SUAKIM.
The intense interest with which all eyes have been turned upon the Soudan—that is, Country of the Blacks, or Negroland—gives a special value now to any information about that region, particularly if it refer to such towns as Khartoum, or that named at the head of this paper. The former place has been pretty fully described of late in the newspapers, while little has been told us of the latter beyond actual war-news. This is the greater pity, as Suakim possesses a good deal of historical interest, and Khartoum does not.
Suakim—the word is spelt in a variety of ways—is not only one of the most important towns of Nubia, but the chief port of the Soudan and of the whole western coast of the Red Sea. It came into the possession of Egypt in 1865 by cession or purchase from Turkey—along with Massowah and one or two other towns and the districts around them—and now appears to be regarded by the British government and every one else as an integral part of the Egyptian dominions. Similar subjection of Suakim to Egypt, as we shall presently see, existed in very remote times. The town proper lies on a small island about eight miles and three-quarters in diameter—almost as long as the little bay in which it is placed, a mere tongue of water separating it from the mainland.
Crossing the inlet southwards to the mainland, we step into the large suburb called El Gêf, with a much larger population than the insular town, very irregular streets, and the houses mere native (Bishareen) huts. There is also a very lively bazaar, and, in the north-west of the place, the barracks, one section of which, a few years ago, was armed with three pieces of cannon. In the outskirts are the wells—surrounded by gardens and date plantations—which supply the people with drinking-water, although, from the nearness of the wells to the sea, this is brackish, and would scarcely be considered palatable by foreign troops. El Gêf is really an oasis; all round it, save seawards, extend many miles of salt and arid wilderness. Indeed, the whole distance from Suakim to Berber—two hundred and eighty miles inland—is for the most part desert, the route garnished here and there with wells of water and encampments of the wandering Bishareen, who, with the Haddendowa, a similar set of people, possess the whole wilderness from east of the first cataract of the Nile up to Kassala and the boundaries of Abyssinia. These tribes, though sometimes called Bedouin, whom in many respects they resemble, are really a very different people. Bedouin proper are Arabs of the Semitic, while the Bishareen are of the Hamitic family.
The chief articles of export are cotton, gum-arabic, cattle, hides, butter, tamarinds, senna leaves, and ivory. The imports consist of cotton goods, iron, wood, carpets, weapons, steel, and fancy wares. Berber in the east, and Kassala in the south, are the great centres for all the caravan traffic of Suakim, which is also the port on the one side for the whole Soudan—an inland country as large as India—and on the other side, for Arabia. Hence it is much visited by Mohammedan pilgrims to Mecca, their port of Jeddah occupying a corresponding position on the Arabian to that which Suakim does on the African coast. Twenty years ago, from three to four thousand slaves per annum were shipped from here to Jeddah, and though this monstrous traffic has been much crippled of late years by the Egyptian government, out of regard for English feeling, it is to be feared that it is not yet extinct. Oddly enough, Hassan Mousa Akad, one of the ringleaders in Arabi’s recent rebellion, and the greatest slave-merchant in Egypt, was exiled to this very slave-port of Suakim, hence his complicity in the Soudan disturbances is not unnaturally suspected. The total population of the town and suburb is estimated by Schweinfurth—one of our greatest authorities—at from eleven to thirteen thousand. The port is now in regular communication with Suez by steamer—four days’ journey—and with Europe by telegraph. The Egyptian governor (Mudeer) and vice-governor (Wakeel) live at Suakim, and the budget for the district in 1882 was—income, £25,945; expenditure, £20,492—thus being one of the few districts of the Soudan which yielded a surplus.
In ancient times, the whole of what we may call the Suakim seaboard—extending northwards along the coast as far as a line drawn from the first cataract, and southwards as far even as Bab-el-Mandeb—was known as the Troglodyte country. The Troglodytes, as the name implies, dwelt in caves, were by occupation herdsmen, and often uncivilised and wretched in the extreme. A graphic picture of the hard life of another Troglodyte people, dwelling in the rocky fastnesses east of Jordan, is preserved for us in the thirtieth chapter of the book of Job. ‘For want and famine,’ it says, ‘they are solitary; fleeing into the wilderness in former time desolate and waste. Who cut up mallows by the bushes, and juniper roots for their meat. They were driven forth of men (who cried after them as after a thief), to dwell in the cliffs of the valleys, in caves of the earth, and in the rocks.’
Perhaps the Troglodytes of the Nubian shore were a superior stock of their kind; at anyrate, they appear to have been impressed into the army of the ancient Pharaohs, and to have shared in the first invasion of the kingdom of Judah, and the first spoliation of Solomon’s Temple. The name of the Pharaoh of that time was Shishak, and two accounts of his expedition have come down to us: one is in the historical books of Scripture (2 Chronicles, xii., also 1 Kings, xiv.); and the other, remarkably enough, is by Shishak himself. That of the Egyptian king is contained in the famous hieroglyphic inscription on the walls of the temple of Karnak at Thebes, in Upper Egypt, a great part of which is still legible, after the lapse of nearly three thousand years! The book of Chronicles tells us with what an immense army of charioteers, cavalry, and infantry, Shishak overran Judea. He marched against it ‘with twelve hundred chariots, and threescore thousand horsemen: and the people were without number that came with him out of Egypt; the Lubims, the Sukkiims, and the Ethiopians.’ Of these three allies, the first are probably the Libyans (as in Daniel, xi. 43), and the last the same as the modern Abyssinians. For the middle name of ‘Sukkiims,’ the old Greek translation of the Bible—made by Jews a century or two before the birth of Christ—substitutes the word Troglodytes, the very people of the Nubian coast whom we have been considering, and who are now known as Bishareen. But yet more, Pliny the elder, an old Latin writer, who died A.D. 79, mentions, in his enumeration of places on this Troglodyte coast, a town called Suche, which, according to the general opinion of scholars, is identical with the modern port of Suakim, at present (while we write) governed by an English admiral, and its fortifications manned by British sailors and marines.