Sudan Notes and Records (SNR) was a leading African scholarly journal on Sudanese studies, published continuously from 1918 to 1984 (apart from a break 1943-1944). A new series appeared briefly from 1997 to 2001. Sudan Notes and Records was published in Cairo until 1920, then by the University of Khartoum.

SNR was founded in 1918 by the British administration of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Until 1952, it was the only regularly published journal in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The idea for the journal was suggested because, as stated by the Director of Survey to the Sudan Government, Lt. Col. Milo Talbot, ‘year by year much valuable information was lost or buried in inaccessible files because there was no convenient medium for recording it’. A meeting then took place where it was decided to start a journal.

Early on, SNR published the ethnographic observations of British district officials, whose interest in social anthropology and ethnology was encouraged by their need to find out about the people that they administered. SNR also regularly published papers on linguistics, archaeology, agricultural practices, the navigability of rivers (and edibility of their fish), the histories of towns and places, big game hunting, sport, and a miscellany of other topics. These papers were written by colonial officials, anthropologists, missionaries, doctors, and others. 

Later on, Sudanese increasingly contributed to SNR. In the 1920s, a number of articles ‘written by Sudanese sheikhs’ were allotted to favoured notables and tribal chiefs. In the late 1930s, the editorial policy of SNR expanded to include articles and correspondences written by the intelligentsia, including Sayyed Abd el-Rahman el-Mahdi, the patron of a prominent Sudanese political party—the Umma. Until independence in 1956, the ‘Sudanisation’ of contribution to the journal became one of the focal points of editorial notes.

SNR volumes 1-32 and 48 are included in Sudan Memory. All other volumes can be accessed via digital library JSTOR www.jstor.org.