14 THE NUBIANS, THE NUBA l. 2. v.

V As regards the Barabra as a whole one thing is quite certain: there are no grounds for closely connecting them as a race with the Nuba of southern Kordofan as Riippell, Rossi and Keane did. They are very similar in type to the Middle Nubians who lived between 3000 and 4000 years ago in the same locality, but these had no more racial affinity with the southern Nuba than the Barabra-Danagla have, and the latter are almost the complete antithesis of the southern Nuba both physically and culturally.

It may be the case, and probably is, that the southern Nuba are to some extent the modern representatives of the race of negroes who temporarily held Dongola and the cataract country south of Haifa in the days of the Middle Kingdom and early Empire and whose congeners, no doubt at a later date, formed part of the forces of the Ethiopian dynasty that conquered Egypt and ruled it for something less than a century, but these negroes were aliens in the northern Sudan and most of them were forced back to the south, and their place in Lower Nubia was taken by its original inhabitants and settlers from Egypt.

In the Dodekaschoinos it is probable that the negroes had hardly displaced the original inhabitants, but south of Haifa they must have done so temporarily and to some extent modified the racial type in the process. But, even so, allowing for periods of interruption, it is true to say that from the time of the Middle Empire (2000-1600 B.C.) and onwards for centuries, and throughout the Meroitic, Ptolemaic and classical periods, and again in the years preceding the decisive Arab conquest of the Sudan, a strong infiltration of the Egyptian and, later, of the Egypto-Arab type was steadily and almost uninterruptedly proceeding in the northern Sudan and the negro element was correspondingly decreasing in that region.

VI It will be seen too that this prolonged infiltration to the south was more than the return of an ancient population, reinforced by fresh blood, to its quondam home on the river. When once the Arabs had overthrown the Christian kingdom of Dongola and established themselves in its place, they rapidly amalgamated with the local Nubians and began to send colonies further afield.

Thus it came about that Barabra, with an Arab leaven, penetrated into Kordofan and settled round about the most northernly of the Nuba mountains and intermarried with the negroes who were See Seligman, Journ. Anthr. Inst. 1913, xliii, 610, and Beckett, loc. cit.

pp. 200 ff. For Keane, see Man: Past and Present, p. 75.

" Seliian, loc. cit.

' See Part II, Chap. 2, xxxix.