being weakened by nomadic incursions and by the development of Red Sea maritime trade as an alternative to the Nile route. By the fourth century a.d., the Kushite temples in the south were dilapidated, and the last of the royal pyramids were small and unimpressive affairs of brick, while the northern region was near the peak of its prosperity.

The final demise of the Empire of Kush seems to have occurred early in the fourth century a.d., though both the date and the circumstances are obscure. Much of the territory of Meroe in the central Sudan was overrun by migrating seminomadic peoples from the west, and the region seems to have lapsed for a time into a state of tribal anarchy. In the region of Lower Nubia, however, a powerful local kingdom arose from the ashes of Kushite sovereignty, and it continued to maintain a flourishing trade with Byzantine Egypt. When its archaeological remains were first discovered in 1907, they were designated as the X-Group because they corresponded to no historically known entity in Egypt. Although the term is still sometimes used in archaeological literature, especially as a designation for pottery and grave types, the political entity and the cultural period are now more commonly referred to as the Ballana kingdom and culture after the locality near the Egyptian-Sudanese border where the rulers were buried. The Ballana monarchs continued to employ some of the iconography of the Kushite pharaohs and kept up the worship of the Egyptian and Kushite gods, but the art of Meroitic writing entirely disappeared. The Ballana culture, which endured into the sixth century a.d., represents the last surviving manifestation of ancient Egyptian civilization, long after its disappearance in Egypt itself.

In the middle of the sixth century, Christian missionaries appeared in Nubia, and within half a century they had succeeded in converting the whole country to the faith that by now had been long established both in Egypt to the north and in Abyssinia to the south. The missionaries encountered, and converted, three Nubian kingdoms: Nobadia (their name for the Ballana kingdom) in the north, Makouria in the region between the Third and Fourth Cataracts, and Alodia (afterward known to Arabs as Alwa) in the region around the confluence of the Blue and White Nile Rivers. Sometime in the eighth century, the kingdoms of Nobadia and Makouria were merged under a single ruler with a capital city at Dongola. Alodia, however, always remained independent, with its capital at Soba near modern Khartoum.

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A section of the seventy-four frescoes depicting Christian scenes that were found in Nubia near the temples of abu simbel

(Hulton Getty)

In 642 a.d., Arab armies conquered Egypt and immediately attempted an invasion of Nubia as well. However, both this attempt and another incursion ten years later were successfully resisted, and the invaders then negotiated a treaty, called the Baqt, that left the Nubian kingdoms independent of Arab and Islamic control throughout the Middle Ages. As a result, Nubia remained Christian until near the end of the fifteenth century. The Nubians, like their coreligionists in Egypt and Syria, allied themselves with the Monophysite sect of Christianity, which meant that their church was under the