Funj Sultanate

The Funj Sultanate, the Blue Sultanate of Sennar, was the Islamic kingdom of the middle Nile, founded in 1504 when Amara Dunqas, a convert to Islam, raised his capital Sennar on the Blue Nile over the ruins of Christian Makuria and Alodia. The Funj, an Arabized people of obscure origin, ruled Nubians, Beja, Bedouin and Hamaj from the first fixed urban capital at Sennar, whose prosperity rode on royal caravans that drew foreign merchants to the Blue Nile, and by welcoming Sufi holy men they spread Islam and quickened the Arabization that made the modern Sudanese Arabs. At its late seventeenth-century peak the blue banner flew from the Third Cataract to the Ethiopian foothills and the Sobat, east to the Red Sea and west across Kordofan. In the eighteenth century the Hamaj seized the throne in 1762, the provinces tore the realm in civil wars, and in 1821 the last sultan yielded to the Turco-Egyptian invasion, ending three centuries of Funj kingship.