178 THE PROGRESS THROUGH EGYPT ii. 2. xxxiii.
later^ when we come to record the destruction of Soba by the Fung 300 years after Abu Salih's time. Dongola was the royal residence. " It is a large city on the banks
of the blessed Nile, and it contains many churches and wide streets 2."
Trade was all by exchange, and the chief medium seems to have been slaves who were handed over to the Arabs and Mamluks in
return for cloths and suchlike.
A matrilinear system still held good, for
It is said to be the custom among the Nubians when a king dies and
leaves a son and also a nephew, the son of his sister, that the latter reigns
after his uncle instead of the son ; but if there is no sister's son, then the
king's own son succeeds.
"Nephews" figure very largely in the records of this and the
following century and we have already seen how the Arabs accepted and used for their own purposes this system of succession among
the Nubians^.
^ See D 7, I, 7iote. ^ Yakut calls it "Dumkula" (iJLLoi).
^ See the case of the Guhayna in the last chapter. The matrilinear system was quite understandable to the Arabs. Robertson Smith speaks of the "early and universal prevalence of mother-kinship" in Arabia as being "only gradually superseded by paternal kinship," and thinks "the old Arab groups of female kinship were originally totem tribes" {Kinship and Marriage, pp. 27-33 ^^^ 212). The practice is extremely ancient. See Breasted, Hist. p. 84, re the Old King- dom in Egypt: "the natural line of inheritance was through the eldest daughter
...the closest ties of blood were through the mother..."; and ibid. p. 141, re the Middle Kingdom. Compare, too, the case of Thutmose (Thothmes) I of the eighteenth dynasty and of Osorkon I of the twenty-second (Libyan) dynasty in Egypt (Breasted, Hist. pp. 208, 364). The same system applied among the Bega (Makrizi, Khetdt, 11, 561 ; Burckhardt, p. 503). It is also recorded about 1353 by Ibn Batuta as existing among the Berber princes of the country round Asben (Air)
;
see Barth, i, 338, 340, 341, and Cooley (p. 40) for the same in Ghana, Walata and Mali. The Berber tribes when they reached these parts pursued the same obvious course as did the Arabs when they entered Nubia. Barth says, "with respect to the custom that the hereditary power does not descend from the father to the son, but to the sister's son,—a custom well known to be very prevalent not only in many parts of Negroland, but also in India, at least in Malabar,—it may be supposed
to have belonged originally to the Berber race... but they might also have adopted
it from those tribes (now their subjects—the Imghad) who conquered the country from the black natives " Cp. also Barth, 11, p. 273 (quoted on p. 92, note). We
see an instance of the same custom among the Kabablsh seven generations ago. Keradim, who was the first of the Nurab family to rule the whole tribe, was the
sister's son and successor of Kurban of the Ribaykat section, which had previously held the sheikhship (see MacMichael, Tribes..., p. 185).
The custom is still in vogue at Gebel Midob (N.E. Darfur)—see Part I, Chap. 4, IV—and in the hills of Abu Hadld and Um Durrag and el Haraza in northern Kordofan. For instance, Abu Shenko the late "mek" of Abu Hadfd told me in
1 910 that his father was a Zaghawi from Kagmar and his mother the daughter of
a local "mek," that the mother of Tibayn, the "mek" of Um Durrag, was the daughter of a previous mek but his father only one of the Asadab (non-royal)
section at the same hill, and that the well-known 'Abd el Hadi who, though a D61abi (D6alib) on his father's side, ruled the "Nuba" of el Haraza, did so by virtue of the fact that his mother was a Nubawfa of the royal stock.