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The Shilluk Kingdom was located along the banks of the White Nile river in modern South Sudan. Its capital and royal residence was in the town of Fashoda. According to their folk history and neighboring accounts, the kingdom was founded during the mid-fifteenth century CE by its first ruler, the demigod Nyikang. During the nineteenth century, the Shilluk were affected by military assaults from the Ottoman Empire and later British colonization in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The Shilluk king is currently not an independent political leader, but a traditional chieftain within the governments of South Sudan and Sudan. The monarchy (the Reth) has been political and religious in nature. The monarch guaranteed social order; his health and the health of the nation were intertwined. Worship is performed in rituals inspired by the national myth of Nyikang, the first Reth. The Shilluk monarchy and the beliefs of its people was studied in 1911 by Charles Seligman and in 1916 by British anthropologist James George Frazer in ''The Golden Bough''. Seligman described the Shilluk form of government as a "sacred kingship". == Geography and people == The kingdom was located along a strip of land along the western and eastern bank of White Nile and sobat river, from Lake No to about 12° north latitude. The Shilluk people are closely related to the commoner South Sudanese ethnic groups, the Nuer and Dinka (their neighbors to the south and east, respectively). Their language is related to that of the Anuak people near the rivers Baro and Pibor. The English name for the Shilluk language derives from the Arabic version of the Shilluk self-designation: ''Cøllø'', or ''Chollo''. This (and a belief by many Shilluk) suggests a common origin with the Acholi, another ethnic group living on the Ugandan-South Sudanese and Luo in Tanzania, Kenya, DRC, Chad, CAR and Ethiopia (Anuak) borders Like most Nilotic peoples of South Sudan (such as the Nuer and Dinka), the Shilluk practiced subsistence semi-nomadic cattle breeding and some grain farming.〔"Shilluk." ''Encyclopedia of the Peoples of Africa and the Middle East, Volume 1'' Infobase Publishing, 2009〕 Their social system was egalitarian, and the cattle herds had great symbolic value. The lifestyle of the modern Shilluk is similar, except that their herds are smaller. They were sedentary, because the land along the White Nile is more fertile than elsewhere in the region. Their cultivation of durra, a variety of sorghum (millet), made them a relatively prosperous agricultural people except during prolonged droughts. Today's Shilluk population was estimated at 1.7 million in 2005; during the nineteenth century they were estimated at about 200,000, living in hundreds of villages. The kingdom was divided into two provinces: Gher (Gärø) in the north and Luak (Lwagø) in the south. These, in turn, were divided into zones. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Shilluk Kingdom」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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