Project: Afropolis Tungul: Urban biography of a cosmopolitan African capital

Afropolis Tungul: Urban biography of a cosmopolitan African capital

Keywords: Old Dongola, Sudan, Africa

The project’s acronym captures its essence. Afropolis stands for a city that was built at the intersection of two great cultural spheres – that of the ancient Mediterranean world and Africa. The people who inhabited the city were extremely effective in leveraging their geographical location, skillfully drawing on the two resource bases to create a social, political and cultural organism that was unique in global terms. Tungul is the native name of this urban center, which survived for 15 centuries. One of our aspirations is to tackle the biased and erroneous colonial perceptions of Africa as a continent without history and without civilization. Tungul and the kingdom of Makuria were established five hundred years before the emergence of Poland.

The “Afropolis Tungul” project will focus on the period when the city was the capital of the Christian kingdom of Makuria (4th–15th cent.), but it will also incorporate the results of the earlier ERC project, UMMA, which studied the most recent 500 years of the city. The project is a multidisciplinary attempt at gaining a profound understanding of settlement persistence in the Nile Valley: Why was Tungul established in this particular place? What factors allowed it to survive for so long, despite harsh environmental conditions and dynamic political changes?

While most of the work will focus on the collection and analysis of data on Tungul during the Makurian period (4th–15th cent.), the project’s research goals require combining this material with data on the Funj period (16th–19th cent.) obtained over the course of the ERC Starting Grant UMMA project, and other information gathered during the PCMA UW expedition’s excavations at the site.

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