Nubian

The Nubians are indigenous people of the Nile valley between southern Egypt and northern Sudan, speaking Nilo-Saharan Nubian languages and descending from Kush, whose archers were famed. After Kush collapsed in the fourth century, three Christian kingdoms arose, among them Makuria at Dongola and Alodia at Soba.

An Arab army failed at Dongola in 652, and the Baqt treaty kept peace with Egypt until the thirteenth century; Makuria's ninth-to-eleventh-century golden age saw cruciform churches and Old Nubian, written in a Coptic-based alphabet from the eighth to fifteenth century. Mamluk raids, Bedouin incursions and plague broke the kingdoms: Muslim kings briefly held Makuria in the 1310s, civil war in 1365 reduced it to a rump, its last king recorded around 1460; Soba fell to Arabs or Funj about 1500.

The Funj founded the Sennar Sultanate in 1504, bringing Islamization and Arabization; Ottomans occupied Lower Nubia in the 1560s. Nubian survived alongside Arabic until Egypt's 1820–1821 conquest brought the valley under Muhammad Ali.