CHAPTER 12 The Hamrdn I The Hamran Arabs are a very small community living near the Abyssinian border, but they have become well known on account of Sir Samuel Baker's description of them. He met these "mighty hunters with the sword" on the Seti't River in 1861 and describes vividly their surpassing courage and dexterity in the chase of the elephant.

The earliest notice of them, however, is that of Bruce in the preceding century. He does not mention them by name but his description of them and the application to them of the name agdgtr, elephant-hunters, by which they are still known, establishes their identity. He speaks of them as having regular (" European") features and non-woolly hair and being "very swarthy." They were deadly foes of the Shangalla tribes.

Mansfield Parkyns calls them "a tribe of Bishary origin, which still uses the Hadendawy language, like its mother race. They may almost be considered a subtribe of Bisharin, for there is no separation between them."

Baker says: "The Hamran Arabs are distinguished from the other tribes by an extra length of hair, worn plaited down the centre and arranged in long curls." They carried round shields of rhinoceros hide.

II They were never a large tribe and their habitat has always been the banks of the Setit near its junction with the Atbara. At the present day they probably number only a few hundred souls: the majority were killed by the Dervishes. The survivors still bear the reputation of being as great Nimrods as their fathers were, and they boast themselves to be purer Arabs than any of the surrounding tribes.

III They claim to have immigrated from the Hegaz and to be of noble Uneage. If the MS. "D 6" is to be trusted they are by origin an ofishoot of the Harb. "BA," though giving no details, simply classes them, with the Hamar, in the Guhayna group, and this latter, as there has been frequent cause to remark, is much mixed with that of the Harb.

Vol. VI, Bk. vHi, p. 228.

Baker, Nile Tributaries..., p. 174, also notes their swarthiness. Parkyns calls them "deep bronze."

* Life in Abyssinia, n, 404. * Loc. cit. pp. 167-168. '' See para. LXXVIII.