1. 2. XXXI. AND THE LIBYAN ELEMENT 27 He calls himself /3aaiXi(TKo<i ISov/SaSwu koI oXcop tmv AWtoTroiv, which may be translated " Mek of the Nuba and all the Ethiopians."

But even if one allow some truth to his pretensions to overlordship it is clear that with the lapse of time a process of disintegration set in, and the petty kings, the /SaaiXcaKoi, who are mentioned in the inscriptions of Axum and Talmis, were evidently prototypes of the meks who ruled Nubia so late as the nineteenth century and who still survive in name among the Gamu'ia and some other debased Arab tribes in the Nile valley to the present day.

XXX Now the manuscript numbered "D4," written by a Berberi of Haifa, speaks of the ancient capital of the Nuba or Nubians—he uses the words interchangeably—as Gebel el Haraza in northern Kordofan, and it is clear from the context that he refers to the time of the twenty-fifth dynasty, i.e. " The Nubian Period." I am inclined to think this is not so far from the truth as might at first sight be supposed. The people of the hills of el Haraza, Abu Hadid and Um Durrag, which lie some 150 miles west of the junction of the Niles, are still called Nuba in spite of the racial modifications they have undergone by admixture with Danagla from the Nile ; and both the hills mentioned and also the now uninhabited hills in their neighbourhood show plentifully such traces of ancient occupation as stone villages on the slopes and old tumuli, presumably graves, by the sides of the little water-courses cut by the rains in the wet season, and on the crests of the hills. Similar tumuli are to be found at intervals all along the banks of the great Wadi el Mukaddam which, starting from near Bagbagi, about seventy miles east of el Haraza, runs across the Bayuda desert to Korti at the southern end of the great bend of the Nile.

XXXI From el Haraza to Korti is only two hundred odd miles and the journey is easy. One can follow the course of the Wadi el Mukaddam for most of the way and find plentiful water at a shallow as they are elsewhere called in the inscription, were no doubt the "several sovereignties" spoken of by Eratosthenes 700 years earlier, but Silko does not specifically call them Nobadae.

Sir C. Wilson (p. 12) aptly compares these " Meks " with the kings of Palestine overthrown by Joshua.

-I have opened some of these tumuli, but neither in them nor under them have I found anything: they certainly were not houses and the only feasible suggestion that I can make is that they were cairns made to protect the bodies of the dead from wild beasts and that the action of wind and rain percolating among the boulders of which they are composed and the ravages of insects have destroyed all trace of flesh and bones alike. It is probably to the custom of erecting such cairns that Agatharcides (q.v. ap. Strabo, iii, 34) refers when he says that among the Megabarai the dead are tied neck and heels and carried to the top of a hill where they are pelted with stones until they are covered over (see, however. Bent, p. 78). The cairns are roughly circular in shape and the stones are entirely unshaped.