1. 2. XXXIX. AND THE LIBYAN ELEMENT 31

northern hills of Kordofan, at Gebel Moya, Gebel Kayli (on the Khartoum-Kassala road), in front of the altar at Basa^, and in fact

all over the Island of Meroe.

XXXVII One may say then that when the Muhammadan Arabs invaded Lower Nubia in the seventh century a.d. they found there

a race radically compounded of pre-dynastic Egyptian and cognate Hamitic elements blended with dynastic Egyptian and Libyan stocks and deeply and repeatedly modified by forty centuries of dilution with Negro blood^. One of the two main Negro strains was probably

derived from Kordofan and the Gezi'ra and in classical times had been represented in modified form by the Nobatae or Nuba.

XXXVIII As further evidence of a fusion of Nuba and Libyan elements in the Bayuda and west of it another fact may be cited.

So late as the seventeenth century a.d.^ the Bayuda was still known, as it had been a century earlier to Leo Africanus, as the Desert of Goran, or Gorham, or Gorhan, a name connected with "Kora'an" and, as I believe, with "Garama" and " Garamantes*."

XXXIX These Kura'an ("Guraan"), whom el Hamdani^, by the way, includes with the Nuba, Zing and Zaghawa as descendants of

Canaan, son of Ham, are a mixture of Tibbu and negro and at the

present day they form a large nomadic section of that race in the

deserts north of Darfur and Wadai^, and are commonly spoken of

as "Tibbu Kura'an." Their language is a dialect of Tibbu. Of the Tibbu Keane says

:

The Tibu themselves, apparently direct descendants of the ancient Garamantes, have their primeval home in the Tibesti range, i.e. the " Rocky

Mountains," whence they take their name (Ti-bu = "Rock People"). There are two distinct sections, the northern Tedas, a name recalling the Tedamansii, a branch of Garamantes located by Ptolemy somewhere

le fut par les habitants du Facher.. . . lis prirent pour monnaie des anneaux d'etain. . ."

(Tunisi, Voy. au Ddrfour, p. 315). On the whole, however, I lean to the theory that these rings of stone were simply stands on which to balance jars (Crowfoot in Sudan Notes and Records, Apr. 1920, p. 91).

^ Crowfoot, "Island of Meroe" (Mem. XIX, Arch. Surv. Nub. pp. i6, 17, and Plate XI).

^ Cp. Elliot Smith, Arch. Surv. Nubia, Bull, in, 1909, pp. 22 ff.

' See R. Blome's Geographical Description... (1670) quoted in the Hakluyt ed. of Leo Africanus, i, 28.

* I have discussed this subject more fully in an Appendix to The Tribes of Northern and Central Kordofan.

* See Makrizi, Khetdt, 11, 571.

* The name Kura'an also occurs in Arabia as that of a section of Huwaytat near Diba on the Red Sea coast. Burton {Land of Midian, 11, 97) mentions these people: he says that the port of Dumaygha belongs to the Beli (" Baliyy") who are "mixed with a few Kura'an-Huwaytat and Karaizah-Hutaym." Burckhardt (Nubia, p. 510), commenting on the passage from el Hamdani, says: "The Negroe MosHms to this day apply the name of Koran indiscriminately to all the pagan Negro nations."