ABSTRACT
The Christian missionaries who visited Sinnar during the first decade of the eighteenth century found it a prosperous kingdom, whose essential integrity did not seem to be imperilled by the occasional disputes among the nobility. The atmosphere in the Funj capital was tolerant and cosmopolitan. About a century later a small merchant caravan accompanied by the explorer Burckhardt worked its way gingerly through the devastated provinces of northern Sinnar, avoiding as best it could the banditti, Mamluk adventurers, robber barons and feuding princes, whose wars and intrigues had plunged the region into chaos. Burckhardt travelled in disguise, and feared for his life should his true identity as a non-Muslim foreigner be revealed. Clearly the same century that witnessed the dismemberment of Sinnar also produced a revolution in the earlier Sudanese attitude towards foreign influences. The new xenophobia was in a sense justified, for the state of the kingdom was largely the result of the impact upon Sudanese society of cultural innovations borrowed during the earlier age of cosmopolitan confidence. The decline of Sinnar in the eighteenth century may be broadly attributed to the erosion of traditional Funj institutions and values under the combined pressure of commerce and Islam.
