IV. IX. OF THE SUDAN 7

this book reached the Suhan Seh'm its contents delighted him and he renounced the attack on Sennar^."

Of el Samarkandi nothing more is known. He was probably one of the itinerant fekis who were attracted from Egypt by the fame

of the new kingdom founded in the Gezi'ra and by the probability that in the vanity and credulity of its rulers some profit might be found for himself. His original work has entirely disappeared and

the numerous "exact copies" of it that are periodically reported are never more than garbled extracts.

There are nine references to el Samarkandi in the manuscripts that follow: four of them are in A 2, two in A 11, two in C 5, and

one in D 6. From A 2 one gathers that el Samarkandi 's method was to give the pedigree and branches of the Ga'ali stock and so connect them with the Beni 'Abbas; then to tell how one Sulayman of the Beni Ommayya migrated through Abyssinia to the Sudan about

750 A.D., when the 'Abbasids were supplanting the Ommayyads, and became ancestor of the Fung; and finally, perhaps, to enumerate the Arab tribes of the Sudan and state very shortly from what Arabian

ancestor each was descended and whence and when it migrated to the Sudan.

From A II one gets the same impression but is told that there were two persons named el Samarkandi, Mahmud el Samarkandi

and 'Abdulla ibn Sa'id el Samarkandi. One of them was apparently called "el Samarkandi the Great." C 5 adds nothing to our informa-

tion. D6 speaks of "Abu Mahmud el Samarkandi." No direct information is vouchsafed in any of the manuscripts as to the date

or life of el Samarkandi ; and D 7, which makes a point of mention-

ing such savants as came to the Fung court, refers to no such person. To non- Sudanese literature so far as I am aware he is entirely unknown.

It would be unjustifiable, I think, to write him down a myth. His fame must rest on some basis or other of actuality. If one accept

the gist of Na'um Bey's account of him it is certainly allowable to

remark that at the time when el Samarkandi composed his work there must have been a fairly large fund of information still available about the circumstances of the entry of the Arabs into the Sudan and their tribal affinities. El Samarkandi would naturally make use of this, and the Arab chieftains of the day would be only too eager to supply him with genealogical details and tradition concerning

^ Translated from Na'um Bey Shukayr, ii, pp. 73, 74. Cp. Crowfoot in A.-E. Sudan, i, 319. Na'um Bey, I believe, got his facts by hearsay at Khartoum about the time of the reoccupation of the Sudan.