358 THE NATIVE MANUSCRIPTS iv.dt.i.

times unexpectedly critical. He has rescued from oblivion the scanty records of many events that happened in the reigns of those kings of Sennar of whom little more than the names are recorded by Bruce and Cailliaud, and he has given us the only extant account of the Sudan in Turkish days as regarded from a native point of view. In

addition, so far as I am aware, he provides the only connected narra-

tive from which we can learn the names and dates of the successive Turkish Pashas and Beys who ruled the country, and he alone draws our attention to the experiments that were made in administrative decentralization between 1857 and 1862.

The account of Soba in pre-FuNG days (see para, i) is evidently

taken from the passage of Ibn Seli'm el Aswani preserved by el Makrizi and quoted above in Part II, Chap. 2.

I In the name of God the Compassionate and Merciful. Praise be to God.. . .

Now this is a history of the lands of the Nuba and relates who ruled them, beginning with the kings of the Fung, and what happened in their time [and] until this present day, and who succeeded them, and how their kingdom came to an end; but God Almighty best knows and judges of that which is hidden.

It is related in the histories which I have seen that the first of

the kings of the Fung who was invested with the royal power was

King 'Omara Dunkas, who founded the city of Sennar in 910 a.h.^

Previously to his date the Fung had overthrown the Nuba and made the city of Soba (sic) their metropolis ; and in that city were beautiful buildings and gardens and a hostel occupied by the Muhammadans.

Its site was on the east of the Nile, near to the confluence of that river with the White Nile; and the chief food of its inhabitants was the white dhurra known as el kassdbi. Their religion was Christianity, and they had a bishop appointed by the prelate of Alexandria, as had the Nuba before them. Their books were in Greek {Rumia) but they used to commentate upon them in their own language.

II These people were overthrown in the ninth century, and in those days there were no schools for the Muhammadans who lived among them and no observance of the Muhammadan law, so that

it is even said that a woman might be divorced by her husband and married by another man on the same day without any purificatory period. This state continued until the coming among them of Mahmud

el 'Araki from Egypt. He taught them some of the elements of Muhammadan law: he also built himself a hostel on the White Nile

1 1504 A.D.