50 THE BEGA, THE BLEMYES 1. 3. xxxi.

inhabitants of the Island of Meroe is unknown, but some indication

of connection is perhaps furnished by the existence in Meroe until

the third century B.C. of the custom of killing the king when he was

considered to be no longer sufficiently vigorous to rule. This con-

stitutes presumably one more example of the ancient belief in kings

"believed to incarnate the divine spirit. ..who were periodically killed

lest that spirit should suffer from its retention in an ageing body^"

If so, it is probably to be connected on the one hand with the '' sed"

festival of ancient Egypt, which is thought to have originally celebrated

the Osirification of the king through death, and certainly, on the other hand, with the still-existing custom according to which the Nilotic Shilluk and Dinka put their kings to death before their bodily

vigour passes away-.

Traces of the same custom existed among the Fung of Sennar,

at whose court there was a personage who combined the functions

of Master of the Household and Executioner of the Kings; and, it

seems, among the 'Abdullab of Kerri^. Of the former Bruce says*:

It is one of the singularities which obtains among this brutish people

that the king ascends his throne under an admission that he may be law-

fully put to death by his own subjects or slaves upon a council being held by the great officers, if they decree that it is not for the advantage of the

state that he be suffered to reign any longer. There is one officer of his own family who alone can be the instrument of shedding his sovereign and kinsman's blood. This officer is called Sid el Coom, master of the

king's household or servants, but has no vote in deposing him ; nor is any

guilt imputed to him however many of his sovereigns he thus regularly murders.

XXXII But until the beginning of the sixteenth century the Nilotic

negroes do not appear either racially or culturally to have exercised any influence in the Island of Meroe comparable to that of the other

three groups mentioned. Of these the most important was probably

the Nuba. The ancient inhabitants of Soba, the Island of Meroe and

the hills of northern Kordofan are still commonly spoken of as

^ Seligman, jfourn. Anthr. Inst. XLHi, 1913, p. 664. The locus classicus of the subject is Frazer, The Golden Bough, Part III. Cp. also Man, Feb. 1915, "Killing the Divine King," by Geza Roheim, for some Ural-Altaic instances of the custom.

- Seligman, /oc.a7. pp. 665, 666 ; and see, in particular, Miss Murray's " Evidence for the Custom of Killing the King in Ancient Egj-pt," in Man, Feb. 19 14. For the custom in Fazoghli see Lepsius, Discoveries..., p. 221.

=> See "D5 (a)" in Part IV.

* Bruce, Bk. vii, Ch. ix. For another ancient Egyptian custom which surs'ived among the Fung, that of the king personally hoeing a piece of land, see Part I, Chap. 4, XXVI. The connection between the two lies in the typically Hamitic con- ception of the king as a rainmaker and the medium whereby the yearly renascence of vegetation is ensured. Cp. Seligman, loc. cit. pp. 68 1, 683.