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, misspelling for Abu Ṭulayḥ, so called after the ṭalḥ tree ( Acacia seyal ), the name of a well-centre on the road through the Bayūḍa desert which, avoiding the Nile bend of Abū Ḥamad, leads from Korti (Ḳurtī) south of Dongola to al-Metamma, a distance of 192 miles. The place is famous as the scene of a battle fought on 17 Jan. 1885 between the darwīs̲h̲ forces of Muḥammad Aḥmad [ q.v.] and a "desert column" of some 1800 British troops who were advancing from Korti to the relief of Ḵh̲arṭūm where the Egyptian garrison and General Charles Gordon were besieged by the…

, the mediaeval Islamic form for the land of Nubia, lying to the south of Egypt, and its peoples. 1. Definition The names Nubia, Nubian, Nūba are commonly used without scientific precision and it is only in the linguistic sense that they have an unambiguous meaning. The frontier separating Nubia from Egypt proper is well defined as the first cataract of the Nile in the neighbourhood of Aswān, and the area where Nubian is spoken nowadays ends in the vicinity of the 18th parallel, but the southern limit of Nubia is so…

, a tributary of the Nile, known to the ancients as Astaboras. It rises in Abyssinia not far from Gondar and, entering the Sūdān near Gallabat (Ḳallabāt) is joined lower down by the Salām and Setīt; it joins the Main Nile at a point about 200 miles north of Ḵh̲artūm. During the flood season (end of May to end of September) it contributes a considerable amount of silt-laden water to the Nile; for the rest of the year it dries up into a series of pools. The town of Atbara near the river mouth is important as the headquarters of the Sūdān railways (population of the Municipal counci…

(his name is invariably pronounced as ʿAbdullāhi ), the successor of Muḥammad Aḥmad [ q.v.], the Sudanese Mahdī. He belonged to the Awlād Umm Ṣurra, a clan of the Ḏj̲ubarāt section of the Taʿāʾis̲h̲a, a tribe of cattle-breeding Arabs (Baḳḳāra) in Dārfūr. His great-grandfather is said to have been a Tunisian s̲h̲arīf who married a woman of the tribe. His father Muḥammad b. ʿAlī Karrār bore the nickname of Tōr S̲h̲ayn (Ugly Bull). Religious pretensions were hereditary in the family, and both father and son were fakīs of repute. Zubayr Raḥma, the famous merchan…

(sg. ʿAbbādī ), an Arabic-speaking tribe of Bed̲j̲a [ q.v.] origin in Upper Egypt with branches in the northern Sudan. The northern limis of their territory in Egypt is the desert road leading from Ḳena to Ḳusayr, and their nomad sections roam the desert to the east of Luxor and Aswān. The original ʿAbābda stock is most truly represented by the nomads but there are also sedentary sections who have intermarried with the fallaḥīn and adopted much of their way of life. On the Red Sea coast there is a small clan of fisher-folk, the Ḳirayd̲j̲āb, who by some are not recognized as true ʿAbābda. Like the r…