relating both to religion, to public affairs or to private life. From the fourteenth century onwards, Arabic gradually became the primary language in Nubia and, with the spread of Islam, developed into the main written and spoken language for religious and secular affairs in most other parts of Sudan. The oral poetic tradition of the northern Nilotic Sudan was mainly expressed in colloquial Sudanese Arabic. Presented orally or in songs, poetry was and still is a fundamental form of literary expression in highly developed and structured forms. Most of the poetry that has survived from the 19th century is in praise of the Prophet and during the Mahdist period, in praise of the Mahdi. A rare historical record written in the early 19th century by Shaykh Ahmad ibn al-Hajj Abi Ali (b. 1784-5) and other early Sudanese historians is the Funj Chronicle. Preserved in several versions in many manuscripts, it present a history of the Funj sultanate (1504–1821) and its capital at Sennar, on the Blue Nile, and of the Turco-Egyptian regime that succeeded it. The manuscripts were edited as an annotated translation under the title "The Sudan of the Three Niles" in 1999 by British historian Peter M. Holt. In her review of this edition, historian Heather J. Sharkey wrote: "Along with the Tabaqat of Ibn Dayf Allah (a biographical dictionary of Sudanese Muslim holy men compiled in the late eighteenth century), the Funj Chronicle is the most important Arabic source for the northern riverain Sudan in the Funj era, a period when Islam was spreading widely." Another account of the early 19th century was written by Muḥammad al-Tūnisī (d. 1857)), who spent ten years as merchant from Cairo in the Sultanate of Darfur and described the kingdom in detail and with his own drawings in the book entitled 'In Darfur'. Traditional and modern forms of oral literature Literature in contemporary Sudan is either recited orally or written in the Arabic language, with certain types also in local languages, such as poetry in the Fur language of western Sudan. As in other African countries, both written literature and genres of oral tradition, such as folk tales, proverbs or poems, are common, but depend on their social setting, such as in rural, partly illiterate or in urban educated societies. These oral types of storytelling may be simply recited by individuals or by groups of persons, or they may be accompanied