12 THE NATHTE MANUSCRIPTS iv. xiv.

Muhammad walad Doli'b the younger simply quotes Ibn Khaldun when he states that "the original autochthonous people of the Sudan were the Nuba and the Abyssinians and the Zing^," but he goes on

to classify the Hamag as Zing and the Fung as Nuba. " The original

[home] of the Zing," he says, "is a mountain inhabited by blacks on the equator and south [of it]. Beyond them are no other peoples; and their country stretches from West Africa [el Moghrab] to the

neighbourhood of Abyssinia^." Sennar, he adds, in old days con-

tained "tribes of Zing and Nuba^." Daud Kubara of Haifa discussing the Nubian race says that the capital of the kingdom of the Nuba was Gebel el Haraza in Northern

Kordofan : he also speaks of Abyssinians and Nubians as living to-

gether round the first cataract*. The limits of Nubia to the south in the seventh century, in his view, would seem to have been Debba on the river and el Haraza inland'^. When civil war broke out between

the Beni 'Abbas and the Beni Ommayya in the next century, he says, many Arabs migrated and, following the steps of previous emi-

grants, settled in the Sudan "and mingled with the Nubians, and took their women to wife, and intermarried with them, and made

the land of Nuba their home. . .^." The same author speaks of Southern

Kordofan, Dar Nuba that is, as inhabited by " Zing-Nuba'."

Referring to the origin of the Fung race the manuscripts commonly

speak of Sulayman 'Abd el Malik as passing through Abyssinia into the "mountains of the Fung " or " the country of the Hamag," mean-

ing the northern Burun country south of Rosayres, and there marry-

ing the daughter of a local king, — whence the Fung aristocracy. The Fung chronicle says that about 1504 a.d. the Fung and their Arab allies overthrew the Christian "Nuba," otherwise "the 'Anag, the kings of Soba and el Kerri," and most of "the Nuba... scattered and fled to Fazoghli and Kordofan^." Similarly the Tabakat^: "Know that the Fung possessed and conquered the land of the Nuba early in the tenth century" (sc. of Islam).

Muhammad walad Dolib the elder classes as "'Anag" the Fun- KUR, the aborigines of Borku, the people of Bakirmi, the Dagu, and

'Di.cLxxvui. ''Di.cLxxxn. ^ ^ j clxxxiii. * 1^4, IV. » D4, VI and XX.

' D4. VII. 7 D4, XXI. ' P?. QV. paras, i-x. The 'Ana^, I have been assured, came originally from Sabd in southern Arabia, and their headquarters were at S6ba on the east bank. 1 hey had wonderful means of communication between Sabd and S6ba, it is said; but the story that when Kinj,' Subr of S6ba fell ill his father came "by telegraph" from Sabd in one day has so taxed even the credulitv of the Sudan that the retort

to a cock-and-bull story is " Khubru Subru!" ("a Subr yarn!"). • D 3, q.v. para. iv.