vi INTRODUCTION The chief reason for this disappearance of documents is not so much the reluctance of the "fekis" to risk their possessions in alien hands, though this motive has to be combated where confidence has not been established, as the indubitable fact that both the Mahdi and the Khalifa, and especially the latter, gave stringent orders for the destruction of all modern books and documents. The Mahdi feared that research might tend to invalidate his pretensions to be the Expected One, and the Khalifa, who was a Ta'ai'shi from Darfur, was only interested in genealogy to the extent of declining to appear less nobly born than his subjects. Consequently vast numbers of documents were deliberately burnt during the period of Dervish rule, many others were buried and so lost, or destroyed by white ants, and only a few survived to the present day.

My first impression after eximining a medley of these copies fragments and extracts was to the effect that they v/ere worthless ; but a closer acquaintance shewed, on the one hand, that there were various scattered remarks and indications which had a certain value in themselves, and, on the other, that some passages recurred almost word for word in the majority of the longer "nisbas" and pointed to a common origin dating from about the sixteenth century.

It also became more and more clear that, however faulty the details might be, the larger tribal genealogies, particularly those connected with the name of el Samarkandi, contained in the form of a genealogical parable much valuable information concerning the interrelation of the tribes of the Sudan.

Even allowing that the intrinsic value of these documents is comparatively small it is none the less true that anyone wishing to conduct researches into the history or sociology of the country would have the unwelcome choice either of delaying his work to collect specimens of these manuscripts from all over the country, and then examining them for what they were worth, or of ignoring the documentary evidence altogether. If he could afford the delay he would presumably choose the former alternative and would rapidly find himself sinking deeper and deeper into a morass of contradictions and inaccuracies from which a year or two of work would hardly serve to extricate him. To obviate the occurrence of this dilemma and smooth a little the path of research, by collecting, comparing and annotating such documents as I could find in the course of my work ' Cp., for the case of the Jvlahdi, Slatin Ch. viii.