Seed of South Sudan Read Online Free Page A

raised in the Egyptian court…. The intention was that upon their return home, they would promote Egyptian culture in Nubia and alliances to Egypt.” 6 Archaeologists of Egypt and Sub-Sahara Africa find a great many links between the cultures, starting from the time before the Sahara became the desert it is now, and before Arabic groups came to live between Egypt and Sudan. In a sense, Sudan is an important source of much that is Egyptian culture and geography.
    There was great interplay between Egypt in the north and Sudan as well as other areas of sub–Saharan Africa. In fact, all of what is now Africa shared much in customs, religion, and cultural objects. Archaeologists point to similarities between the early tools of the area, from bone harpoons to pottery bowls and jars, items that appeared from the Atlantic to the southern part of what is now the Sahara, on up along the Nile, finally reaching into Palestine, as well as similarities in the famous blue crown of Egyptian rulers of the New Kingdom era and the beaded miter crown used in Cameroon in the past (used ceremonially in present-day Nigeria). All of these examples simply suggest that there were ties between what may seem like unlike cultures, ties that date back to the Neolithic period. 7
    Yet to look at Sudan as a country today is to look at true contrast. Egypt was eventually ruled by Greek, Roman, Muslim, and Turkish regimes (The Ottoman Empire) before gaining independence. Largely through the dynasty begun with Khedive Muhammad Ali, the country was transformed on a European model. 8 Because of that influence, Egypt learned how to tame and dam the Upper Nile, and became (at least until the Arab spring of 2011) a secular country that is more developed than almost any other country on the African Continent; it sits at the north end of the Nile Valley, orienting itself to the Indo-European culture of the Mediterranean. Sudan to its south is a culturally, religiously, and ethnically split nation. Nubia was Christianized and remained that way from approximately AD 580 to 1400. At the end of this time, some areas still remained independent and Christian, 9 affecting southern Sudan even today. Arabs, who came in initially in the 7th century but did not exact control for several centuries, 10 occupy the north, including the Nubian Desert, the ancient kingdom of Kush, and the capital, Khartoum. The area to the south, inhabited by various African tribes including the Dinka, includes some fertile area, some desert, and what at one time was simply referred to as the Sudd, or Tremendous Swamp. In fact, the swamp is the largest in the world; in Arabic, its name translates as “obstacle,” which it has been for those trying to access the vast lands along its edges. 11
    North Sudan is relatively developed and for years has received most of the infrastructure improvements in Sudan, and from colonial times to present has dominated the rest of the country; South Sudan consists of the areas west and east of the Sudd, and the Sudd itself.
    This part was basically left unconquered when in the early 16th century Muslim armies controlled all lands bordering the Nile, Alexandria to Khartoum. The South was called Bilad al–Sudan, the “Land of the Blacks,” and stayed unexplored until the 1840s when the Turkish Ottoman Empire, under Muhammad Ali, invaded and seized Africans as slaves. 12
    After Turkish captors, slave traders from North Sudan followed. The Dinka, major victims of slavery, call this the “time when the world was spoiled.” 13 The slavery continued into the late 1800s even though the British, who had come into power in the area, tried to end the trafficking. In the 1880s, the British army was destroyed in a revolt by North Sudanese, but they held on into the 1900s, finally dividing the Muslim north from the south, whose dominant religions are traditional animist and Christian. 14 The Christian tradition is a lingering effect of the