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CHAPTER 3

The Bega, the Blemyes and the Nuba of Meroe

I Let us now turn to the Eastern Desert between the river and

the Red Sea.

II Here Hved in the seventh century the Hamitic Bega, who in

the far distant mists of antiquity may have come from Arabia^, and who in their present form still largely resemble the pre-dynastic

Egyptian type.

At the present day the Bisharin, Hadendoa and Beni 'Amir are

the three great tribes which represent the Bega.

The two former still speak To-Bedawi; but the latter, who live

further south on the confines of Abyssinia, speak the Semitic Tigre, and "from the national standpoint... are less homogeneous than the Hadendoa and kindred tribes," and physically differ distinctly from

the other Bega. There is a "steady rise in the cephalic index from

74'7 in the south (Beni Amer) to 79 in the north (Bisharin)." The Beni 'Amir are shorter and shew less trace of Negro and Armenoid

admixture than the others. They are "the most dolichocephalic of modern Bega^." Professor Seligman considers that the Hadendoa

are representatives of the Beni 'Amir stock modified chiefly by

miscegenation with the tall negroes of the Nile Valley, and also, in

all probability, with the quite alien long-bearded, round-headed Armenoid population which since the third millennium B.C., if not

earlier, exerted a profound influence on Egypt as the immediate

result of the ever-increasing intercourse with northern Syria^. He

holds that the Hadendoa and Bisharin owe the fact of their being more round-headed than the Beni 'Amir to their subjection to

^ Seligman, JourM. Anthr. Imt. 1913, xliii, 595.

- Seligman, loc. cit. pp. 598-610.

^ Elliot Smith, The Aficient Egyptians, pp. 60, 95, 135; Seligman, loc. cit.

p. 603. The various Armenoid groups of Asia Minor " are all descended from tribes belonging to the great Hittite Empire" (von Luschan, "The Early Inhabitants of Western Asia," Journ. Anthrop. Inst. XLi, 191 1, p. 242). Of these Hittites von Luschan (loc. cit. p. 243) says they were settled in Western Asia when "about 4000 B.C. began a Semitic invasion from the south-east, probably from Arabia, by people looking like modern Bedawy. Two thousand years later began a second invasion, this time from the north-west, by xanthocroous and longheaded tribes

like the modern Kurds, half savage, and in some way or other, perhaps, connected with the historic Harri, Amorites, Temehu, and Galatians."