FROM THE NILE TO POT SUDAN: TO THE ORIGINS OF THE BEJA PEOPLE Claude Rilly

Director of the French section of the Direction of Antiquities of Sudan 1. It is perhaps not unnecessary to introduce myself. My name is Claude Rilly, Ph.D in Linguistics and Egyptology from the University of Paris. I am a specialist of the language of Meroe, called Meroitic. I am the director of the French mission of archaeology of Sedeinga, in the Northern State, close to Abri. It has been four months that I have been named by the French ministry of foreign affairs as the director of the SFDAS (French Section of the Direction of Sudan Antiquities), whose administration is localised within the Sudan National Museum in Khartoum. When I have been contacted sometimes ago to present an archaelogical conference here in Port-Sudan, I wondered if I should, one more time, speak of the history of the Nile Valley that I know very well? Or deal with a topic of which I am not the best specialist, but that I still have studied, namely the origins of the Beja language? I thought that people from Port Sudan would be more interested by the second topic, even if it would be more difficult for me. Hence, please forgive me about my very poor knowledge of the modern Beja language. Concerning modern Beja language, we have in France a specialist, Martine Vanhove, who was the director of the African languages laboratory I was working in in Paris before moving to Sudan. She may come next winter to talk about her work. Many points I will deal with come from discussions I had with Martine.

2. Languages are distinct from people. Nowadays, a great majority of Sudanese people speak Arabic, even those who do not have a single drop of Arab blood. It is thus possible that a part of the people who speak Beja nowadays may have spoken another language a few centuries ago. However, since the Beja language has never been a conquerant language, one can believe that the origin of the Beja language roughly corresponds to the origins of Beja populations themselves. We will begin our inquiry by figuring out which language family Beja belongs to.

3. The reference work on African languages classification has been published in 1963 by an American linguist, Joseph Greenberg, under the title "Languages of Africa". Even if some of its details are disputed nowadays, the core of this classification remains unchallenged. Greenberg classified African languages in four super-families: to the south, Khoisan; in Central and western Africa, the Niger-Congo (Swahili for example); From Chad to Tanzania,

Nilo-Saharan (like Mahasi, Fur or Dinka); in Northern and Eastern Africa, Afro-Asiatic. Beja belongs to the latter. 4. In France, one traditionally calls this family "Hamito-Semitic". Greenberg's appellation is a very neutral term indicating a family straddling Africa and Asia, although that for the latter, only the Middle East is represented: according to geographers, Lebanon (sic)or Arabia are in Asia because they are located on the other side of the Red Sea . Afro-Asiatic comprises a great number of sub-families. That of Beja is called Cushitic, simply because of an error: one erroneously thought, for a long time, that Meroitic was a language from this family, related to Beja. The Kingdom of Meroe was in the past called the Kingdom of Kush. From "Kush", one created "Cushitic" and kept this appellation, even after that scholars had shown that le language of Kush was not "Cushitic", but Nilo-Saharan. Inside of Cushitic, there exists several groups. Beja is the only member of the Northern Cushitic group. Beja (or tobedawiye) is not an unified language: it is subdivided into a lot of varieties, corresponding to the groups of Beja populations localized on the three countries of the Red Sea, namely Egypt, Sudan and Erythrea: Ababda is mostly spoken in Egypt, Bisharin and Hadendowa in Sudan, Hidareb and Beni Hamer in Erythrea:

5. Along with Cushitic, afro-Asiatic comprises other sub-families that are often attested a long time ago: Ancient Egyptian, Semitic, Berber and Chadic. 6. Ancient Egyptian, a dead language, is a subfamily of Afro-asiatic itself. Semitic, is its only Asiatic branch. However it comprises Arabic, which spread into North Africa and Sudan because of Islamic conquests. Berber is still spoken, especially in Algeria and Morocco. Chadic is a branch, mostly spoken in Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon. Finally, Cushitic, that includes Beja, is a group of languages primarily spoken in Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia.

7. Semitic languages thus include Arabic, as we have said, but also Hebrew as well as Ethiopian and Erythrean languages such as Amharic and Tigrinya, that arrived there from Yemen almost two millenia ago. 8. The most widespread Chadic language is Hausa, which is also spoken in Sudan by a diaspora that recently migrated from Nigeria. 9. The Cushitic group includes languages which are closer to Beja. To simplify the situation one will say that it is divided into three subgroups: East, Central, and North.

10. The central group or "Agaw" includes many languages, the most known being Bilin, spoken around the town of Keren in Erythrea, and Kemant in Eastern Ethiopia.

11. The Eastern group includes many languages, some being widespread, like Oromo or Afar in Ethiopia or the Somali. Beja, as we have already said, is the only representant of the Northern Branch. Perhaps it had some sister languages in the past, but if it is the case they disappeared a long time ago.

12. Afroasiatic languages present some identical characteristics. As they split a long time ago, they almost do not share any common lexical elements. However, they retained grammatical features that braved the years. For example, they distinguish feminine and masculine, unlike Mahasi, Dinka or Swahili where nouns do not have gender. Feminine is marked by a t element placed before or after the noun which is found in Berber, Ancient Egyptian, Beja and Arabic's ta Marbuta, even if it is not pronounced anymore nowadays. 13. Have you ever heard of the Blemmyes. Maybe? One can find everywhere, including on the internet, that they are the Beja's ancestors. Indeed, one had no proof of this until recently. Popularisation books claimed it, why specialists were more careful about this claim. 14. The Blemmyes were a people, who, quite strangely, has always excited Westerners' curiosity, from Greek geographers from Ancient Times to Rudyard Kipling. Since they were located outside of the world they knew, the Greeks made up sometimes absurd legends on the people from modern Sudan. Hence, in some texts reported by Roman writer Pliny in his Natural History, the Blemmyes were described as headless people, with a face on their torso. Although the Romans had afterwards been in contact with the Blemmyes and fought them-and they must have seen they had heads- the legend of the headless people survived until the Middle Ages as shows a German engraving from 1493.

15. The first sure mention of the Blemmyes appears in a stela written in Egyptian for the Sudanese King Anlamani, a great grandson of the Great King Taharqa. It comes from Kawa, close to Dongola and has been acquired a long time ago, by the Copenhagen Museum, in Denmark, where it is localised nowadays. Anlamani tells us about the details of his accession to the throne of Kush, and especially about the Desert nomads he had to fight, the Bulahau : His Majesty sent his army to conquer the land of the Bulahau(). They made a great slaughter, rapted all the women, children, cattle as well as all their properties". One of course has to understand this story as very exaggerated: it is probably concerning only one Blemmye tribe with the Kushites had a small conflict.

16. The word "Blemmye" will then sporadically appear, especially within Egyptian sources. The Rylands Papyrus IX, precisely dated from 513 BC, which deals with the troubles an Egyptian priest has with his neighbours and the charges he pressed against them refers to some Blemmyes as integrated in Egyptian cities. The word appears under the writing that will become the most frequent one: BLHLM, since the

Egyptians usually did not write vowels as Classical Arabic. Other documents show that a Blemmye immigration in Egypt existed. Some Blemmye immigrants, well integrated within Egyptian society, were considered as priests; some other are, in the other hand described as a little bit dangerous marginal people who were spending their time partying and drinking alcohol. But those are the Greeks, who give the first precise descriptions of the Blemmyes. The Alexandrian geographer Eratosthenes, well known for being the first to have measured the earth's circumference wrote the following before 220 BC in his description of Sudan: "To the North, from each side of Meroe and up to the Red Sea, are living the Megabares and the Blemmyes, who obey the King of Meroe yet who are neighbours to the Egyptians." The Megabares remain unknown to us, but those two people, as one can see, with their location to the Egyptian border from Red Sea's side, remind us of the modern Beja people, and this is on the basis of this text and the closeness of the to ethnonyms that one has compared the Blemmyes and the Beja. 17. Actually, the first sure mention of the word Beja is not found in Egypt, or Sudan, but in Ethiopia. In 350 AD, the King of Axum, Ezana, conquers a great number of territories all the way to Meroe. In a stela written in Greek, he says: "When the Bugaite people did revolt, we sent against them our brothers Sazana and Aidipha. After their surrender, all their people and their cattle were brought in front of us. They were 4420. One gave them 22000 breads for them to stay healthy for four months until we could move them in another place". That the Bugaites were the Beja is certain. The Greek language not knowing the sound "j", it is transcribed by a "g". As in the Anlamani stela, this is probably only a small Beja tribe, not the whole population that the King Ezana deals with.

18. At this time, one hears again, in the North, about the Blemmyes. The Meroe Kingdom just collapsed because of the attacks of the Noubades (ancestor of modern Mahasi) and of King Ezana. The Blemmyes take advantage of the situation to establish themselves in the Nile Valley, to the South of Aswan. They establish their capital city in Talmis, called Kalabsha in Egypt nowadays, where Roman Emperor Augustus had make build four centuries before a great temple dedicated to the god Mandoulis, a god worshipped by the Blemmyes depicted as a human headed bird. Just above, Augustus, depicted as an Egyptian Pharaoh is making an offering of incense to the god Mandulis. 19. The Blemmye Kings who established themselves in Kalabsha left us some texts, never in their own language which was not written, but in Meroitic or in Greek. Around 420 AD, the Blemmye King Kharamadoye orders the writing of an inscription on a column of the temple: it is the most recent known text written in Meroitic. He presents himself as the successor of the Kings of Meroe and tells about his conquests in the area, especially against the Noubades. 20. Slightly before him, the Blemmye King Isemne, cited in the Kharamadoye stela orders the writing of an inscription in Greek a bit obscure to us : "Me Isemne, King, I offered this place to Ploulan, just like Marouk had offered it to King Degou". Degou may be a predecessor of Isemne, but the other names are unknown to us. 21. The domination of the Blemmyes over Talmis will not last long. Between 420 and 450, the Noubade

King Silko drove them from there. He made an inscription in Greek, accompanying his depiction with a horse. The text begins this way: "Me, Silko, King of the Noubades and of all the Ethiopians, I went to Talmis and to Taphis. On two occasions, I fought against the Blemmyes and the god gave me the victory. The third time, I conquered their cities." 22. The Blemmyes would never get back their territories in the Nile Valley. One discovered in 1976, in the Qasr Ibrim excavations, to the north of the Egyptian/Sudan border, an interesting document. This is a letter written in an incorrect Greek sent by Phonen, a Blemmye King, to the Noubade King Abourni, successor of Silko. Phonen complains about the treaties made with Silko had not been respected by the Noubades: "Because Silko was the first to vanquish and took Talmis. Today, it is you who took Talmis. The first one, Silko took our lands and kept us away from them. He told us "Give me sheeps, cows and camels in a decent number" for our lands to be given back to us." One never fulfilled Phonen's request. The Blemmyes came back to the Desert and never had any possessions in the fertile Nile Valley. Equiped with quick camels, that were still an innovation in this part of the world, they took advantage of the situation to regularly launch raids in order to sack Egyptian cities like Aswan. 23. Actually, this is only recently that one had the decisive proof that the Blemmyes are the ancestors of the Beja. Indeed, as you will see, this proof was not easy to find and looks quite fictional. In 1907, an ostracon had been found in Saqqara close to Cairo. The ostracon was broken and the text was only partially found. The writing was Greek, but the language was unknown. It has been dated from about the seventh century AD hence postdates or is contemporary to the Arab conquest of Egypt. This document had not been seriously studied for a century. No one knows if it still exists, or where it would be kept. Only a picture of it remains. Four years ago, Martine Vanhove, the French specialist of Beja came to me. She had received from one of her colleagues, the copy of a strange little book, dedicated to the languages of the Blemmyes. It was written by Gerald Browne, the world specialist of Old Nubian, the written language of the Christian Kingdoms of Sudan, in the Middle Ages. I know Browne's books very well and I often use them. Browne was a strange American who commited suicide in mysterious circumstances in 2004. The book we are talking about, which is 34 pages long, has been published in the United States in an undiscoverable edition. Indeed, it is not written in English, but in Latin that has been a dead language for 1500 years and that one does not use anymore in Western studies for more than one century Here it is. The translation of its text is : A Blemmye text of the Christian period. 24. In his preface, Gerald Browne is not delusional about the number of his readers: "You, very clever reader, and I as suspect, very rare, tu have in your hands a small book that contains to my knowledge what is left of the Blemmye language. " The book is actually divided in two parts: on one hand, the famous Saqqara ostracon, and on the other hand, the names of Blemmye individuals found within Greek texts such as King Phonen's letter mentioned earlier. 25. Using Beja dictionaries known in the Western world, like the one written by the Austrian Reinisch, Gerald Browne showed that the beginning of the text of the Saqqara ostracon contained words that could be paralleled with that of Beja: hada "god", lil "sing", leh "to be sick", melah "drive", le'ab "withdraw". The grammatical elements were also corresponding and Browne shows that this text is actually a Blemmye version of

Psalm 29: "Oh Lord, you are God. I shall sing for you and I shall not be sick (). Drive my soul and withdraw it from hell!". 26. In the second part, Browne gets back to the study of Blemmye personal names and shows that one can understand them thanks to Beja. A striking example is the one of the words ending by tak or tek, that one can compare with Beja tak "man". Hence, the name Hadetak is probably the man with the lion (Beja hada), Breitek is the "man of the rain" (biri in Beja), Yasatek is the man with the dog (Beja yas) and Kurbeitak is "the man with the elephant" (Beja Kwirib). After having read this little book, Martine Vanhove arrived to the same conclusion as I did. The language of the Blemmyes is indeed ancient Beja.

27. I would like to conclude by mentioning another hypothesis, that would date back the origins of Beja language before the Blemmyes. Again, this is a quite curious text we will deal with. 28. At the beginning of the XIXth century, the rich English amateur Egyptologist John Bankes bought in Cairo a vast collection of Egyptian papyrus. Among them were the archives of a scribe living around 1000BC, called Djehuty-Mose, which had been published four years ago. One know, thanks to those archives that this scribe had lived for a long time in Nubia and that he had health problems. However, someday, he wrote in a papyrus four lines written in Egyptian writing, but transcribing an unknown language. 29. Actually, the last line, very damaged, was probably written in Egyptian and was ended by the expression "in the language of Nesek". What is Nesek, a man, a place? The first three lines are thus transcribed in this obscure language, spoken in Nubia 3000 years ago. Of course, one immediately thinks of Meroitic that was already spoken at this time. Moreover, one knows magical spells in Nubian languages, Meroitic being one, transcribed in Egyptian magical papyri. The Sudaneses were thought by Egyptians to be fearless magicians and one were looking for their magical spells.

30. However, the second line comprises a "f", a sound that never existed in Meroitic, but that existed in Blemmye and still exists in Beja.

31. The first line comprises a group where all the words are ended by a t, which as we saw, can be the marker of nominal feminine gender in Afro-Asiatic languages. This is the case in Beja. 32. But more specifically, the first word contains the consonants "s" and "q" and reminds of the Beja sigi (feminine siga) "go away". And Egyptian magical spells used to cure from illnesses always start by "go away" addressed to the Evil. Moreover, one knows about Djehuty-Mose health problems, that should have led him to use this primitive kind of medicine. One cannot be sure of it at 100%, of course, that this spell in a foreign language was the most ancient Beja or Blemmye text.

33. conclude with this presentation that made us travel within texts and centuries, one can assert the following facts: Beja language originated in the Sudan/Ethiopia region Beja language has probably been present for millenia in the Nile Valley the Blemmyes are the ancestors of the Beja. Beja tribes were formerly present from the Nile, where they sometimes constituted Kingdoms all the way to the Red Sea.