Sudan
Around 11500 BC, near Jebel Sahaba, people fought what scholars call the earliest known war in the world. That ground now sits inside Sudan, a country in Northeast Africa with 51.8 million people as of 2025. It spreads across 1,886,068 square kilometres, making it Africa's third-largest country by area, after Algeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Its capital and most populous city is Khartoum.
The name carries an old idea. Sudan comes from the Arabic bilad as-sudan, "The Land of the Blacks", a label once stretched from Senegal on the Atlantic coast across the Sahel. Ancient Egyptians used other names: Nubia, and Ta Nehesi or Ta Seti, after the Nubian and Medjay bowmen. Since 2011 the country is sometimes called North Sudan, to set it apart from the South. Why a country would split, and what came before, are the questions that follow.
At Affad 23, in the southern Dongola Reach of northern Sudan, lie the remains of the oldest open-air hut in the world. The relics are roughly 50,000 years old. By the eighth millennium BC, Neolithic people had settled into fortified mudbrick villages, herding cattle and gathering grain beside the Nile. Out of that mixing grew the Kingdom of Kerma around 2500 BC, centred at Kerma in ancient Nubia.
Thutmose I of Egypt occupied Kush and destroyed the capital, Kerma, leading to the annexation of Nubia around 1504 BC. The conquered land became a key province, and major pharaonic ceremonies were held at Jebel Barkal near Napata. An Egyptian warrior named Ahmose, son of Ebana, recorded sailing upstream "to destroy the Nubian bowmen".
King Kashta invaded Egypt in the eighth century BC, and Kushite kings ruled as pharaohs of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty for nearly a century. Pharaoh Taharqa fought the Assyrian king Sennacherib, then was driven from Lower Egypt by Esarhaddon and died two years later. Between 800 BCE and 100 AD the Nubians built pyramids at Nuri, Meroe, and Gebel Barkal, a skyline that outlasted the empire that raised it.
By the sixth century, three Nubian kingdoms had taken shape. Nobatia held the north with its capital at Faras, Makuria centred at Old Dongola, and Alodia ruled from Soba, now a suburb of Khartoum. All three converted to Christianity. When the Muslim Arabs invaded in 641 and again in 652, the Nubians repelled them. They became one of the few peoples to defeat the Arabs during the Islamic expansion.
Makurian women held striking status for the era. They could own, buy, and sell land, and fund churches and paintings. The royal succession ran matrilineal, so the king's sister's son was the rightful heir. The culture has been called "Afro-Byzantine", with an alphabet for Old Nobiin built on Coptic letters.
In 1504 the Funj founded the Kingdom of Sennar. Islam spread along the Nile through Sufi holy men, and king Amara Dunqas, once Pagan or nominal Christian, was recorded as Muslim by 1523. West of the Nile in Darfur, the Keira sultanate peaked with the conquest of Kordofan in 1785, growing to roughly the size of present-day Nigeria. That apogee would last until 1821.
In 1821, Muhammad Ali of Egypt invaded and conquered northern Sudan, sending his son Ismail to add the country to his domains. Egyptian rule brought harsh taxes on wells and farmland, so steep that many farmers abandoned their land and livestock. European pressure against the slave trade in the 1870s battered the northern economy and helped raise the Mahdist forces.
Muhammad Ahmad ibn Abd Allah, the Mahdi, or "Guided One", offered followers and the surrendered a choice between Islam or death. From his announcement in June 1881 until the fall of Khartoum in January 1885, he led a winning campaign against the Turco-Egyptian government. He died on the 22nd of June 1885, six months after taking Khartoum.
Abdallahi ibn Muhammad emerged as his successor, taking the title Khalifa. His armies struck outward; a 60,000-man Ansar force invaded Ethiopia in 1887 and reached Gondar. Herbert Kitchener's campaigns ended the Mahdist state, with a decisive victory at the Battle of Omdurman on the 2nd of September 1898. The Khalifa died at the Battle of Umm Diwaykarat on the 25th of November 1899.
In 1899, Britain and Egypt agreed to share sovereignty over Sudan as a condominium, though in practice it was run as a British possession. From 1924 the British governed the north and south as two essentially separate territories, a division that would outlast the empire. The Sudan Defence Force, formed in 1925, later fought in the East African Campaign when Italian troops occupied Kassala in 1940.
The Egyptian revolution of 1952 toppled the monarchy and pushed the country toward independence. Muhammad Naguib, a co-leader of the revolution and Egypt's first President, was half-Sudanese and raised in Sudan, and made independence a priority. On the 1st of January 1956, at the People's Palace, the Egyptian and British flags came down. Prime Minister Ismail al-Azhari raised a new flag of green, blue, and yellow stripes.
A coup on the 25th of May 1969 brought Colonel Gaafar Nimeiry to power, abolishing parliament and outlawing political parties. In September 1983 he introduced sharia law, the September laws, with public amputations and the symbolic dumping of alcohol. He declared himself imam of the Sudanese Umma in 1984, deepening the rift between the Islamic north and the south.
On the 30th of June 1989, Colonel Omar al-Bashir led a bloodless military coup, then introduced an Islamic legal code nationwide. He appointed himself President in 1993, and in the 1996 election he was the only candidate allowed by law. Sudan became a one-party state under the National Congress Party. Speaker Hassan al-Turabi invited Osama bin Laden into the country, and the United States listed Sudan as a state sponsor of terrorism.
In February 2003 the War in Darfur began, as rebel groups accused the government of favouring Arabs over non-Arabs. The conflict was described as genocide, the militias known as Janjaweed accused of atrocities, and the International Criminal Court issued two arrest warrants for al-Bashir. Across his rule the regime killed an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 people. A 2011 referendum ended in a near-unanimous vote for the secession of South Sudan.
Protests began on the 19th of December 2018 after the price of goods was tripled, with inflation running at 70 percent. His government fell on the 11th of April 2019. On the 3rd of June, security forces dispersed a sit-in with live ammunition in the Khartoum massacre, killing over 100 people. Sudan was suspended from the African Union.
On the 15th of April 2023, a power struggle between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his deputy Hemedti erupted into civil war. The fighting filled the streets of Khartoum. Hemedti led the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary force formed from the Janjaweed militia. By the third day the United Nations reported 400 people killed and at least 3,500 injured. Among the dead were three World Food Programme workers.
The World Food Programme reported on the 22nd of February 2024 that more than 95% of Sudan's population could not afford a meal a day. By April 2025 the famine had severely affected nearly 25 million people, including nearly 4 million acutely malnourished children under the age of five. US officials estimated in May 2024 that at least 150,000 people had died in the war's first year.
Sudan ranks 170th on the Human Development Index as of 2024 and 185th by nominal GDP per capita. Over 60% of its people live in poverty. After the RSF captured El Fasher in October 2025, reports emerged that at least 60,000 people may have been killed there. The same Darfur ground that named a genocide two decades ago now waits to see whether history repeats.