4 THE NATIVE MANUSCRIPTS IV. ii.

the next eight or nine as less so. Then follow seven or eight suc-

cessive ancestors whose names rest more firmly on the accepted authority of contemporary 7risbas compiled during that Augustan age of the Sudan, the period of the early Fung kingdom.

Beyond these are the weakest links in the chain, some fourteen or fifteen names probably due in part to the inventiveness of the genealogists of the Fung period and their anxiety to connect their own generation with that of the immediate descendants of the Com-

panions of the Prophet. III In the early centuries of Islam so much attention was paid, by generations that scrupulously observed the behest of Muhammad concerning pedigrees, to the exact inter-relationship of his Com-

panions and their ancestors that the native scribe of the present is naturally content to accept without question the statement of any ancient genealogist whose work may be accessible to him.

The popular idea of the value of a long pedigree is easily estimated from the opening paragraphs of the larger nishas that have been translated.

Unfortunately the Arab genealogies have always been almost purelv patrilinear, and little account is taken of the wives and daughters and the collateral lines. It is noticeable, however, that whereas in the more recent generations the mother is not mentioned

at all unless for some very special reason, her name is not infrequently given in the groups of ancestors who lived about the early Fung period, but then only incidentally and with a view to showing which of the sons of some particular man were full brothers and which

half-brothers. So, too, in the group of ancestors connecting the generations last mentioned with the better-known generations of those who lived in the seventh and eighth centuries a.d. one some-

times finds such names as ''so and so el Khazragi," meaning that his mother was a Khazragia^.

IV Now the traditions current among the Arabs of the Sudan on the subject of their racial origins and the circumstances and date of the migration of their forebears to the Sudan are almost entirely based upon statements they have found in the jiisbas handed down to them, though in a few cases their stock of information has been supplemented by the result of inadequate uncritical and unenlightened foragings among the works of one or two mediaeval Arabic historians.

'I'he Arabic historians if studied with greater care might well have saved the genealogists of the Sudan from a vast number of inaccuracies,

but, as it is, they have been so neglected that, unless the context

^ See BA, cxxxni note.