Every other dossier on this site sets out two cases for owning a place. This one sets out two cases for not owning it. Bir Tawil is claimed by no state — and that is not an oversight but the exact arithmetic of a dispute about somewhere else. Each of Egypt's and Sudan's boundary positions on the Hala'ib Triangle — the next stretch of the same border, ten times the size — hands Bir Tawil to the other. Claiming Bir Tawil would mean conceding Hala'ib. What follows is each state's boundary case in its own documents, with the other's answer on every card. This page does not say who is right about Hala'ib, and it draws no single correct line.
VOTE What should become of this land? Naming rule This site's rule is that the name used by the state in effective control leads. Here no state is in effective control, so the rule has nothing to work on: Bir Tawil is the transliteration used in both states' own material and in the technical literature, and Arabic is the language of both. The spelling varies even in Arabic — بئر طويل in Modern Standard usage, بير طويل in the Egyptian form and in OpenStreetMap's alternate names. It means long well. One further note: this page does not use the phrase terra nullius in its own voice, for reasons set out at the endadmin_level tag — checked live in August 2026 — and describes it as "Territory unclaimed by any country." Downstream libraries inherit the gap; one bug report is titled "Africa is a donut" 2026-08 Egyptian strikes and mass arrests at artisanal gold-mining camps along the border. Casualty counts range from 23 to more than 50 across outlets, and which side of the line the strikes fell on is disputed. No reporting places them inside Bir Tawil.
The Secretary-General records that Sudan's 1958 complaint — item 52 — will remain on the Council's list of matters of which it is seized for a further year.
Egypt replies, reaffirming without restating: it wishes "to reiterate what Egypt has stated in all its communications to the Security Council regarding this matter."
Sudan writes to the President of the Security Council asking that the 1958 complaint be retained — as it has in every January for which a letter was retrieved for this page.
Reports circulate that Sudan's leadership directed the adoption of maps showing Hala'ib as Egyptian. Officially denied by Sudan; not treated as fact here.
Civil war begins in Sudan. Control of Hala'ib and the status of Bir Tawil are unchanged; Sudan's capacity to press the claim by any means but the annual letter is not.
A bug report titled "Africa is a donut" is opened against a geocoding library: because Bir Tawil belongs to no country, the library cannot place it on a continent.
Suyash Dixit reaches Bir Tawil, plants sunflower seeds and declares a kingdom. No state responds.
Jeremiah Heaton plants a flag. He says he obtained permission from the Egyptian military to make the journey; the account is his own. Neither government comments.
Jack Shenker and Omar Robert Hamilton reach Bir Tawil — the first documented visit — and deliberately make no claim.
After the attempt on President Mubarak's life in Addis Ababa, Egypt expels Sudanese police and administrators from Hala'ib. Sudan protests to the Council on 17 July and offers to go to arbitration or the International Court.
The Security Council meets on Sudan's complaint at its 812th meeting. Egypt announces a postponement; the Council takes no decision, and has not returned to the item since.
⇄ The order of the two narrative sections below is randomized on every visit.
Egypt's position is that the only international treaty on this boundary is the Anglo-Egyptian Agreement of 19 January 1899, which places it on the 22nd parallel of latitude. Everything since — the 1902 line, the 1907 confirmation — was an Egyptian ministerial arrangement for administering nomadic tribes, and administration is not sovereignty. The Hala'ib Triangle lies north of the parallel and is therefore Egyptian; Egypt has administered it since 1995 and has not taken up Sudan's offer of arbitration in any letter read for this page. The same sentence that gives Egypt Hala'ib takes Bir Tawil away from it, and Egypt does not flinch from that: on Egyptian maps Bir Tawil is Sudanese.
The agreement established the Anglo-Egyptian condominium and drew the boundary as a parallel of latitude — a straight line across the Nubian desert, drawn without reference to anything on the ground. Bir Tawil's northern edge sits exactly on it: 22.0000°N, running about 94 km east to west. Hala'ib lies north of the parallel; Bir Tawil lies south.
The same ministry had already moved the Wadi Halfa salient across the parallel by a decree of 26 March 1899 — that one, the State Department notes, "in effect became an international line." The 1902 boundary did not. It was shortened in 1907, on a proposal from the Egyptian Intelligence Service approved by the Sirdar on 22 June: the western segment was cut back to run only as far as the 22nd parallel from Jebel Bartazuga, eliminating an indefinite triangle of land reaching toward the Nile. Confirmed unchanged on 10 October 1909. One source dissents on authorship, and it is outweighed. Keesing's contemporary account of the 1958 crisis attributes the 1902 decree to the Governor-General of the Sudan and puts an Egyptian Interior Ministry decree in 1907 "recognizing the new boundary." Against that stand the State Department's technical study and, in part, Sudan's own representative at the Security Council. He called the instrument of 25 July 1902 "a ministerial enactment" — not an act of a Governor-General — and he named the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior for the Wadi Halfa order of 26 March 1899 and for a confirming communication of October 1916. He did not name a ministry for the 1902 instrument itself. That narrows the conflict without closing it: the attribution Keesing's makes is contradicted by the party it would favour, but no source read for this page has Sudan calling the 1902 enactment Egyptian. Two smaller discrepancies do remain: Sudan's Council statement dates a further modifying enactment to later in November 1902 where the State Department gives the activating decree as 4 November, and it cites an Egyptian communication of October 1916 confirming the line, which the State Department does not mention.
Egypt made the same argument in 1958 in two forms. Keesing's records it maintaining that Sudan's transitional Constitution, "having been drawn up unilaterally, did not affect the 1899 agreement, which was the only international treaty on the subject." The State Department records the sovereignty limb: Egypt held that the territories north of the parallel "were never part of the Sudan but were actually under Egyptian sovereignty because they were formerly administered by a bilateral arrangement in which Egypt was a partner."
Three published accounts, and they do not agree on which note carried the offer. The State Department's boundary study places it in the first note, of 1 February, and frames it as administration rather than territory: Egypt asked for the return of everything north of the parallel and "would reciprocate by turning over the Egyptian administered territory south of the 22nd parallel to Sudanese administration." Osman at the Council attaches it to the same memorandum. Keesing's contemporary summary instead puts it in "a second Note of Feb. 13, which asked for an early settlement and offered to exchange the Egyptian territory south of the 22nd parallel for the two Sudanese areas north of it." Sudan's own letter to the Secretary-General of 20 February walks through the Egyptian notes of 1, 13 (dated 9), 16 and 18 February and does not mention the offer at all. None of the four documents uses the name Bir Tawil.
Read the tense. Keesing's in 1958 described the 1902 decree as one by which "two areas north of it were incorporated in the Sudan for administrative purposes and a third area south of it became Egyptian territory," and listed among the disputed places "a desert area of Egyptian territory to the west of the first area, lying south of the 22nd parallel." The State Department in 1962 wrote plainly of "the area administered by the United Arab Republic to the south of the 22nd parallel." The Factbook, decades later, records that Egypt no longer shows that administration. Nothing changed on the ground.
Hala'ib is commonly given as 20,580 km² of Red Sea coast with towns at Hala'ib, Abu Ramad and Shalatin — roughly ten times Bir Tawil. The two are not distant places. They meet at a single point on the 22nd parallel, at about 34°04′48″E, where the 1902 line crosses it: Bir Tawil to the south-west of that point, Hala'ib to the north-east. The coastal towns lie some 300 km further east. One line, one crossing, two anomalies back to back. Egypt has administered it since 1995; secondary accounts date the takeover to the weeks after the attempt on President Mubarak's life in Addis Ababa on 26 June that year, when it expelled Sudanese police and administrators. Egypt runs it within the Red Sea Governorate. It holds elections there — "all territory north of the 22nd parallel of latitude north falls within one of the electoral districts of Egypt," with polling for presidential, parliamentary and local elections and for referendums. It "rejects and does not recognize any action that the Sudan has taken, or might take in the future, to suggest that it has territorial rights north of the 22nd parallel," and calls such action a breach for which Sudan "can be held internationally responsible." On procedure Egypt says little. The nearest thing is a past-tense sentence in its letter of 10 July 1995, explaining why it had not itself gone to the Council: it "sincerely believed that the historical relations between the Egyptian and the Sudanese peoples would enable a solution to the problem to be found by means of bilateral negotiations." That is an explanation of Egypt's own restraint rather than an answer on arbitration. Sudan's reply a week later says it declares its readiness "once again," so the offer was not new even then, and no Egyptian letter read for this page takes it up.
Sudan's position is that the 1899 agreement was amended in 1902 and 1907 by instruments made between the two governments, and that what those instruments produced is the operative boundary. Hala'ib lies north of the 22nd parallel and south of the 1902 line, was administered from Khartoum for half a century, and its people voted as Sudanese in 1953; it is therefore Sudanese. Sudan has offered arbitration and the International Court, and has kept its 1958 complaint alive at the Security Council by letter in the first week of January in every year for which a letter was retrieved here. The same line that gives Sudan Hala'ib gives Bir Tawil to Egypt — and on Sudanese maps that is where it is.
The stated purpose was "to facilitate the administration of nomadic tribes along the international boundary and to retain the continuity of certain tribal areas." The result is 222 miles of straight-line segments running from the 22nd parallel at about 33°10′E east to Bi'r Shalatayn and the Red Sea, delimited but never demarcated on the ground. It departs from the parallel in exactly two places: north of it near the coast, where Hala'ib was placed under Sudanese administration, and immediately west of that, south of the parallel, where Bir Tawil was placed under Egyptian administration. Bir Tawil is the only stretch where the 1902 line runs south of the 1899 line.
The same footnote records two further facts Sudan relies on. Sudan on independence "made known that it reserved the right to determine whether it would be bound by any treaty or agreement made on its behalf prior to independence." And on 3 January 1956 President Nasser received a letter from Sudan's Prime Minister setting out that position, "to which the Egyptian Government made no formal protest." On the administrative question the same study concludes that "for most purposes the states concerned had treated the two territories as being under Sudanese administration for approximately a half century."
Two territories, not one: the north-eastern corner above 22°N, and the area north of Wadi Halfa comprising Saras, Debeira and Faras — about 140 square miles that the Aswan High Dam would later flood. The Council met the following day, 21 February, at its 812th meeting. Sudan's representative Yacoub Osman argued that the same boundaries "have remained, on the whole, undisputed for nearly sixty years" and that "for practical purposes, the administrative boundary is the really important one." He did not stop there, and what he said next is the strongest passage in the 1958 record for Egypt: "The 22nd parallel north is taken as the general boundary, and such modifications as were made in this arbitrary line were made for the obvious reason of avoiding the placing of portions of the same tribe under different administrations." He also called the 1902 instrument "a ministerial enactment" — Egypt's characterisation, not the "agreements and treaties concluded between the Egyptian Government and the Sudan Government" of his own Prime Minister's letter of the previous day. Egypt announced the same day that it would postpone the frontier question until after the Sudanese elections. The Council took no decision. It has not met on the item since.
The trigger was oil. Sudan agreed terms in principle with the Canada-based International Petroleum Corporation on 15 August 1991 over blocks including Hala'ib, signed in January 1992; the row broke out that February. Sudan complained to the Council repeatedly in 1993 and 1994. After the attempt on President Mubarak's life in Addis Ababa on 26 June 1995, Egypt expelled Sudanese police and administrators, and Sudan's protest of 17 July followed. Sudan's own filings date the occupation to 1995.
The Council's own procedure explains why the letter has to be written. Items not considered at a formal meeting for three years are listed as subject to deletion, and "will be deleted unless a Member State notifies the President of the Security Council by 28 February 2026 that it wishes an item subject to deletion to remain on the list." Item 52 reads: "Letter dated 20 February 1958 from the representative of the Sudan addressed to the Secretary-General (21 February 1958; 21 February 1958)" — first taken up and last considered on the same day, sixty-eight years ago. On 2 March 2026 the Secretary-General recorded that, "at the request of Member States and with the concurrence of the Security Council," every item then subject to deletion — item 52 among them — would remain for one additional year. The addendum does not name Sudan or single the item out. Nine such letters were located for this page, and all nine fall in the first week of January: 5 January 2017 (S/2017/7), 3 January 2019 (S/2019/3), 2 January 2020 (S/2020/9), 4 January 2021, 6 January 2022, 4 January 2023, 3 January 2024, 6 January 2025 and 5 January 2026. Seven were read in full; the 2019 and 2020 letters are identified by symbol and date in Egypt's replies to them. They are worded almost identically, and what changes is the item's number as the list around it is edited — 56 in 2017 and 2019, 59 in 2020, 55 in 2021, 53 in 2022 and 2023, 55 in 2024, 54 in 2025, 52 in 2026. It falls and rises, because items are added to the Council's list as well as deleted from it. No letter was located here for 2018, which is a gap in this page's retrieval rather than a finding about Sudan.
Sudan's filings before the Council, from 1958 to the letter of January 2026, concern the territories north of the parallel. Bir Tawil is not named in any of them. The refusal is expressed only cartographically, and the same is true in reverse of Egypt. No instrument of renunciation has been located on either side. What exists is two sets of official maps that each place the trapezoid in the other country.
Neither state claims Bir Tawil, and no third party claims it either. But the reason the 1902 boundary bends at all is that people were already crossing it, and they are named in the instrument that created the anomaly. This section is here because the two-sided format would otherwise delete them, and because every popular account of Bir Tawil depends on the land being empty.
The Ababda and the Bisharin — both Beja peoples, the Ababda based on the Egyptian side and the Bisharin on the Sudanese — are the reason the 1902 line exists. The State Department's summary of the instrument names them, and names one exception by tribe and by well: the Melikabe-Kibli, with the well at Bir-Bekhwat, to be under the Sudanese Government. Jack Shenker's account of the same document adds the detail that Jebel Bartazuga, the mountain the line runs to, "was home to the nomadic Ababda tribe, which was considered to have stronger links with Egypt than Sudan."
Shenker sets the argument against its own history, quoting the British commissioner Sir Charles Eliot on East Africa: "I cannot admit that wandering tribes have a right to keep other and superior races out of large tracts … merely because they have acquired the habit of straggling over far more land than they can utilise." His verdict is the title of this card. Jeremiah Heaton, who planted a flag there in 2014, is reported to have told the Guardian the opposite — that the Bedouin do not enter Bir Tawil because it is too dry, and that the few people he spoke to welcomed his plans, while conceding he spoke to only a handful. That account reaches this page through the research behind it and could not be re-read at source; theguardian.com is not retrievable from this environment.
The people present in and around the trapezoid today are artisanal gold prospectors, and the armed groups escorting and preying on them are drawn mainly from the same Beja communities the 1902 line was drawn around. Visitor accounts from 2019 and 2020 describe substantial mining camps and being escorted by armed Ababda men; tour operators reported mining settlements and, in 2024, weapons dealers. In June 2026 Egyptian aircraft and artillery struck artisanal mining camps in the border zone and Egyptian forces made mass arrests. Those strikes were reported near Hala'ib and in Sudan's River Nile State — not inside Bir Tawil — and which side of the line they fell on is disputed, as are the casualty figures. No mining licence has been recorded inside Bir Tawil itself.
Three passages that both states quote. Select a reading to see how each side uses the same words.
Article I, 1899: "The word 'Soudan' in this Agreement means all the territories south of the 22nd parallel of latitude ..." Sudan, 1995: "The agreement concluded between the two parties in 1899 and amended in 1902 and 1907 provides that the Sudan has sovereignty over the territories and region of Halaib." Egypt, 1995: the Sudanese claims are "contrary to a correct legal interpretation of the nature of the provisional arrangements made for the benefit of certain Sudanese tribes in a desire to strengthen links between the two peoples." Sudan, 1958: the territories belong to Sudan "by virtue of agreements and treaties concluded between the Egyptian Government and the Sudan Government in 1902 and 1907."
There is one international instrument here and everything else is domestic. The 1899 agreement was made between Egypt and Great Britain; the 1902 arrêté and decree were issued by an Egyptian minister, and the 1907 change was proposed by the Egyptian Intelligence Service and approved by the Sirdar. A state cannot cede territory by internal administrative order to a territory it was itself co-administering. Sudan's own phrase gives the game away — it calls them agreements between "the Egyptian Government and the Sudan Government" in 1902, when there was no Sudanese government to conclude anything with.
The instruments are amendments, and both states treated them as binding for half a century. Sudan does not need the 1902 line to be a treaty; it needs it to be what the two administrations actually operated, which the State Department confirms: for most purposes the territories were "treated as being under Sudanese administration for approximately a half century." And Egypt cannot call the 1902 acts merely internal in one breath and tell the Security Council in the next that "the Egyptian ministerial decisions on the administration of the area … buttress the Egyptian case."
Both parties are quoted from their own filings. The characterisations — provisional arrangements, agreements and treaties — are each side's own words for the same documents, and neither is adopted here.
Provisional Constitution: the state comprises "all those territories which were included in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan immediately before the commencement of this Constitution." State Department: on 3 January 1956 Nasser received Sudan's position on existing treaties, "to which the Egyptian Government made no formal protest" — and the same study records Egypt's answer, that the areas north of the parallel "were never part of the Sudan but were actually under Egyptian sovereignty." Keesing's, 1958: Egypt maintained that the transitional Constitution, "having been drawn up unilaterally, did not affect the 1899 agreement, which was the only international treaty on the subject." Sudan, 1958: the inhabitants "have voted as Sudanese nationals in the Sudanese Parliamentary elections in 1953" and "at no time did they vote in any Egyptian parliamentary election or plebiscite."
A state cannot enlarge itself by writing its own constitution. Whatever Khartoum declared in 1956, it could not convert an administrative convenience into a boundary, and silence in the face of a unilateral document is not consent to it. As for the elections: voting rolls are administrative records too. They show who was being administered, which nobody disputes, not who held sovereignty, which is the question.
Succession takes the territory as it was administered, and Egypt watched it happen. The administration ran to the 1902 line from 1902 to 1956 without interruption. Egypt received Sudan's statement of position on 3 January 1956 and did not protest, and did not raise the question at all until the plebiscite of February 1958 gave it a reason. The people of the disputed areas were Sudanese nationals who had already voted twice as Sudanese and never once as Egyptians.
The 1953 elections and the Provisional Constitution concern Hala'ib and the Wadi Halfa area, which had inhabitants. They do not concern Bir Tawil, which had no settled population then and has none now — which is why neither state has ever argued about it in these terms.
Osman (Sudan): the boundaries have "remained, on the whole, undisputed for nearly sixty years" … "for practical purposes, the administrative boundary is the really important one." Loutfi (Egypt): "There is really no point in referring here to the agreement … concluded at Cairo between Egypt and Great Britain in 1899 or to the Egyptian ministerial decisions on the administration of the area which, incidentally, buttress the Egyptian case." Loutfi: "there are no Egyptian armed forces in that area. We have frontier guards, who are needed to maintain order and security." Sudan's letter: "a breach of Sudanese sovereignty … may develop into armed conflict."
Egypt declined to litigate because it did not need to. Loutfi's point was that the Council was the wrong forum and the complaint was domestic politics: Sudan had gone to New York before exhausting the peaceful means in Article 33, on the eve of its own elections. The remark about the ministerial decisions is not a concession — it is the observation that even the instruments Sudan relies on are Egyptian acts, made by Egypt, and that a party does not strengthen its case by citing the other side's paperwork.
Egypt refused to argue the law in the one forum where it would have been recorded. Sudan came with documents, dates and a nationality argument; Egypt came with an assurance of brotherhood and a postponement. And in the same breath in which it said the 1902 decisions need not be discussed, it claimed them. The Council heard the case once, took no decision, and has not returned to it — which is the outcome Egypt's approach was designed to produce.
Osman spoke English; Loutfi spoke French and is quoted from the United Nations translation, which matters more than usual here. The French column of the same record reads that the Egyptian ministerial decisions "qui, notamment, appuient le bien-fondé de la thèse égyptienne" — notably support the Egyptian case. The United Nations English renders notamment as "incidentally," which tilts the sentence the other way, and Sudan's reading below turns on exactly that tilt. Neither reading is endorsed here.
No international body has ever determined anything about this boundary. Sudan has offered arbitration and the International Court; Egypt does not take it up in the letters read here. What exists outside the two capitals is technical, cartographic and journalistic — and one category that simply fails to apply.
Seven pages of text and no map. It gives the international boundary as 792 miles, the administrative boundary as 222 miles, the Wadi Halfa salient as slightly under eight miles wide at its base and reaching 22°12′12″N, and records that the boundary is "delimited throughout" but "has not been demarcated." OpenStreetMap's polygon of Bir Tawil is consistent with its geometry — the western vertex sits at 33°10′E and the southern at Jebel Bartazuga — though the relation carries no source tag, so the link is inference rather than documentation. Measured for this page the polygon computes to about 2,020 km², against the commonly published figure of 2,060.
The Sudan entry of the same edition carries the same Hala'ib clause, differing by one word — "the Halaib region" — and no Bir Tawil clause at all; in both entries the clause sits inside a longer list of disputes rather than standing alone. Note also where the Factbook puts the place: "the Bir Tawil trapezoid in Sudan." By the November 2023 edition the asymmetry had reversed. Egypt's "Disputes – international" field no longer listed an Egypt–Sudan dispute at all, only Egypt–Gaza and Egypt–Ethiopia. Sudan's still carried it, now under an explicit heading: "Sudan-Egypt: Sudan claims, but Egypt de facto administers, security and economic development of the Halaib region north of the 22nd parallel boundary."
Bir Tawil is not on the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories, and the reason is structural rather than substantive. Chapter XI attaches its obligations to Members that administer territories; the listing mechanism works through information those administering Powers transmit. Bir Tawil has no administering Power to transmit anything. When the flag-planting reached the press in 2014, a spokesman for the Secretary-General told the Washington Post that defining a country's borders was not the United Nations' role.
OpenStreetMap relation 3335661 carries boundary=administrative and description:en=Territory unclaimed by any country. and — checked live for this page in August 2026, at version 52 — no admin_level tag at all. That absence is deliberate and contested: the tag was added and removed repeatedly in the relation's early history, at versions 3, 7, 8 and 15. On 14 July 2014, days after the flag-planting reached the press, the relation was renamed "Kingdom of North Sudan"; it was reverted three weeks later, renamed again through a run of edits on 24 February 2016 and reverted a fortnight after that, and renamed a third time on 7 October 2022 as "Finnish Sahara Territory" — with admin_level=3 attached — and reverted eighty-five minutes later. The relation also carries timezone=Africa/Cairo, which is a practical tag for software and says nothing about status.
Three independent reasons are given in the literature, any one of which is sufficient. First, only states are capable of acquiring territorial sovereignty — Anthony Arend of Georgetown told the Washington Post in 2014 that under international law only states can assert sovereignty over territory. Secondary accounts render his words in indirect speech and this page could not reach the original, so it is given as reported substance rather than as a quotation. Second, occupation as a mode of acquisition presupposes unappropriated land, and Bir Tawil is not unappropriated but doubly appropriated: each state places it inside its own boundary system and assigns it to the other. Third, even if the mode were open, Borgen quotes James Crawford: "the effective and exclusive governmental control of territory necessary for its acquisition is rarely sustainable by a collection of individuals lacking a previous political organization."
Jack Shenker and Omar Robert Hamilton reached Bir Tawil in January 2011 and deliberately made no claim. Jeremiah Heaton, a Virginian, obtained permission from the Egyptian military, drove south from Aswan and planted a flag on 16 June 2014, his daughter's seventh birthday, declaring a "Kingdom of North Sudan"; a Disney film was developed and never made. Suyash Dixit of Indore reached it on 4 November 2017, planted sunflower seeds and declared a "Kingdom of Dixit." Several further claims were made without anyone going there. No state or international organisation has recognised any of them, and neither government has issued a formal response — the Washington embassies did not reply to Al Jazeera in 2015, and Foreign Policy reported in 2019 that there had been no reaction from either. One on-record remark exists, and it is Sudanese: Gamal Malik Ahmed Goraish, a counselor at Sudan's embassy in Washington, is reported to have said that "there is no land between Egypt and Sudan that doesn't have any owner," adding that the two states are negotiating ownership and that "there is no third party." It is a diplomat's comment to a reporter, not a filing.
Votes per hour. A surge is not hidden here — it is drawn.
One line, from people who voted. No replies. Your side and country are shown with it.
Vote first — this is where a vote gets its reason.
No lines yet.
How this page is built, and what it refuses to do. This is the only dossier on this site in the inverted format, and three decisions follow from that.
① It carries no controller line in the usual sense. Every other page names the state in effective control. Here the honest answer is that no state administers Bir Tawil and none has for decades — but that is not the same as saying nobody is there, and the status block says what is exercised on the ground instead: Egyptian control of the northern approaches, and a gold economy run by armed groups from the same communities the 1902 line was drawn around. The de jure position is stranger than the popular account: on paper, contemporary sources described the area as Egyptian-administered into the 1960s. The disclaimer hardened; it was not there from the start.
② It draws no single correct boundary. Both lines are shown together, labelled as the line each party relies on, and Hala'ib is never coloured in one state's colour in this page's voice. That rule applies across this site and it applies here with particular force, because any accurate account of Bir Tawil necessarily displays two incompatible maps of somewhere that is genuinely disputed and genuinely inhabited.
③ It does not use terra nullius in its own voice. The phrase is the reason most readers have heard of this place, and it is contested by every specialist source consulted here. Bir Tawil is not outside both states' claim systems; it is inside both of them, assigned by each to the other. It is over-determined rather than undetermined. The phrase also carries a history — it was the instrument by which inhabited land was declared empty — and this page would rather not borrow it to describe a place the same peoples have crossed since before either line was drawn.
What no card on this page carries is the determined by an international body label, because nothing here has ever been determined by one. On that there is one asymmetry worth stating plainly, since it is a fact about procedure rather than about title: Sudan has offered international arbitration in writing at the Security Council — in 1995, where it also offered a ruling by the International Court of Justice, and again in 2018, where it named arbitration alone. The word arbitration appears in the Sudanese letters read for this page and in none of the Egyptian ones; Egypt’s letters restate its title and do not take the offer up. That is a description of the documents, not a reading of Egypt’s intentions, and the two states do meet — Sudan’s own 2018 letter refers to four high-level meetings that February. Which of them is right about Hala’ib is a question this page does not answer, and could not answer honestly, because nobody with the authority to answer it has been asked.
One last observation, and it belongs to both states rather than either. The refusal of Bir Tawil is the most disciplined territorial position either government holds: kept up for more than a century, on their official maps, in their filings, and — Egypt’s in 2018, Sudan’s every January — in writing at the Security Council, without a word of it ever being about Bir Tawil.
Editorial principles. ① This edition quotes each state's boundary case from its own filings and from the published treaty and technical record. ② The order of the two narrative sections is randomized on every visit. ③ Every dispute on this site is labelled with its de facto controller; here that line reads no state, and the status block says what is actually exercised on the ground instead. ④ No single boundary is drawn as correct — every line is labelled as the line one party relies on.
The same border, drawn twice
Drawn for this page from the geometry in US Department of State, International Boundary Study No. 18 (1962). A schematic, not a survey. Neither line is presented as correct: each panel shows the boundary one state relies on, and both territories change hands between them. This is the mechanism in one image — the line that gives a state Hala’ib is the same line that takes Bir Tawil away from it
Two lines, and the two holes they make
Above: CC BY-SA 3.0 — Cmglee & McGeddon · Wikimedia Commons. Both claim lines are drawn together and neither is presented as correct: Hala'ib is the area both states claim, Bir Tawil the area neither does. Below: public domain — US Army Map Service, Series Y502 sheet NF 36-11, 1960 · Wikimedia Commons. The 1960 sheet prints both lines and names them: (POLITICAL BOUNDARY) along 22°00′, (ADMINISTRATIVE BOUNDARY) along the southern edge. The mapmaker did not have to choose, and did not
The trapezoid from orbit
Public domain — Landsat 8 / OLI, US Geological Survey and NASA · Wikimedia Commons · About 2,060 km², its northern edge lying exactly on the 22nd parallel and running some 94 km east to west. The outline is added; nothing on the ground marks it. No photograph of Bir Tawil exists under a free licence, which is why this page carries none