1. 3. XXXI. AND THE NUBA OF MERGE 49
in the seventh and eighth centuries^, they appear to be bickering and the lesser princelets who were wedged between the two, probably
succeeded in maintaining some measure of local independence, what-
ever nominal allegiance they may have professed.
XXX It is indeed difficult without further scientific data to get any but a vague impression as to the race to which the various occu-
pants of the country round Meroe belonged in the period immediately
preceding its conquest by the Arabs. Four distinct races at least met
thereabouts. Inland to the north and east were the Bega : to the north- west were the Nuba tribes; to the south-east was Abyssinia: to the south along the White Nile and the Sobat were the people of whom
the modern representatives are the Shilluk.
XXXI As regards these latter, as has been mentioned^, they display Bantu affinities, and probably they moved into the country south of
the Sobat and the upper reaches of the White Nile during or rather
later than the second millennium B.C. They did not extend their occupation to the lower White Nile, to the vicinity of Kawa and Dueim, until the beginning of the sixteenth century a.d., the period,
that is, of the rise of the Fung kingdom^.
Bruce was told in Sennar in the eighteenth century that these Fung were descended from the Shilluk, and Westermann has lately adduced proofs of the correctness of the tradition. To what extent,
if any, the Nilotic negroes modified the racial composition of the
^ In 687 the Patriarch of Alexandria sent a message exhorting the kings of Nubia and Ethiopia (Abyssinia that is) to concord (Renandot, Hist. Patr. Alex. 178, ap. Letronne). In 737 A.D. the Patriarch writes to Cyriacus "King of Nubia" to cease raiding Upper Egypt, and the biographer speaks of the king's power as extending over thirteen other kings {ap. Le Quien in Orient. Christian., ii, 662, for which see Letronne). But as a matter of fact there is a continual confusion in the ideas of the early Christian writers between Nubia and Abyssinia, and even in some cases between Abyssinia and India, and "Nubia" should probably read "Abyssinia" in this passage. The subject of this confusion will be further dealt with later, but
one may quote a note by A. J. Butler to a remark by Abu Salih (p. 285): "Our author here seems to look upon South-west Arabia as identical with or forming part of Abyssinia or Ethiopia, an error akin to the confusion of Abyssinia with
India which appears lower down."
In the thirteenth century we shall see that the Sultan of Egypt in addition to sending an embassy to the king of Dongola had to approach ten separate meks to the south (see Part II, Chap. 2).
2 P. 16.
' Westermann, Lii ff. In 1842 they inhabited the islands as far north as the fourteenth degree of latitude (Deherain, Fig. vii, opp. p. 262). Cp. Schweinfurth,
I, 9-10: "On the 13th of January, on one of the thronging islands, we had our
first rencontre with the Shillooks. This tribe of negroes formerly extended them- selves much further north than at present, having settlements on all the islands
;
but now [1869] they only exceptionally penetrate to this latitude (12° 30') in their canoes— In a few days we lay-to alongside the village of Kaka, the most northernly place inhabited by Shillooks on the White Nile."