Nobody knows where the Funj came from, yet they ruled Sudan for three centuries
The Funj Sultanate, also called Sennar or the Blue Sultanate, was an Islamic kingdom across today's Sudan and parts of Eritrea and Ethiopia. Sultan Amara Dunqas founded it in 1504 with his capital at Sennar on the Blue Nile, and it lasted until the Turco-Egyptian conquest of 1821.
It rose from the ruins of Christian Nubia. The kingdoms of Makuria and Alodia had been fading since the twelfth century; by 1365 Makuria was a rump confined to Lower Nubia that vanished roughly a century and a half later, and Alodia's capital at Soba may have been abandoned much earlier. Central Sudan broke into petty states while Bedouin tribes spread Islam and Arabic. In the fifteenth century a Bedouin leader remembered as Abdallah Jammah built a tribal federation and finished Alodia off, only to be attacked in the early sixteenth century by the Funj, nomadic herders from the south who then practised their own religion.
Who the Funj were remains unresolved, and some scholars doubt it ever will be. Suggestions include Nubians, Shilluk, a ruling class rather than an ethnic group, or migrants from Bornu, Eritrea or northern Ethiopia, while some Sudanese traditions trace the rulers to the Umayyads. An eighteenth-century copper drum called Amara Dunqas their grandfather from a place named Lul, and the Funj Chronicle speaks of a homeland called Lulu. That may match Lam'ul, described by the traveller David Reubeni as a royal city eight days south of Sennar. Shilluk traditions recall defeating a more sophisticated settled people, now identified with the Funj, and Dinka stories also claim victory over them.
The ruling Funj were Arabised and governed a mixed population of Nubians, Beja, Bedouin and Hamaj. At their height in the late seventeenth century their realm stretched from the Third Cataract south toward the Ethiopian Highlands and the Sobat River, and from the Red Sea coast across to Kordofan and the Nuba hills. The sultans invited Sufi holy men, speeding both conversion to Islam and the Arabisation that shaped modern Sudanese Arab tribes.
Decline set in during the eighteenth century, especially once the Hamaj took power in a coup in 1762. Civil wars tore the state apart from the late 1700s, and in 1821 its last, much weakened sultan surrendered to the invading Turco-Egyptian forces.
Source: Funj Sultanate
