I.2.XLIV. AND THE LIBYAN ELEMENT 33 A strong argument for the hypothesis is also provided by the case,
already quoted, of Gebel Midob, where we have a negro-Hamitic
population claiming relationship with the Nubians of the Nile and speaking a language akin to that of the latter^.
XLIII Further evidence is perhaps to be found in the rock-pictures
at Shalashi^ one of the small hills composing the Haraza range on the southern fringe of the meeting-ground of the two races. These are
very similar in type to those which occur elsewhere throughout that
portion of North Africa which has been principally subjected to Libyan influences^.
XLIV At what date the modified Nuba stock in northern Kordofan was replaced in the plains by the nomad Arabs it is hard to say, but
the Kababi'sh insist that only some five or six generations ago their
grandfathers were still engaged in extirpating "Nuba" from the
small and less easily defensible hills. The country is so eminently
suitable for camel-breeding that the Arab is not likely to have over- looked it when he first began to settle in the Sudan, The orographical, hydrographical and climatic conditions and the vegetation of northern and central Kordofan all wonderfully resemble those of
the Arabian highlands : it is a land of steppes and pasture with suffi-
cient water obtainable for the scanty needs of the nomad : it is not given over to the agriculturist and there are no great mountain chains
to impede free roaming. But in Leo's time, early in the sixteenth
^ The case of the Birked of south-central Darfur, who also speak a language closely akin to that of the Barabra will be dealt with in Chap. 4 of this Part.
- Lejean saw them and gave a highly fanciful and misleading description of them, which is quoted by Hartmann in Die Nigritier (Berlin, 1876, p. 41). I copied them as closely as I could in 1908, and published the result with some notes in Journ. Anthr. Inst, xxxix, 1909. They are quite distinct in type to the rudely engraved
(or sometimes painted) "uncouth outlines in shepherd's ruddle" which occur on other hills at el Haraza, near Foga in western Kordofan, at G. Daier on the northern fringe of Dar Nuba, in Somaliland, in Arabia, and all over the Tuwarek countrv, and which by the inclusion of the camel prove themselves not earlier than the beginning of the Christian era, and may be much more recent since the natives of the present day in the Sudan draw such, e.g. on the walls of rooms. The pictures at Shalashi are full of life and movement and are graceful and well proportioned
:
they are in red and white pigment, and represent men on horseback; also giraffes and hyenas. See UAnthropologie, xii, 1901 (Flamand) for pictures of this type; and for the ruder type UAnthropologie , viii, 1897 (Flamand); xvii, 1906 (Carette- Bouvet); xv, 1904 {Gzutiev); Journ. Anthr. Inst, xi.iv, 1914 (Zeltner); etc.
* One of the ancient place-names in the same locality is also curiously suggestive. At Kaga, some 100 miles west of el Haraza, is a large outstanding hill called Bakalai, a name which recalls a passage, following on mention of the island of Meroe and the tribes south of it, in Ptolemy's Geography: "In the rest of the country, but farther west of the Ethiopian hiHs, in the sandy and waterless region, dwell the races of Phazania [Fezzan] and Bakalitis." See Ptolemy, Bk. in, p. 783, ed. Miiller
:
Ttt oe XotTra rrjs x^pas dva/XLXi^Tepa 5^ tcDc AidLoiriKuiv dpe^cv Karixo^JO^^ fxera ti)v 8iafx/j.ov Kai ajSpoxov x'^po-" ol KaTo. Tr)v <ia^avlav Kai Ba/caXtro/. Barth (iv, 580) identifies Ptolemy's Bakalitis with Wargela, far to the north.
M.S.I. >