Between 1821 and 1885 most of the area constituting the present Sudan came under Turko-Egyptian rule. The annexation of the Sudan to Egypt was undertaken in 1820-1 by Muhammad 'Ali, the Ottoman Wali of Egypt, and was completed under his grandson, the Khedive Isma'il, who extended this rule to the Great Lakes in the south and to Bahr al-Ghazal and Darfur in the west. In the history of the Sudan, this period became known as the (first) Turkiyya. The term Turkiyya is not really arbitrary since Egypt was itself an Ottoman province, ruled by an Ottoman (Albanian) dynasty. Moreover, most of the high officials and army officers serving in the Sudan were of Ottoman rather than Egyptian origin.

The Persian Empire, the foundation of which by Cyrus the Great we are now celebrating, was dissolved as the result of the Greek invasion under Alexander; it was restored, some five and a half centuries later, by the native dynasty of the Sassanians, who like the Achaemenids before them, had their origins in the south-western province of Fars or Pars, which has given Iran the name by which it is known in the West. The Persian Empire thus restored disputed with the heirs of Alexander, the rulers of Rome and Byzantium, for the possession of Western Asia. The later phase of this struggle is referred to in the Koran: "The Greeks have been defeated in a land hard by: but after their defeat they shall defeat their foes." This is a reference to the war waged against the Byzantines by the Sassanian Emperor Khusrau Parviz, who in the course of a war of more than twenty years' duration, was to extend the boundaries of the Persian Empire to where they had lain in the days of Darius, on the shores of the Mediterranean and the Aegean; it is also a prophecy of the Byzantines' ultimate victory with the triumphal entry of Heraclius into Jerusalem in 629.