Borno (in northeast Nigeria) is notorious today as the home of an Islamist terrorist group, Boko Haram, whose insurgency is a major security threat, but it was once the heartland of the Kanuri-speaking royal empire of Kanem-Borno, renowned throughout Africa and beyond, which in its later incarnation, the Bornu Empire, lasted from 1380 to 1893. This book offers the reader the first modern history of Borno, drawing upon sources in London, Berlin, Paris, Kaduna and Maiduguri and recently released 'migrated archives'. As its longevity suggests, what is particularly remarkable about Borno is the permanence of its boundaries-its territorial integrity-which dates back centuries, and the political and social identities that such borders framed in the minds of its inhabitants.

This book is a literary, intertextual study of an Egyptian popular epic. In this innovative study, Helen Blatherwick investigates how various sources, including Islamic qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ (‘tales of the prophets’), Pharaonic, Graeco-Roman and Coptic Egyptian myths and narratives, and recensions of the Alexander Romance function as intertexts within Sīrat Sayf. Blatherwick argues that these intertexts are deployed as narrative devices which are readily recognisable to the story's audience, and that they are significant carriers of meaning and theme. Crucially, these intertexts also interact within Sīrat Sayf to bring a conceptual continuity to its discussion of kingship and society that stretches from this late-medieval epic back to ancient Egyptian narratives.