The Atlas
From the pyramids of the river north to the granite domes of the east, the volcano of the west and the wetlands of the south — the whole country, state by state.
The corridor of kingdoms — where the Nile bends through Nubia and every cataract hides a capital.
Capital · Dongola
Capital · Ed Damer
Coral seas, granite domes, and the greenest torrents in the desert's shadow.
Capital · Port Sudan
Capital · Kassala
Capital · Gedaref
Sudan's north-eastern coast — 20,580 square kilometres of Red Sea shore, mountain and Beja grazing land. Disputed territory, claimed by Sudan on the 1902 administrative boundary and under Egyptian de facto administration.
Where the Red Sea coast runs north from Port Sudan, the shore does not stop at a line of latitude. It carries on through Abu Ramad, the port of Halayeb and the settlement of Shalateen — a stretch of mountain, wadi and coral coast that has belonged to the Beja for as long as anyone has counted.
In 1899 the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium Agreement drew a political boundary straight along the 22nd parallel north — a surveyor's line, indifferent to who actually lived there. Three years later, on 4 November 1902, Britain drew a second line: an administrative boundary intended to reflect the real use of the land by the tribes of the region.
That 1902 line placed the territory north of the parallel — the grazing lands of the Bishareen, a Beja sub-tribe — under Sudanese administration, because the people there belonged to Sudan's east and answered to the governor in Khartoum, not Cairo. Sudan has held to the 1902 boundary ever since independence in 1956, and in its own claim and official presentation the area belongs to Red Sea State. Egypt has exercised de facto administration since the mid-1990s.
The case was never really about cartography. It is about kinship. The Bishareen and Ababda who live between Halayeb and Shalateen are the same Beja people who fill the markets of Port Sudan and Kassala, speak the same Tu-Bedawie, herd the same camels, and carry the same swords at the same weddings. Around 24,000 people live at Shalateen alone.
It is austere, dramatic country: granite peaks rising off the water, Mount Shendib at 1,911 metres, seasonal wadis running green after rain, and a coral coastline continuous with the reefs of Sanganeb and Dungonab to the south.
Egypt asserts the 1899 parallel and has exercised de facto control since the mid-1990s. Sudan maintains the 1902 administrative boundary and has consistently called for the question to be settled by international arbitration — the ordinary, lawful means of resolving such a claim between neighbours. This archive maps the territory as Sudanese, on the 1902 line, and states the position plainly.
Where the two Niles marry, and the breadbasket spreads between them.
Capital · Khartoum
Capital · Wad Medani
Five states around a green volcano — orchards at altitude, sultans' palaces, citrus valleys.
Capital · El Fasher
Capital · Nyala
Capital · El Geneina
Capitals · Ed Daein & Zalingei
Gum arabic country, wrestling mountains, and the island where a revolution began.
Capitals · El Obeid, Kadugli, El Fula
Capitals · Ad Damazin, Rabak, Singa
Six great dams hold the rivers — power, harvest, and the slow engineering of a century.
Main Nile · 2009
The "Great Wall of the Nile" at the fourth cataract — 1,250 MW, Sudan's largest hydropower work.
Blue Nile · 1966 / 2013
Heightened in 2013; the reservoir that anchors Sudan's power and feeds the Kenana and Dinder canals.
Blue Nile · 1925
The oldest monument of them all — British-built stone, still watering the Gezira Scheme by gravity.
White Nile · 1937
Forty kilometres south of the capital — the quiet regulator of the White Nile's seasons.
Atbara & Setit · 2017
The twin Rumela and Burdana dams — 320 MW and new farmland for the east.
Atbara · 1964
The reservoir of the New Halfa scheme — built for the families of drowned Wadi Halfa.
A temple of lions, a lighthouse on a coral atoll, and a waterhole where the Nile's oldest wildlife still comes to drink.
River Nile State
The Lion Temple of Apedemak stands beside a Roman-style kiosk — two empires meeting in one clearing of Meroitic desert.
Red Sea State
A lighthouse on a ring of living coral, forty kilometres offshore — Sudan's first UNESCO marine site, and its clearest water.
Sennar & Al Qadarif
At the dry-season waterholes of Sudan's oldest national park, waterbuck, marabou storks and egrets share a single shrinking pool.
750 BC – 350 AD · Kush
The twin capitals of the Kingdom of Kush — Napata the spiritual seat beneath the holy mountain where pharaohs were crowned, Meroë the royal city whose steep pyramids still hold the eastern dunes.
6th – 14th century · Makuria
The cosmopolitan Nubian metropolis of Christian Makuria — its ninth-century Throne Hall became a mosque in 1317, and its pyramidal qubbas still stand over the river road.
Ali Dinar Palace · El Fasher
Photograph coming soonالصورة قريباً
18th – 20th century · Darfur
Seat of the independent Darfur Sultanate and hub of the trans-Saharan caravans — the Ali Dinar Palace Museum keeps the memory of the region's last sovereign ruler.
Sufi qubbas · Abu Haraz
Photograph coming soonالصورة قريباً
Al Gezira · living shrine
On the Blue Nile east of Wad Medani, pyramid-pointed Sufi qubbas painted sky blue, pink and green — where ancient Nubian geometry and Islamic devotion share one silhouette.