TIL 4. XVIII. THE GUHAYNA GROUP 319
(c) THE HAMARi
XVII The nisbas say little of the Hamar, and that little is con-
tradictory. One account^ says they are a branch of Beni Tamim; another^ that they are a mixture of Beni Ommayya, Beni 'Abbas, 'Anag, Ashraf and Fur ; two others^ say they belong to the Guhayna group.
The tradition among the Gharaysia section of the tribe is that they are Himyarites from el Yemen who migrated into the Sudan in the time of Haggag ibn Yusef, i.e. in the second half of the seventh century. They crossed the Red Sea, it is said, and settled first round Taka {i.e. Kassala) : then they moved to the Blue Nile ; and then, after awhile, to Darfur^, where they took up a more permanent abode.
The story of their sojourn round Taka lends a certain support to the tradition—otherwise unsupported—of their connection with the Hamran Arabs of that district^; and the coincidence between the name of their commonest camel-brand, the " shabul," and that of the
Shabul section of the ManAsir—a tribe alleged by Sir C. Wilson to be related to the 'Ababda—is a small piece of evidence in favour of
their alleged movement from the direction of the Red Sea'.
XVIII Our knowledge of their history in Darfur remains practically
a blank until the beginning of the last century when they attained to
a considerable power under the leadership of a certain el Hag Muna'am of the 'Asakira division^. It is not improbable that as a
tribal entity they had hardly existed previously and that by origin they were simply a conglomeration of various Arabs who decided to colonize the almost well-less tracts where good crops can be grown, but where the chief water-supply is derived from melons and water
stored in the hollow trunks of baobabs^ during the rainy season. It
is variously alleged among the Hamar either that Mekki, the son, or Ibrahim el Melih, the great-grandson, of el Hag Muna'am, was the
first man to inaugurate the practice of hollowing the baobab and
1 Much of the information here presented is taken from Chap, xil of The Tribes of Northern and Central Kordofdn. But details have also been added from a short account of the Hamar compiled from their oral traditions by 'Abd el Wahhab Ahmad 'Awadulla, headmaster of el Nahud school in 191 3.
2 See D I XXVIII. 3 ggg j^ j cxLviii.
* See BA lxxviii and ABC li. The Hamar are also found classed with the Bakkara.
'' Darfur at that time comprised what is at present western Kordofdn, i.e. the country west of el Nahud. The Hamar were for long in the neighbourhood of Um Shanka on both sides of the present boundary. ® See BA lxxviii.
' So, too, the Beni Fadl, who are closely related to the Manasfr, contain a section called Hadarma {i.e. Hadareb).
® Rvippellin 1824-5 met him ("HadgiMinhim") in Kordofdn (jRme/?..., p. 148). ® The
'' tubeldi" : Adansonia dis^itata.