The Battle of Shaykan was a battle of the Mahdist War that was fought in Kordofan, Sudan in 1883.
In 1881, the "Mahdi" Muhammad Ahmad retreated into the deserted Kordofan region to raise an army there and in Darfur, and he destroyed a 4,000-strong Egyptian force sent to capture him and looted its equipment. By 1883, he was said to have had 200,000 dervishes in his army. Egyptian governor Rauf Pasha raised an army of his own to crush the rebellion, appointing British officer William Hicks Pasha to lead an expedition of 11,000 Egyptian Army soldiers - many of them just freed from prison following the Anglo-Egyptian War, and showing little willingness to fight - to crush the Mahdi's army. The 8,000 Egyptian regulars, 1,000 bashi-bazouk cavalry, and 100 tribal irregulars were unpaid, untrained, undisciplined, and had more in common with their enemies than with their officers, and they had a large supply train of 2,000 camp followers and 5,000 camels. Led astray by their guides, they were ambushed by the 40,000-strong Mahdist army from 3 to 5 November 1883, and the Egyptian soldiers began to desert en masse, with a third of the Egyptian soldiers surrendering and their officers being massacred. Only 500 Egyptian troops escaped back to Khartoum, while Hicks, his staff, and even the journalists Frank Vizetelly and Edmund O'Donovan were slaughtered. Osman Digna was inspired by the Mahdist victory, and he contributed his Hadendoa tribesmen to the rebellion from the Red Sea coast.