Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 4.djvu/483



CHAP. IX.

ROM Salidan's time, till the conquest of Selim emperor of the Turks, who finished the reign of the Mamalukes by the murder of Tomum Bey, that is, from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, the Arabs in Nubia and Beja, and the several countries above Egypt, had been incorporated with the old indigenous inhabitants of those territories, which were the Shepherds and, upon conversion of these last to the Mahometan religion, had become one people with those Saracens who over-ran this country in the Khalifat of Omar. The only distinction that remained was that the Arabs continued their old manner of life in tents, while the indigenous inhabitants lived in huts, mostly by the sides of rivers, and among plantations of date-trees.