1. 2. XVI. AND THE LIBYAN ELEMENT 21

at el Haraza, Kaga, and other hills in the north of Kordofan, and

(c) to denote the aborigines extirpated by the Fung at the beginning

of the sixteenth century in the Gezi'ra and the neighbourhood of the

Shabluka cataract.

In the form "Nubia," however, the name came to be appUed not

to the country whence these negroes came but to the scene of their

greatest triumphs, the valley of the Nile between the first cataract

and Napata. Nay more, by the irony of fate, although the northern

portion of this same country throughout the early and the later

dynastic, the Ptolemaic, and Roman periods, and again in the time

of the Mamluks, was considered almost an annex of Egypt and was

largely populated by Egyptian colonies, the use of the name " Nubia"

was tending more and more to be restricted to it rather than to the

southern portion, and we shall see that by the time of Ibn Selfm in

the latter part of the tenth century it was not uncommon to regard

it as applying par excellence to that most northernly district of the

Sudan commonly called Maris, which ended some way north of the

second cataract^.

The Libyo-Egyptian period in Nubia and the Nubian

Conquest of Egypt

XVI About 945 B.C. the Libyans, who in the course of centuries

had obtained a strong footing in Lower Egypt and the Delta and

became partly Egyptianized, seized the throne of the Pharaohs and

founded the twenty-second dynasty^. How this affected the Sudan

immediately we do not know, but in the records of 750 B.C. the

northern Sudan appears "no longer as a province of Egypt but as

the seat of an independent monarchy of which the Thebaid was the

northern province," and Reisner thinks it likely that, as the Libyan

kings subsequently weakened and power became decentralized,

Kashta, the Libyan ( ?) representative commanding in the northern Sudan and a member of the royal family, assumed independence. He even, it appears, invaded Egypt and established his supremacy

as far north as Thebes. His capital was at Napata (Gebel Barkal),

and we may assume that though he and his staff may have been Egypto- Libyans, the mass of his subjects were Nubians of the

present darker type in the north and negroes or semi-negroes in

the south.

^ Cp. Budge, I, 651, and u, 105; also Letronne, loc. cit. Evidence of the con- sistency with which this tract south of Aswan was considered an annex of Egypt

will be adduced later (see Part II, Chap. 2).

* For the following see RQxsnev in SudanNotes andRecor(h,iov]?in. and Oct. 19 19.