Soba

Soba was the royal capital of Alodia, the southernmost of the Christian kingdoms of medieval Nubia. It stood on the Blue Nile above its meeting with the White Nile, in a belt of farmland that reached into the Sudanese interior. Arab visitors described a town of extensive dwellings, gardens and churches full of gold, and the largest of its churches was said to be the Church of Manbali. By about 1300 the decline of the kingdom was well advanced, and no pottery or glassware later than the thirteenth century has been found in the town.

Arab tribes, first recorded moving into Nubia in 1324, had settled the whole central Nile valley by the later fifteenth century, leaving only the country around Soba to its kings. Around 1500 the Nubians were said to have no king at all, only some 150 lordships grouped around castles on both banks of the river. Tradition credits the Arab chief Abdallah Jammah, allied with the Funj king Amara Dunqas, with destroying Soba, and one Shendi tradition dates its fall to 1509. The Funj founded Sennar in 1504–05. When the Jewish traveller David Reubeni passed by in 1523, he found Soba in ruins. People lived among the ruins until at least the early seventeenth century, and their bricks and stones went into the domed shrines of Sufi saints and, in the early nineteenth century, into the new town of Khartoum.