15.5239°N, 32.6808°E.
Capital city of the medieval Christian kingdom of Alodia, located on the east bank of the Blue Nile roughly 22 kilometres southeast of modern Khartoum in central Sudan. Soba was built primarily in fired red brick with stone foundations and stood from approximately the sixth century CE until its eventual conquest by the Funj Sultanate around 1504 CE. The Arab geographer Ibn Selim al-Aswani, visiting in the tenth century during a diplomatic mission, described it as a city of large houses, churches richly furnished with much gold, and surrounding cultivated gardens. British excavations in the 1950s under Peter Shinnie of Cambridge identified at least three churches, a palatial administrative complex, and an extensive cemetery; renewed work by Mariusz Drzewiecki of the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology resumed at the site in the 2010s. Most of the visible brick was robbed across the Funj period for construction in nearby villages along the riverbank.
A Christian kingdom held the upper Nile for nine centuries and left mainly bricks reused in later walls.