If we think about characters and civilizations in African history, most of us think of the pharaohs and pyramids of Ancient Egypt and little else. However, there is much more and you don’t have to go far from that enormous continent: just to the south, following the river inland, there were powerful kingdoms with their own kings, their own cities and their own cathedrals (yes, I said cathedral). One of those kingdoms was called Makuria, and its capital was Old Dongola, a great city on the banks of the Nile that for almost a thousand years was a center of power, commerce and culture.
Curiously, while Europe was living through the Middle Ages, Dongola was a prosperous Christian city that even stood up to the Arab armies that conquered North Africa. Over time it declined, became Islamized and was almost forgotten, buried under the desert. The history of the region Nubia It is almost a documentary silence. It’s not that nothing happened: it’s that almost nothing was written or what was left had not been excavated. In that darkness, a small fragment of Arabic paper recovered in a garbage dump in ancient Dongola (the north of present-day Sudan) has just marked a before and after.
The discovery. The document measures just 10 × 9 centimeters, it was found in a garbage dump inside Building A.1 of the Old Dongola citadel (what has been popularly known there for centuries as the “King’s House”) and it is an administrative order issued in the name of King Qashqash.
The king orders a subordinate named Khiḍr to arrange an exchange of sheep with their offspring, cotton cloth, and a headdress between several individuals. The text was written by the scribe Hamad and the research team behind the paper considers that it is probably the response to a previous letter, suggesting that there was an active epistolary network around the court. It is, simply, the king working on his task of administering, managing assets and relationships within his network of power.
The first face of the King’s order. M. Rekłajtis/PCMA in Barański et al. 2026
Why is it important. The relevance of the discovery has several levels, but the most direct and immediate is to confirm the historical existence of Qashqash, of which there was previously only evidence through oral tradition, including fragments of the Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt of Wad Ḍayfallāh. This book compiled in 1700 compiles the biographies of the most important saints and religious teachers of the Sudan, based on stories that had been transmitted orally from generation to generation.
Beyond that confirmation, the discovery sheds some light on what the “Dark Ages” of Nubia were like. For centuries the image left by Leo Africanus in the 16th century predominated, describing the king of Nubia as a monarch perpetually at war. This document demonstrates the opposite: the region was politically active and its king was not on the battlefield, but rather involved in the daily management of goods and networks of reciprocal exchange, which was the central mechanism of political power in precolonial Sudan.
Context. Old Dongola was the capital for centuries of the Christian kingdom of Makuriaone of the most powerful medieval African kingdoms in the Nile Valley. In the mid-14th century it ceased to be so, and the city progressively contracted until it was reduced to its citadel and its immediate surroundings.
What followed is the period that historians call the Sudanese “Dark Ages”: three centuries in which Dongola was caught at a geopolitical crossroads: with pressure from the north by Ottoman Egypt, from the south by the Funj sultanate, and meanwhile its society was Islamized. It was in that delicate context that Qashqash probably reigned between the second half of the 16th century and the first years of the 17th century. one of the first rulers of that dark period that has been able to be verified.
How have they done it. The PCMA research team at the University of Warsaw have combined three independent avenues to date and contextualize the document: with numismatics using Ottoman silver coins from the same stratum, radiocarbon of organic matter from the garbage dump, and cross-literary genealogy, combining the Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt and the account of the traveler Evliya Çelebi, the documented descendants of Qashqash. The convergence of the roads has made it possible to reconstruct the limits of when his reign was.
Qashqash is just the tip of the iceberg. The document is also a linguistic testimony of the first order: written in Arabic, it has grammatical irregularities and colloquial spellings that show that although it was not fully established, it was already the language used by the chancellery. In short: evidence of the gradual Arabization of Nubia, which was adopted and adapted.
Another interesting point is that archaeological evidence and local oral memory confirm each other. Building A.1 has been called the “King’s House” by the inhabitants of Dongola for centuries and the descendants of Qashqash continue to live nearby. Finding the royal order precisely there is no coincidence: it is archeology validating what the community had remembered for generations. In fact, the collaboration between the research team and those who live there has been close, something they consider essential for a correct interpretation.
Shedding light on the dark ages. The Qashqash order is only the first published result of a much larger corpus as the project has recovered approximately fifty Arabic paper documents in Old Dongola, including letters, legal and administrative texts, and written amulets. The first analysis points to communication networks that connected religious, administrative elites and possibly nomadic leaders of the region. A comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the set will shed some light on the political, legal and social history of pre-colonial Nubia.
Cover | M. Rekłajtis/PCMA in Barański et al. 2026 and Wikimedia
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