Sudan's foreign relations have reflected a number of domestic and international factors. The long history of indigenous state formation on the middle reaches of the Nile had always involved relations with neighbouring areas, and sometimes wider international relations as well. Nubian and Meroitic civilisation in Sudan's far north is now seen as being more distinct from Pharoanic Egypt than in the past, including clashes between the two. The Coptic Christian states that succeeded Meroe also maintained changing relations with both Egypt to the north and Abyssinia (Ethiopia) to the south-east. Following the decline of those states and the emergence of the Islamic Funj kingdom based upon Sennar, relations with Abyssinia in particular remained a source of periodic conflict; and the Funj also had to come to terms with the rising independent state of Darfur to the west. However, rather than reflecting further chapters in indigenous state formation, the modern territory of Sudan was largely carved out of north-east Africa by other powers: Egypt's invasion of the region in the nineteenth century (from 1820/21) largely created Sudan's modern boundaries as well as setting up its modern state structures; while after the period of Mahdist rule, at the end of the century and following the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of 1898, British imperialism dominated Egypt and Sudan, before both the latter gained their independence.