11. 1. XIV. IN THE MIDDLE AGES 147

Egypt^, and which in various more or less garbled forms is still

frequently met with in the Sudan.

The Beni Hilal thus transplanted to Tunis and Tripoli very soon took to intermarriage with the Libyo-Berber tribes who had

previously occupied the country, and the process of alternate fighting and miscegenation continued persistently under the various dynasties

that rose and fell in northern Africa during the ages that followed. The alleged Yemenite origin of the powerful Sanhaga and Ketama branches of Berber is probably authentic^, and if so largely explains

the readiness with which Arab and Berber fused their stocks into the

race known now as Moors ^.

Within a hundred years of their arrival in Libya the Sanhaga and most of the Beni Hilal were leagued together in revolt against

the Almohades (El Muwahhidin). Numbers of them also pushed westwards to Spain*.

From now until the time of Ibn Khaldun (1332-1405) and Leo

(d. 1552) one loses sight of the Beni Hilal in the west; but in the south one hears of some of them among the troops sent by Kalaun

in 1287 to invade Dongola^. Ibn Khaldun mentions them in Upper Egypt in his day^, and Makrizi speaks of them about 1400 a.d. as

very numerous in the district of Aswan, in the eastern desert as far

as 'Aidhab, and in fact all over the Sa'id'^.

It also appears that some of the Ga'afiria settled between Esna and Aswan may be Beni Hilal by origin^.

There is evidence that some of the Beni Hilal also settled in the Sudan^: it would be a remarkable thing if they did not. As regards the Beni Sulaym, though most of them left Egypt

for the west at the time of the great migration of 105 1, by no means all of them did so. At the close of the thirteenth century they were very powerful in Bahira Province, and very many of them were

also settled in the Fayum and Upper Egypt ^".

^ See Lane-Poole, Manners and Customs..., Ch. 2i ; Huart, p. 405, etc.

^ See above, p. 8.

* Moghrabi, pi. Mogharba (or Moghrabin). Doughty writes in i888 : " Moorish Arabs are well accepted by the Arabians who repute them 'an old Hegaz folk and nephews of the Beni Hilal'" (Wanderings..., i, 36 ff.).

* Ibn Khaldun, i, 25 and 118. The Zoghba section threw in their lot with the Almohades. (Ibid. 11, 90.)

* Quatremere, li, loi ff.

* Ibn Khaldun, ed. de Slane, I, 9-1 1. ' Quatremere, 11, 201.

* Lane, Manners and Customs..., p. 405, mentions "Ga'afireh" as a sub-tribe of Beni Hilal. See also remarks under Gawama'a in Part III.

* See pp. 68, 69 and 79.

^° At the same period the Howara in Libya were subject to the Beni Sulaym, and the two tribes pastured their herds together. (See Ibn Khaldun, i, 197, and cp. Makrizi, ap. Quatremere, 11, 207, 212-215.)