152 ON THE PENETRATION OF THE SUDAN [app.

Having once settled in Eg^'pt the Berber intermarried witia the Arabs and native Egyptians to such an extent that their Berber origin was almost

forgotten. The case of the Luata who named themselves Kays has been

already cited, and that of the Howara will follow.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we hear of large numbers of nomad IMezata, Howara and Zenara (a section of Luata) between Alexandria and Old Cairo ^, and many sections of Luata, the tribe which had been in occupation of Barka at the time of Amr's conquest^, are

similarly mentioned by Makrizi^ (1365-1441) in Giza, Bahnasa*, Manuf and tapper Egypt generally, and with them Mezata, Howara and others. The two sections last mentioned had also settled to the north in Bahira and Gharbia provinces and between Alexandria and Akaba^. About 1382

a colony of How^ara was transplanted to Girga province by Barkuk, the

first of the Circassian dynasty, and by assiduous cultivation they reclaimed

it from the desert^. These partly arabicized Howara, generally in company with the Zenata, were largely represented in the middle ages in Algeria,

Tripoli and the Fezzan', warring, intermarrying, making treaties and

quarrelling with the Arabs, but more than any other tribe of Berber origin

the Howara succeeded in establishing themselves firmly in the Nile valley. Their settlement in Girga by Barkuk marked the beginning of this process, and about the end of the century, as we have seen, they first, in company with the AwLAD Kanz, attacked and pillaged Aswan, and then some years

later seized it from the Awlad Kanz and put it to the sword. These Howara made Upper Egypt their final habitation. Pococke,

visiting the Nile in 1737, speaks of Akhmim as under a Berber afnir^; and Norden, who travelled up the Nile in 1737-8, says^:

A little above the town of Siuut begin the habitations of the Arabs, known under the name of Havarra. They possess likewise lands on the other side of the Nile. They call them natives of the kingdom of Maroc. They are the best kind of Arabs. They are governed by a shech; and they are all gentlemen, pretty much like the Polanders.

Burckhardt, early in the next century, found the Howara settled in villages from el Siut to Farshiut on the west bank and to near Kena on the east^". He regarded them as Arabs, and they had posed as such since the fourteenth century at the latest^^. He relates in full^'^ how in the eighteenth century they had controlled Upper Egypt and the northern Sudan as far south as Mahass and had compelled the Mamluks to cede these parts to them by

' Ibn Khaldun, ed. de Slane, i, 9-1 1 ; ed. ar. Vol. 6, p. 5. Quatremfere wrongly reads " Mezana" throughout for "Mezdta."

^ Butler, p. 430. They submitted to 'Amr in 642 a.d. In el Mas'udi's day they occupied the oasis of Kharga (see Makrfzi, Khetdt, 11, 697).

^ Quatrem^re, 11, 201 and 207-208.

^ In Bahnasa the bulk of the population were Luata.

^ Quatremere, loc. cit. * Ibid. 11, 209.

' Their strain is also believed to survive very strongly in the Shawia Arabs of West Africa. See Carette, pp. 126 ff.

^ Quatremere, II, 200.

* Travels in Egypt and Nubia, 11, 24. ^^ Nubia, App. i.

^^ Ibn Khaldun (ed. de Slane), i, 273. ^^ For further details see Part III, Chap. 8.