Most of this area of northeastern Sudan is desert, though grasslands exist in the southeast, and even some irrigation farming in one valley. The land rises eastward to over 2,000 meters, then falls suddenly to the Red Sea shore.
Most of the more than one million people here speak Beja(3), perhaps nearly all of them. In any case everyone learns Sudanese spoken Arabic, and is a Sunni Moslem.
Port(4) Sudan on the Red Sea became significant as a railway terminus that received agricultural goods from the Nile Valley. Later it became an oil refining center, with a pipeline to Khartoum, and a seaside resort. This state capital has less than half a million residents.
The Beja are a Cushitic group, which probably lived in this area for thousands of years; they are tentatively identified with the Blemmyes which the classical Greeks wrote about. Their ancestors may have been speakers of Proto-Afro-Asiatic dialects that expanded into this area from the Horn of Africa sometime after 18,000 years ago.
north
east
southeast
southwest and west
(1) al-Ahmar in transliterated Arabic.
(2) al-Bahr is waters (sea or river) in transliterated Arabic.
(3) Beja is the Arabs name for them; they call themselves ti-Bedaawye, from which we get our label, Bedouin, although we apply it to nomadic Arabs originating on the other side of the Red Sea.
(4) Bur in transliterated Arabic.