72 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



("The Tunisian ") who visited the country towards the close of 

 the 1 8th century. But of these reports I have no first-hand 

 knowledge. 



Nubas. As in Waday, the intruding and native populations 

 have been either imperfectly or not at all assimilated 

 Problem" Darfur and Kordofan, where the Muhammadan 



Semites still boast of their pure Arab descent 1 , and 

 form powerful confederacies of pastoral tribes, who with their 

 Nubian allies constitute the great disturbing element throughout 

 Egyptian Sudan. The Nubians themselves present one of the 

 hardest problems in the whole range of ethnological studies. 

 Having elsewhere discussed the question somewhat fully 2 , I will 

 here confine myself to a statement of the general conclusions 

 which I have arrived at, and which have not been seriously 

 questioned. We have first of all to get rid of the " Nuba-Fulah " 

 family, which was introduced by Fr. Miiller and accepted by 

 some English writers, but has absolutely no existence. The two 

 languages, although both of the agglutinative Sudanese type, are 

 radically distinct in all their structural, lexical, and phonetic 



1 Yet some, such as the dominant Baggaras, are almost as dark as the 

 blackest Negroes, but with quite regular well-shaped features. " These Bag- 

 garas looked like the fiends they really are of most sinister expression, with 

 murder and every crime speaking from their savage eyes. The Baggara were 

 ever known as a cruel, bloodthirsty people. Courage is their one good 

 quality" (Times Correspondent, July 28, 1896). Of the rival Jaalin (Jalin, 

 Jahaliii} the same observer remarks that they are "a proud and religious people, 

 claiming descent from Abbas, the uncle of the Prophet. They have for a long 

 time been the principal slave-hunters in the Sudan (the famous Zubeir was of 

 this tribe), and were formerly among the most zealous Mahdists " (/.). All 

 these Nilotic, Atbara, and Kordofan Bedouins (Baggara, Jaalin, Kababish, 

 Shukrieh, Robabat, Homran, Hassanieh, Dobeina, Yemanieh) speak Arabic, 

 but mostly as Chaucer's nun spoke French, and the pronunciation, especially 

 of the Baggara and Kababish tribes, differs greatly from that of the true Arabs. 

 Many of the characteristic Semitic sounds have been replaced by others possibly 

 inherited from a now extinct language, which could scarcely be any other than 

 the Hamitic still current amongst the Bejas beyond the Nile. Baggara, 

 for instance, should be Baqqara, i.e. "cowherds," while many of the Jaalin 

 sub-tribes have the Beja patronymic ending ab \ Gebalab, Kaliab, Sadab, 

 Timerab, &c. 



2 Ethnology of Egyptian Sudan, 1884, p. 12 sq. See also Eth. p. 270. 



