[236]Two cartouches on an altar preserved in Berlin enable us to recognise eight signs.
APPENDIX E.
ETHNOLOGY OF THE SUDAN.
The wealth of the Nile Valley has at all times tempted invasion; the land presents no serious physical obstacles, and the people who live in the countries bordering it have always been unsettled and migratory. We expect, therefore, to find here a perfect babel of tongues and races. To mention invasions from the East alone and within the historic period, Africa has been overrun by the dynastic Egyptian, the Hyksos, the Abyssinians and the Arabs, and from the early cemeteries of Abydos archæologists have collected skulls which appear to show that from the time of the Stone Age four races at least have contributed to the population of Egypt. These races Kollmann[237] identifies as Punts, who were, perhaps, of Semitic origin, Nubians, Libyans, and Negroes, the last including several Pygmies and, to judge from their grave-offerings, some men of wealth and consideration. In the Sudan no detailed researches have been made in ancient burial-places, but we may confidently expect some day to read in the northern half the same story as in Egypt.
Invasion, moreover, is not the only disturbing element. The natives of the Sudan, even when they have adopted a more or less settled life, are great travellers: traffic in human flesh and conquest for the sake of human flesh have nowhere been pursued so long and so thoroughly. The native changes his abode without hesitation, and his love of strange women is passing Solomon’s. A hundred years ago Brown found Darfur full of Dongolawi traders. Fifty years ago the same race had turned their eyes to Kordofan and the Bahr El Ghazal, and wherever they go they intermarry with the women of the land. The Takruris have similarly in a peaceable way shifted their abode from Darfur to the province of Kassala within quite recent days.
Yet again, in the southern half we have seen within the last few centuries a succession of loosely-knit empires (Fungs, Shilluks, etc.) which carry the name and often the language of a single tribe over a wide area and then melt away, leaving behind only confusion to the ethnologist. What we know to have existed for the last thousand years, we can premise for the last fifty (?) thousand. So intricately mixed indeed is this southern half that the Nileland has been aptly described as the Negro Potpourri.
But there are mitigating circumstances which we must also take into account, otherwise the ethnologist would indeed be, of all men, the most hopeless.
In the first place, invaders do not exterminate and, by what seems to be almost a law, the old Somatic types tend continually to reassert themselves; a new invasion, that is, changes for a time the numerical proportion of different types, but as the newcomers are absorbed the old order returns, and the preponderating elements in the population become increasingly evident. It is a commonplace in Egypt that a Turk of the third generation is indistinguishable from a native.