This chapter lists all the known writings from the Eastern Bilād al-Sūdān – here meaning, in practice, the northern provinces of the modern Sudan Republic – in the period before 1820, the year of the Turco-Egyptian invasion of the Sudan. Much of the information we have comes from a single source, K. al-ṭabaqāt fī khuṣūṣ al-awliyāʾ wa’l-ṣāliḥīn wa’l-ʿulamāʾ wa’l-shuʿarāʾ fī ’l-Sūdān of Muḥammad al-Nūr w. Ḍayf Allāh (q.v.). As the reader will quickly appreciate, the present chapter is to a considerable degree based on the scholarly edition of the K. al-ṭabaqāt by Yūsuf Faḍl Ḥasan.

Although …