III.] THE AFRICAN NEGRO : I. SUDANESE. 75 



with the historic data, it solves the Nubian problem ; for it is 

 impossible to suppose that the cultured Nile-Nubians could have 

 ever adopted or acquired the speech of the savage Kordofan 

 Nubas, unless it had always been their own mother-tongue ; in 

 other words, unless they were themselves originally Kordofan 

 Nubas. They were Christians, it should be remembered, for 

 many centuries, and although the flourishing Christian Empire of 

 Nubia, with its seventeen bishoprics and its thirteen viceroyalties, 

 all governed by priests, was not founded, as is commonly sup- 

 posed, by the renowned Silco, " King of the Noubads and of all 

 the Ethiopians," it was strong enough frequently to invade Egypt 

 in defence of their oppressed Greek and Koptic fellow-Christians. 

 So early as 640 a combined army of Nubas and Bejas, said to 

 have numbered 50,000 men with 1500 elephants, penetrated as 

 far north as Oxyrhynchus (the Arab Bahnosd) where such a sur- 

 prising store of Greek and other documents was discovered in 

 1897. Cultured peoples with such glorious records, and traditions 

 going back even to pre-Christian times (Silco and Queen Candace, 

 contemporary of Augustus), do not borrow their language from 

 the rude untutored aborigines on the distant frontiers of their 

 empire. Nevertheless Sayce may be right in conjecturing that 

 the old language of the Meroitic inscriptions was not the present 

 Nubian, but a Hamitic tongue akin to Berber. These inscriptions 

 ante-date the arrival of the Nubians from Kordofan by perhaps 

 1000 years, and must be referred to the pre-Nuba Hamites of the 

 Nile valley, whom Sayce, I think rightly, identifies with the Berbers. 

 "Two of the Ethiopian deities known to us have a strikingly 

 Libyan (Berber) appearance. One of them is Dudun, a name 

 which bears a remarkable resemblance to that of Didi^ one of the 

 Libyan enemies of Ramses III. 1 " All this harmonises completely 

 with my view that the present Nubians are late intruders in the 

 Nile Valley below Khartum, where they displaced the original 

 Hamitic inhabitants probably not more than 2500 years ago. 



valle del Nilo da Asmara a Dongola sono di stirpe camitica" (ib. p. 107). But 

 ethnical problems are like algebraic equations ; they cannot be solved if some 

 of the necessary factors be overlooked. 

 1 Academy, Ap. 14, 1894. 



