318 Ethnology of the Awjlo-Eijyptinn Sudan.

alone will permit us to delimit the frontiers of the various peoples are wanting.* Along the river, especially, one stock shades into another with such delicate gradations that no two observers seem to agree as to the point of division, and the theories of the people themselves as to their own origin and that of their neighbours — theories which seldom agree — have little foundation in fact, albeit to some they may prove of greater interest and political importance than the future classifications of the learned.

We must at present renounce all pretensions to scientific exactitude and confine ourselves to more or less popular distinctions ; accordingly, eliminating from oiu* survey all recent new-comers of European or Asiatic extraction, we shall divide the present inhabitants of the Sudan broadly into four groups — the Negro, the Nuba, the Bega, the Arab, (i) Negroes. -pjjg ancient Egyptians referred to the South — it is difficult to say where it began — as the land of the black man, just like their successors, who named it Nigritia or Belad el Sudan ; and they knew, as we know, that there were pygmy blacks as well as big fighting blacks. Whether the pygmies, relics of whom have been found all over the world, were evolved first in Africa or came in as immigrants, and whether the big blacks were developed by selection from them here or elsewhere we cannot here discuss. Suffice it to say that from before the dawn of history the two have always been in Africa, and that the Negroes of the Nile land are to-day more hopelessly subdivided than the Negroes of any other part. The pygmies have been now driven into the forests of Central Africa, and the big Negroes are now found in the Sudan only on the Upper reaches of the White and Blue Niles and in the hill countries to the west ; north of this they occur merely as immigrants, soldiers, slaves, etc., amounting, though, in some parts to almost 50 per cent, of the population. They vary enormously in size, colour, language, institutions, and religion, so that in spite of the great work of such explorers as Schweinfurth, Emin, and Junker, we are still far from unravelling the intricate web of their interrelations. A recent writer, who has given a popular account of the researches of travellers before the Mahdia, disclaims as impossible any attempt at scientific classification, and we can only follow him in grouping the blacks of the White Nile and its tributaries according to the picturesque impression which they made upon their visitors. In this book ("Die Heiden Neger des Aegyptischen Sudan," Berlin, 1893), Frobenius divides the blacks within our present frontiers into four groups : — I. The Swamp Negroes — Shilluk, Shuli, Bari, Jur, Nuer, Dinka or Jange, Anuak, etc. II. The Iron-working Negroes — Bongo, Mittu, Golo, Sheri, Madi, Kreich, etc. III. The A-Zande or Nyam Nyara. IV. The Latuka.

For further information about these people we must refer the reader to other chapters in this compendium, and to the authors mentioned above.

It only remains to point out that the blacks of Kordofan and the Blue Nile, offer practically virgin fields to the ethnologist, (ii) Nubas. Under this head we include (a) the Barabra, who are found between the 1st and 4th cataracts, and are subdivided into natives of Dongola, Mahas, Sukkot, Haifa, each with a different dialect ; {h) the Nubas of Kordofan, with their sub-tribes. To these some philologists add, on linguistic grotmds, a number of tribes usually described as negro or negroid.f Geographically, and perhaps physically also, these Nubians appear as a link between Egypt and Negro land. They are darker and smaller than the Egyptian, but still brown and not black, J although they often have, like so many Egyptians, the woolly hair of the Negro. It is probable that they represent the ancient Kushites, and the latest student of the old Ethiopian inscriptions has sought to prove that the Nubians and not the Begas were the rulers of ancient Napata.§ They are enterprising people, apt linguists and great travellers, very ready to take on a veneer of European culture, the last trait being an old one caricatured by the wall-painters of ancient Thebes. It is the more strange that they should have preserved their own dialects, especially as they have been Muslims for some centuries.

♦ Only one ethnologist of the first rank — R. Hartmanit — has spent any considerable time in the Sudan, and tliis was forty years ago. Except for his work we have to depend on (1) reports of officials and travellers ; these are often very valuable, but the different criteria of race, language, etc., used by these writers make it very difficult to use them with any confidence ; (2) the observations of " arru-chair savants who base great theories upon stray skulls, fragmentary vocabularies, chance studies of natives touring about Europe " on show," etc. This is not the place for a nice criticism of the respective values of these works.

t E.g., Cust (Modem languages of Africa, London, 1883, 1, p. 142) includes as " Nubas-Berta, Fung, Hanieg, Golo, Sheri Monbutto, Nyam-Nyam, and others."

I The Nubas of Kordofan, although certainly not negroes, are black.— G. Heinricli Schiifer, " Die Aethiojnsche Kijnigsinschrift des Berliner Museums," Leipzig, 1901.