The dry plains and mountains of north-eastern Uganda below the Kenya escarpment.
The Ateker peoples who now live here (Karimojong, Jie, Teso, and the Turkana beyond the border) took shape later, by most accounts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Lamphear). In 1200 the country was probably held by Kuliak-speaking peoples (whose remnants are the Ik and So of the mountains), Southern Nilotic herders and Eastern Nilotes moving south: all inferred from language.
Who holds it
- Name
- Not named
- Title
- Herding elders
- Since
- Not pinned
- Confidence
- low
What it holds
- Karamoja's plains and mountains (Moroto, Napak, Kadam)
- Teso and the plains north of Lake Kyoga
How things stand that morning
Self-governing; peoples not identified with confidence.
Customs
Not recorded for 1200.
Where the sources disagree
Evidence: Linguistic inference only.
On the map: Rough outline.
Sources and studies
- C. Ehret, An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 B.C. to A.D. 400 (1998) and History and the Testimony of Language (2011), on the language families of East Africa
- C. Ehret, Southern Nilotic History: Linguistic Approaches to the Study of the Past (1971)
Last revised 4 November 2026. Published 4 November 2026. Suggest a correction on the OMNIA Discord.