um and Egypt.
From Kareima downstream the Nile is navigable to Kerma, just above the
3rd cataract. Between 1896 and 1904 a railway ran between Kerma and Wadi
Halfa. In the last-named year this railway was closed. It had been built
for purely military purposes and was unremunerative as a commerical
undertaking.

The Dongolese (Dongolawi, Danaglas, Danagalehs) are Nubas in type and
language, but have a large admixture of Arab, Turk and other blood. They
are great agriculturists and keen traders, and were notorious
slave-dealers. South of Old Dongola the inhabitants are not Nubians but
Shagia (q.v.), and the Nubian tongue is replaced by Arabic. Of the nomad
desert tribes the chief are the Hawawir and Kabbabish.

The country now forming the mudiria was once part of the ancient empire
of Ethiopia (q.v.), Napata being one of its capital cities. From about
the beginning of the Christian era the chief tribes in the region
immediately south of Egypt were the Blemmyes and the Nobatae. The last
named became converted to Christianity about the middle of the 6th
century, through the instrumentality, it is stated, of the empress
Theodora. A chieftain of the Nobatae, named Silko, between the middle
and the close of that century, conquered the Blemmyes, founded a new
state, apparently on the ruins of that of the southern Meroe
(Bakarawiya), made Christianity the official religion of the country,
and fixed his capital at (Old) Dongola. This state, now generally
referred to as the Christian kingdom of Dongola, lasted for eight or
nine hundred years. Though late in reaching Nubia, Christianity, after
the wars of Silko, spread rapidly, and when the Arab conquerors of Egypt
sought to subdue Nubia also they met with stout resistance. Dongola,
however, was captured by the Moslems in 652, and the country laid under
tribute (_bakt_)--400 men having to be sent yearly to Egypt. This
tribute was paid when it could be enforced; at periods the Nubians
gained the upper hand, as in 737 when Cyriacus, their then king, marched
into Egypt with a large army to redress the grievances of the Copts.
There is a record of an embassy sent by a king Zacharias in the 9th
century to Bagdad concerning the tribute, while by the close of the 10th
century the Nubians seem to have regained almost complete independence.
They did not, however, possess any part of the Red Sea coast, which was
held by the Egyptians, who, during the 9th and 10th centuries, worked
the emer