III. 1. XXXVII. THE GA'ALlfN AND DANAGLA GROUP 231
(j) THE MAGIDfA AND KURTAN
XXXVI The Magidia or Maidia^ are an almost extinct tribe, and the KuRTAN, so far as I know, entirely so. The former are said to have occupied the hills near Kagmar in Kordofan about the close of the seventeenth century^, and to have been driven thence eastwards by the immigrating Zaghawa.
There appear also to be remnants of them among the Nuba of Gebel Abu Tubr, between Kagmar and the river^, and Cailliaud mentions them in 1821 on the west bank of the White Nile above Khartoum*.
From MS. D 3 it seems there was also one small colony of them
at least on the Blue Nile^.
For the rest, the Magidia only seem to survive as a branch of the Gawama'a-Ghanaymia.
(k) THE GA'ALlfN PROPER
XXXVII We now come to the Ga'aliin proper, the people, that is, who are called Ga'aliin and nothing else at the present.
Their riverain " ddr" is between the mouth of the Atbara and the Shabluka cataract.
An examination of the "nisbas^' shews that they are distinctly junior members of the great Ga'ali fraternity, in the sense that all the eponymous ancestors of their subsections lived within the last twelve generations or less, or within, say, 400 years of the present
day^. Now a period of 400 years brings us back approximately to the time of el Samarkandi, the great provider of genealogies, i.e. to the
date of the great Arab-FuNG movement which resulted in the forma-
tion of the kingdom of Sennar.
It seems that at the beginning of the sixteenth century certain
chieftains calling themselves pure Arabs, however freely their fore- bears had intermarried with the Nubians, were settled on the Nile with their families north of the Shabluka, and had established for themselves a position of authority and overlordship, as the Rabi'a and GuHAYNA had done some centuries before in the north-east, and
that these chieftains were named 'Arman and Abu Khamsin', sons of
^ See note to D 3, 60. 2 ggg MacMichael, Tribes..., p. 109.
' Ibid. p. loi. * Cailliaud, III, 94. * See MS. D3, 108, 200 and 204.
® A I, A 2, A 6 and A 10 make Serrar, the "general ancestor," live eighteen or nineteen generations ago. Between him and 'Arman intervene five generations (see trees to BA and An); i.e. 'Arman's sons and grandsons, who are the eponymous ancestors of most of the Ga'aliin tribes proper lived twelve generations ago, or less. See in particular A 10, the pedigree of the Grand Mufti, which confirms the above.
' Or perhaps it was their sons or grandsons who were contemporaries of el Samarkandi. It is useless to be over-dogmatic, but a comparison of the "A" MSS. suggests that the generations subsequent to 'Arman were added by a later hand.