The Beja

Who rules

Name

Not pinned. No Beja chief south of Aydhab is named for 1199-1200. The leading Muslim clan of the north are the Hadariba (al-Hadarib), whose chief shares the dues of Aydhab with the sultan's officer (Egypt map); Suakin has its own ruler (name not known).

Title

No single ruler: the chiefs of the Beja clans and the ruler of Suakin

Since

Not pinned

Family

Beja inheritance runs through the mother: a sister's son inherits, which let Arab husbands' sons (Rabi'a, later Meccan sharifs at Suakin) take up Beja chiefships.

Confidence

low

Al-Aswani (tenth century, through al-Maqrizi) on the Hadariba and their client Zanafij; al-Ya'qubi (889) on the Beja kingdoms; Ibn Jubayr (1183) on the Beja round Aydhab; the Mamluk-period rulers of Suakin. Nothing names a chief of the southern Beja about 1200.

Overlord

None. Alodia had claimed lordship over the Gash delta and the coast in the tenth century (Ibn Hawqal, al-Aswani); Egypt reaches only Aydhab, north of this ground.

What the realm holds

• The Red Sea hills from about 21.5 N to the Baraka, with their wells and wadis
• Suakin, the island port, under its own ruler
• The Tokar delta of the Baraka, flooded each summer
• Taka, the Gash delta round later Kassala
• The east bank of the Atbara and the plains between the Atbara and the hills
• The eastern Nubian desert between the Nile bend and the hills

How it was acquired

Ancient: the Beja are the Medjay and Blemmyes of Egyptian and Roman times.

Allies and rivals

Egypt: the Beja of the north share Aydhab's dues and rent camels and guides to the caravans and pilgrims on the Qus road (Egypt map); those of this ground deal with Egypt mainly through Suakin's trade. Makuria and Alodia: old treaties and trade; Alodia claimed the Gash delta and the coast in the tenth century. The Rabi'a Arabs and the Banu Kanz are old in-laws of the Hadariba. Across the Red Sea, the Hejaz and Yemen, reached from Suakin.

Suakin and Aydhab are rival ports.

The realm that morning

Quiet: no war or raid is recorded in 1199. The clans graze the hills in winter (the Red Sea coast and its hills get their rain in winter) and the Atbara and Gash plains after the summer rains. Suakin trades with Jidda and Yemen. North of about 21.5 N lie the Beja and the gold country of the Egypt map (bedouin); west, Makuria and Alodia along the Nile; south, the Eritrean coast and highlands (Horn sheet) and the Baza of the Gash and Setit.

Wealth

Camels (the Beja breed is famous), cattle, sheep and goats; renting camels and guides; gold from the hills; trade through Suakin in slaves, ivory, hides and gold to Arabia, with Chinese celadon already reaching Suakin in the twelfth century; sorghum grown on the flood of the Tokar and Gash deltas.

Military

Camel-riding warriors with spear, sword and hide shield, feared raiders; no fortresses. No numbers known.

Threats

• Drought in the hills
• Egyptian ambition over the Red Sea ports (Baybars attacks Suakin in 1264: later)

What the year holds

What happened next, if nothing in play changes it. Each event carries what it depends on and what would stop it.

1. From autumn 1200The great famine in Egypt (1200-1202) thins the Qus-Aydhab caravan traffic on which the northern Beja live; Suakin's trade with Arabia continues.Depends on: The low Nile of 1200 (Egypt map). Stopped by: Nothing in play; effects on the Beja are inferred.

Places of note

• Suakin: Island port
• Badi (ruins): Ruined port, abandoned by 1170

Where the sources disagree

• The Latin East map draws the northern Beja under the bedouin id; on this sheet the Beja have their own id, and the line between them is the Latin East polygon's south edge at about 21.45 N, which is a map convenience, not a tribal border.
• The modern Beja groups (Bisharin, Amarar, Hadendowa, Beni Amer) are not attested under those names in 1200; the Hadariba and the Zanafij are the names of the sources.

Evidence: Arabic geographers of the ninth and tenth centuries and travellers to Aydhab in the twelfth; the southern Beja and Suakin are barely documented about 1200.

On the map: A people's grazing country, not a state: the outline joins the ranges of many clans, and takes in the northern Eritrean hills that the Horn records anchor to the Beja. The Gash-Setit lowlands are left to the Baza (Baza (Bazin)).

Primary sources for this realm

Chronicles, registers, sagas and inscriptions written in or near 1200 that cover this entry. Each has its own page with editions, translations and where to read it.

• Exhortations and Reflections on the Quarters and Monuments: the chapters on Nubia and the Beja, al-Maqrizi (about 1417 to 1442, at Cairo). Two centuries late, but al-Maqrizi copied earlier books that are now lost, above all the account of Nubia by Ibn Salim al-Aswani, who went as Fatimid envoy to Dongola about 970 and described the Nubian king, his court, the eparch, the church and the land, which is the fullest description of Makuria ever written and still broadly valid in 1200; he also gives the Beja tribes, the oases, the baqt treaty and the Ayyubid campaigns against Nubia of 1173. Read online
• The History of the Churches and Monasteries of Egypt and some Neighbouring Countries, Abu al-Makarim (formerly attributed to Abu Salih the Armenian) (about 1177 to 1208; the core about 1200). The one Christian text written in Egypt around 1200 that looks south: it describes the kingdom of the Nubians with its king at Dongola, his churches, the eparch of Nobadia, the churches of Qasr Ibrim and the raid of Shams al-Dawla Turanshah in 1173, the kingdom of Alwa (Alodia) with its 400 churches and its capital Soba, and the Abyssinians with their king, their metropolitan sent from Alexandria, the church of Aksum and the Ark, as a Coptic churchman heard of them through the patriarchate. Read online
• Dictionary of Countries: the entries on Africa, Yaqut al-Hamawi (1224 to 1228, at Mosul and Aleppo). Entries written within a generation of 1200 from earlier books and from informants: Maqdishu (Mogadishu), described as a town of the Barbar (Somali) on the edge of the Zanj country with no single ruler but elders for each group, the earliest notice of the town; Manbasa (Mombasa), Lanjuya (Zanzibar) and the Zanj coast; Zayla, Barbara and the Dahlak islands; Dunqula (Dongola) and the Nubians; the Beja; Kanem, Zaghawa, Ghana, Kawkaw and the Sudan, mostly from al-Bakri and al-Idrisi; and the towns of Ifriqiya and the Maghreb. Read online
• The Pleasure of One who Longs to Cross the Horizons (the Book of Roger), al-Idrisi (Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Sharif al-Idrisi) (completed in 1154 at Palermo, for Roger II of Sicily). The fullest geography of Africa a generation before 1200: the Maghreb and Ifriqiya town by town with distances and products; the Sahara routes through Sijilmasa, Awdaghust, Ghadames and Zawila; the Sudan with Ghana, Takrur, Sila, Barisa, Kawkaw (Gao) and Kugha, and Kanem with its towns Manan and Njimi; Nubia and Dongola, the Beja and the Red Sea ports; Zeila and Berbera; and the Zanj coast with Malindi, Mombasa, Qanbalu and Sofala with its gold, the earliest systematic notice of the Swahili towns. Read online
• Oriental Sources concerning Nubia, Various (collected and translated by Giovanni Vantini) (the collection published 1975). The standard collection, in English, of every eastern passage on Christian Nubia, and so the quickest way to all that was written about Makuria and Alodia near 1200: Abu al-Makarim, Ibn al-Athir on Turanshah's campaign of 1173, Ibn Jubayr and Yaqut, the History of the Patriarchs, Abu Shama, and the later Ibn Said, Abu'l-Fida, al-Nuwayri, Ibn Khaldun and al-Maqrizi (who preserves the tenth-century Ibn Salim al-Aswani).