8o THE NON-ARAB RACES OF DARFUR i. 4. ix.

Immediately after Ibn Selim's account of the Sudan Makrizi places

the following passage:

J'ai vu aussi dans une lettre adressee par certaines tribus a Temir des croyants 'Ali ben Abou Taleb^, qu'il etait fait mention des Bedjahs et des Kadjahs lesquels sent tres mechants, mais peu pillards"^. Les Bedjahs sent

ainsi; quant aux Kadjahs, on n'en connait que ce qu'en dit 'Abdullah ben Ahmed I'historien de Nubie^.

'AbduUa ibn Ahmad is Ibn Selim el Aswani, who wrote between

975 and 996 a.d., but what he had to say about the "Kajjara" we do not know because the extracts from his work quoted by el Makrizi

contain no mention of them.

X Bayko. The Bayko, neighbours of the Dagu and Birked, are

said by Slatin* to belong to the Monolke family and to have emi-

grated from the Bahr el Ghazal in ancient days and to have been granted lands in Darfur on condition of supplying annually a maiden

for the royal harem. But the mother of the Sultan Muhammad Fadl

( 1 800-1 838) was a Baykawia and he, in consequence, declared the

tribe free for ever, and forbade the buying and selling of them under

penalty of death. The Bayko at present, as is natural, deny the

implication of "slave" {i.e. negro) origin and merely point with pride

to the fact of their intermarriage with Fur royalty. As a tribe they do not claim to be Arabs but, as usual in Darfur, the royal house

of Bayko, the holders of the nahds, the Terkit Haggar section of

the SuBHANiN that is, affect a Ga'ali origin. It was one of them, by name Um Busa, who married the father of Muhammad Fadl. Of their

early history the Bayko know little, but the general tradition among them is that their ancestors came from the East via southern Kordo-

fan and the Nuba country at much the same time as the Bakkara. The tradition is, however, much too vague to have any real value. Browne identified the Bayko ("Bego") too closely with the Dagu in speaking of "the people of Bego or Dageou who are now [i.e. 1799] subject to the crown of Fur but are a different tribe which formerly

ruled the country^"; but at the same time the dialects of the Bayko and Dagu are almost identical^ and it is curious that when I asked

^ The letter must therefore have been written within twenty years of the con- quest of Egypt.

" Burckhardt translates (p. 509): "Warlike nations who do not make much booty." The above quotation is from Bouriant's translation (11, 570).

^ Burckhardt translates: "But I know not who the Kedja are." * Ch. II.

° Browne, p. 285. There is a mention by Ibn Sa'id (ap. Abu el Fidd, p. 158) of a people called the Bajo, connected with the Zaghdwa, and the term puzzled Barth {q.v. Vol. in, Ch. li, p. 426). It is, however, very unlikely that the Baylco are meant.

* E.g. see examples given above when speaking of the Ddgu.