sennar (1820-1821)

An extraordinary figure, the American George Bethune English, a former officer, enters the service of Muhammad Ali and commands the artillery of Ismail Pasha's expedition in 1820. His narrative follows the army from the second cataract towards Dongola, the battle against the Shaigiya, then the advance up to Berber and Shendy, whose chiefs surrender without a fight. It is the exact reverse of Burckhardt's book: where the Swiss traveller makes himself small and passes unnoticed in a merchant caravan, English advances with cannon. Mek Nimr of Shendy, whom Burckhardt had seen reigning, then submits, before having Ismail put to death in 1822.
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George Bethune English, A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar (1822)

Behind the American renegade Waddington met in the camp, Mahommed Effendi, one recognizes George Bethune English. Born in Boston and a convert to Islam, he served as an artillery officer in Ismail Pasha's army, which he followed as far as Sennar. His narrative, published in London in 1822, tells of the same campaign seen from inside the ranks: the marches, the battles with the Shaigiya, the submission of the kings, the advance southward beyond Jebel Barkal. To read the two books together is to hear two versions of the same war, that of the convert soldier and that of the English visitor who held him in contempt.
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Frédéric Cailliaud, Voyage à Méroé, au fleuve Blanc, au-delà de Fâzoql, dans le midi du royaume de Sennâr (1826-1827)

A mineralogist from Nantes in the service of Muhammad Ali, Cailliaud first goes up the Nile to the second cataract and Abu Simbel, then sets out again in 1820 on a journey that takes him much farther. He accompanies the army of Ismail, the pasha's son, which conquers Nubia and Sennar, and reaches the pyramids of Meroë, which he describes and surveys with care. His work, in four volumes and an atlas, appeared in Paris from 1826. He crosses the Mahass where Burckhardt had had to turn back, but in the wake of the Egyptian cannon that put an end to the world of the Kashefs and the Mameluke refugees.
George Alexander Hoskins, Voyages en Éthiopie au-dessus de la deuxième cataracte du Nil (1833)

In February 1833, the English draughtsman George Hoskins leaves Korosko by camel to cross the great Nubian desert, regains the Nile near Abu Hamed, then proceeds to Berber, the pyramids of Meroë and Shendy. There he records the monuments with an artist's care and describes the town, its bazaar and its garrison, twenty years after Burckhardt's stay. Hoskins cites his predecessor, recalling how much Burckhardt and Bruce had suffered on this road, and noting that the time when a traveller could be treated with contempt in these lands is past. Shendy is no longer the great free market, but an Egyptian provincial town.
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George Alexander Hoskins, Travels in Ethiopia, above the Second Cataract of the Nile (1835)

In 1833, a dozen years after Waddington, the Englishman George Alexander Hoskins travelled up the Nile beyond the Second Cataract. Nubia was now an Egyptian province, and he moved with a freedom his predecessors had not enjoyed. He visited Jebel Barkal, went on to the pyramids of Meroe, which he describes with care, and devoted part of his book to the state of the country under Muhammad Ali's rule. It is the natural sequel to Waddington's journal: the same temples and the same villages, seen again once the war was over and the Egyptian administration in place.
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Bayard Taylor, Voyage en Afrique centrale (1851-1852)

The American poet and journalist Bayard Taylor leaves Cairo in November 1851, crosses the Nubian desert from Korosko to Abu Hamed, then travels south through Berber, the Atbara confluence, Damer, Meroë, Shendy and El Metemma to Khartoum, the young Egyptian capital of the Sudan. He then pushes on up the White Nile to the land of the Shilluk. His lively and often enthusiastic narrative devotes a chapter to Shendy and its past. Almost all of Burckhardt's stages reappear in it, seen by a traveller who no longer hides and who discovers, forty years later, what the Sudan has become under Egyptian administration.
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Maxime Du Camp, Égypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie (1852)

In 1849, Maxime Du Camp leaves for the East with his friend Gustave Flaubert, charged with a photographic mission: he has just learned the paper process from Gustave Le Gray. The two men hire a boat in Cairo, go up the Nile to the second cataract, then come slowly back down, visiting the sites on both banks. In March 1850, Du Camp photographs at Abu Simbel a colossus still half buried in the sand. His album of 1852, one of the first books illustrated with photographs, shows, thirty-seven years after Burckhardt, the same temples of Nubia, from the colossi of Abu Simbel to Jebel Abusir, which overlooks the second cataract.
Richard Lepsius, Letters from Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Peninsula of Sinai (1852)

Sent by the King of Prussia at the head of a large scientific expedition, the Egyptologist Richard Lepsius travelled through Egypt and the Sudan from 1842 to 1845. He went up as far as Meroe and the Blue Nile, then stayed at Jebel Barkal, where he recorded the temples and pyramids with a new precision. His letters, published in 1852, tell of the journey day by day. Lepsius identified the ruins of Jebel Barkal as Napata, the ancient capital of the kings of Kush, a conclusion Waddington had already defended. The Cambridge antiquary had been right, with far more modest means and in the middle of a war.
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Samuel White Baker, Les affluents abyssins du Nil (1861-1862)

In May 1861, Samuel Baker and his companion Florence leave Korosko to cross the Nubian desert in heat exceeding forty degrees, on a track strewn with camel skeletons. They reach Abu Hamed and then Berber, before ascending the dry bed of the Atbara, Burckhardt's Mogren, which a sudden flood fills in a single night. Baker then spends a year between Kassala and the Ethiopian borders, hunting with the Hamran Arabs, famed for fighting elephants with the sword. His book sheds new light on the regions Burckhardt had only glimpsed from Damer, and on the Abyssinian origin of the Nile floods.
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Samuel White Baker, The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia (1861-1862)

In 1861, Samuel Baker and his companion Florence leave Berber to explore the Atbara, the river Burckhardt had followed with the Suakin caravan. Baker sees the flood arrive all at once, in June, and understands that these tributaries from Abyssinia make the fertile mud of Egypt. He then crosses the country of the Hadendoa, whom he judges as harshly as his predecessor, passes the Gash and reaches Kassala, which has become the capital of the Taka under Egyptian administration. Hamran elephant hunters, Bedouin camps, heatstroke: this spirited book shows what the places of Volume III had become in half a century.
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Amelia B. Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877)

An English novelist and journalist, Amelia Edwards leaves Cairo in the winter of 1873-1874 on a dahabiah and goes up the river to the second cataract. From Philae to Korosko, from Derr to Abu Simbel, she follows Burckhardt's route step by step, but as a cultivated tourist, with a painter on board. At Abu Simbel, her party brings to light a small painted chamber cut into the rock. From this journey, published in 1877, a vocation is born: in 1882 she founds the Egypt Exploration Fund. Her book remains one of the liveliest on the Nubia that existed before the great dams.
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Theodore et Mabel Bent, Southern Arabia (1895-1896)

A tireless amateur archaeologist, Theodore Bent travels with his wife Mabel through southern Arabia, Socotra and, in 1895-1896, the African coast of the Red Sea. The posthumous volume, published by Mabel in 1900, contains an "African interlude": coastal sailing along the Sudanese shore, Halaib, the interior of the Elba massif and its valleys. This is the country of Olba of which Burckhardt had gathered only echoes from the people of Suakin, and the same coast of creeks and reefs he had skirted in 1814 on a pilgrim boat. The tone is that of the travelling couple, curious and often funny.
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Winston Churchill, The River War (1898)

A young officer and war correspondent, Winston Churchill follows the reconquest of the Sudan by Kitchener's Anglo-Egyptian army in 1898 and rides with the lancers at Omdurman. His book, published in 1899, retraces the whole history of the country from the Egyptian conquest, the Mahdi's revolt and the campaigns around Suakin, down to the desert railway and the fighting on the Atbara. The names of Volume III return there amid the clash of arms: Shendy, the Atbara, the Hadendoa turned into the feared warriors of Osman Digna. Read after Burckhardt, the narrative shows how the world of caravans he had known was swept away in less than a century.
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Pierre Loti, La Mort de Philae (1909)

When Pierre Loti visits Egypt, the first Aswan dam has already begun to drown the island of Philae, which Burckhardt had crossed on the way out and on the way back of his journey. Loti describes the temples of Isis, whose colonnades plunge into dead water and are now visited by boat, and sets against this sight an Egypt gripped by tourism, hotels and navigation companies. Published in 1909, this book of mourning is one of the first cries against the disappearance of the Nubian monuments, half a century before the rescue campaign that would move Philae and Abu Simbel.
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Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari (2002)

In 2001 Paul Theroux set out from Cairo to reach Cape Town overland, by train, bus and truck, sometimes in armed convoy. In the Sudan he followed the Nile, lingered in Khartoum and Omdurman, then took the road into Nubia. The American writer, who had taught in Africa as a young man, takes a hard look at the state of the countries he crosses and at the role of aid organizations. Nearly two centuries after Waddington, the Nubian valley remains a land of passage, riverside villages and ancient ruins, where the foreign traveller still depends on the goodwill of those he meets.

History of Sudan: Nubia, Sennar and Darfur in the Accounts of Early Travellers