Sudan

Sudan: capital Khartoum, population 51.7M, area 1,886,068 km². The 30th most populous country, in Africa. Facts, map, neighbours and more.

Sudan is Africa's third-largest country by area, stretching from the Red Sea across the middle Nile, with Khartoum standing where the White and Blue Niles join. Kerma, Napata and Meroë followed one another as capitals of Nubian states from about 2500 BC, and in the eighth century BC Kushite kings took the throne of Egypt itself as its Twenty-fifth Dynasty. After Kush broke up, the Christian Nubian kingdoms of Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia held the valley for centuries, leaving Old Dongola and a written Nubian tradition behind them.

• Kerma was settled by hunter-gatherers around 8350 BC and grew into an urban centre around the mud-brick temple called the Western Deffufa, controlling the Nile between the first and fourth cataracts.
• King Kashta became king of Upper Egypt peacefully in the eighth century BC and his successor Piye then took Lower Egypt, founding a Kushite Twenty-fifth Dynasty that held Egypt for over a century.
• A Rashidun army besieged Dongola in 652 and was repulsed; the Baqt treaty signed afterwards kept the peace between Egypt and Makuria largely unbroken until the thirteenth century.
• Francis Llewellyn Griffith deciphered the Meroitic script in 1909 by working from Meroitic spellings of Egyptian names, but the Meroitic language itself is still poorly understood.

• Taharqa ruled as pharaoh of Egypt's Twenty-fifth Dynasty and king of Kush from 690 to 664 BC, one of the Kushite rulers remembered as the Black Pharaohs.
• Tayeb Salih turned his small Sudanese village into a setting for questions of identity and exile; his Season of Migration to the North of 1966 is among the key works of modern Arabic literature.
• Ibrahim El-Salahi of the Khartoum School combined Islamic calligraphy with modern painting, and in 2013 Tate Modern gave him its first retrospective of a contemporary African artist.
• Mohammed Wardi, a Nubian Sudanese singer, poet and songwriter born in 1932, is counted among the most famous Sudanese musicians of the twentieth century.

• The site of Meroë is marked by more than two hundred pyramids standing in three groups, built with the steep sides and narrow proportions particular to Nubian pyramids.
• Jebel Barkal is a flat-topped mesa 104 metres high that held religious meaning for both Kush and Egypt; UNESCO listed it with the archaeological site at its foot in 2003.
• Khartoum sits where the White Nile, flowing north from Lake Victoria, meets the Blue Nile coming from Lake Tana; the meeting point itself is called al-Mogran, the confluence.
• Dongola, the Makurian capital founded around 500, still holds the Throne Hall and the great cruciform church raised at the kingdom's peak between the ninth and eleventh centuries.

• Nubians speak Nilo-Saharan Nubian languages such as Nobiin and Andaandi as their mother tongue and Arabic as a second language; the ancient Nubians were famous as archers.
• Kisra is a thin fermented bread of sorghum or wheat, and as of 1995 the then-undivided Sudan was getting through an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 short tons of sorghum flour a year making it.
• The Aswan High Dam flooded much of Lower Nubia and displaced 100,000 Nubians across Egypt and Sudan, with Halfawi families resettled at Khashm el Girba and New Halfa.
• The Khartoum School of painters set Islamic calligraphy against modern forms and became Sudan's contribution to African Modernism and the pan-Arab Hurufiyya movement.

What is the capital of Sudan?

The capital of Sudan is Khartoum.

What is the population of Sudan?

Sudan has about 51.7M people — the 30th most populous country in the world.

How big is Sudan?

Sudan covers 1,886,068 km², making it the 15th largest country by area.

Which region is Sudan in?

Sudan is in Northern Africa, Africa.