30 THE NUBIANS, THE NUBA i.2.xxxvi.
XXXVI Other minor points that possibly serve to connect the old
inhabitants of central and northern Kordofan with the people who
lived at the time of the twenty-fifth dynasty in the Gezira, and even
east of it, are, firstly, the occurrence of tumuli, exactly similar to
those described above, both on the Kerreri hills close to Omdurman and on the small rocky eminences, such as Gebel el Kehayd, round Wad Hasuna and Abu Delayk^, and, secondly, the similarity between
the contents of some middens^ I found at Faragab in Central Kordo-
fan near Bara and objects found at Gebel Moya {e.g. ostrich-egg
beads^) and at Meroe*, and, thirdly, the finding of flat stone rings which may conceivably have been ceremonial mace-heads, or in some
cases weapons of offence, but which, I think, are more likely to have been weights^, or stands for round-bottomed jars, both in the
^ Both several days' journey east of Khartoum.
* See MacMichael, Tribes..., Appendix and Plate XIX, and Seligman in Annals
of Arch, and Anthr. July 1916.
' These ostrich-egg beads also provide a link with the Northern Nuba hills. Pallme (p. 156) speaks of the people of the latter (Daier, Tekali, etc.) as wearing round their loins "a number of small buttons of about the size of a shirt-button, made of the shell of the ostrich's egg, with a perforation in the centre, through which a string is passed, connecting them together. I took the trouble," he says, " of counting the single buttons of one of these ribbons in my possession, and found a total number of 6860."
At the same time the use of ostrich-egg beads is not confined to the Nuba
stock. The Shilluk men commonly wear girdles made of them. They break the shell
into irregular bits, pierce the fragment in the centre, and then round off the edges by crushing (Westermann, p. xxxi).
* See Seligman, loc. cit., discussing these resemblances, especially that between the types of pottery at Meroe and Faragab. He thinks that " At a somewhat remote period—perhaps at least as far back as the Ptolemaic—the Faragab site was occupied by a people rich in cattle, living in huts of grass or straw, and using bone points
for their weapons; a people rich in ivory, which they worked with implements of stone."
' MacMichael, loc. cit. Plate II. Some of these—they are in the museum at Khartoum—are porphyrite, felsite, gneiss, or granite, i.e. as at Basa, but most are of soft sandstone and too light and friable for use as weapons. The Nubas of southern Kordofan use spherical stone-headed clubs (Seligman, "A Neolithic ^iie..." Journ. R. A. I. XL, 1910). The stone rings from Kayli, of which I have collected numbers and which, though rougher in workmanship, are exactly the same as some of those from northern Kordofan, are dated by Crowfoot from about A.D. 150 to A.D. 350 (Seligman, loc. cit. p. 214).
In ancient as in modern Egypt there were public weighers, and money was
in the form of rings of gold and silver, and was also tested by its weight. Wilkinson, speaking of these rings, says : "And it is remarkable that the same currency is today employed in Senndr and the neighbouring countries." Furthermore, he notes, "The Jews also weighed their money. Their weights were of stone; and the word weight in Hebrew. ..also means a stone" {Manners and Customs..., 11, 10, 11). The
illustrations from Thebes depicted by Wilkinson show that these weights were very
like the stone rings of Meroe, and the latter may possibly have been made in imitation of the Egyptian system. Cp. also Breasted, Hist. p. 92, for the metal rings. He adds
that "stone weights were... marked with their equivalence in such rings. This ring money is the oldest currency known." The most ancient coinage of Ddrfur also took the form of rings. " Le premier genre de numeraire qui fut 6tabli au Darfour,