Makuria (Old Nubian: , Dotawo; ; ) was a Nubian kingdom located in what is today Northern Sudan and Southern Egypt. Makuria originally covered the area along the Nile River from the Third Cataract to somewhere south of Abu Hamad as well as parts of northern Kordofan. Its capital was Dongola (Old Nubian: ), and the kingdom is sometimes known by the name of its capital. By the end of the 6th century, it had converted to Christianity, but in the 7th century, Egypt was conquered by the Islamic armies. In 651 an Arab army invaded, but it was repulsed and a treaty known as the Baqt was signed creating a relative peace between the two sides that lasted until the 13th century. Makuria expanded by annexing its northern neighbour Nobatia at some point in the seventh century, while also maintaining close dynastic ties with the kingdom of Alodia to the south. The period from the 9th to 11th century saw the peak of Makuria's cultural development: new monumental buildings were erected, arts like wall paintings and finely crafted and decorated pottery flourished and Nubian grew to become the prevalent written language. Increased aggression from Egypt, internal discord, Bedouin incursions and possibly the plague and the shift of trade routes led to the state's decline in the 13th and 14th century. Due to a civil war in 1365, the kingdom was reduced to a rump state that lost much of its southern territories, including Dongola. It had disappeared by the 1560s, when the Ottomans occupied Lower Nubia. Nubia was subsequently Islamized, while the Nubians living upstream of Al Dabbah and in Kordofan were also Arabized. Sources Makuria is much better known than its neighbor Alodia to the south, but there are still many gaps in our knowledge. The most important source for the history of the area is various Arab travelers and historians who passed through Nubia during this period. These accounts are often problematic as many of the Arab writers were biased against their Christian neighbors. These works generally focus on only the military conflicts between Egypt and Nubia. One exception is Ibn Selim el-Aswani, an Egyptian diplomat who traveled to Dongola when Makuria was at the height of its power in the 10th century and left a detailed account. The Nubians were a literate society, and a fair body of writing survives from the period. These documents were