Book Title: Introduction to the Science of Religion
Author(s): Max Muller
Publisher: Longmans Green and Compny London

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Page 246
________________ 242 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. By a similar process of reasoning he excludes the Hottentot language also from the African family, properly so called, and brings these people in the south in connexion with the Kushites in the north, from whom they were separated by the pressure of Bântu tribes, recovering the eastern territory that had for a time been wrested from them by Kushite invaders. Startling as such a theory will appear, it is hardly less so than the view which Professor Lepsius takes of the language to which he has devoted his special attention, the Nubian. This language, spoken on the Nile, in the very midst of a Kushitic population, is, nevertheless, treated by him, not as Kushitic, but as Bântu, and the Nubian physique, though by a long continued intercourse hardly distinguishable in many places from the Egyptian, is traced back to its original African type among South Nubian tribes. On our maps Nubia generally extends south from the first cataract over the whole breadth between the Nile and the Red Sea as far as Habesh, south east beyond Chartum, south and south-west along the White Nile to the Bahr-el-Gazâl. Lepsius, though admitting the presence of scattered Nubian tribes in the south, more particularly about Kordofan and the neighbouring hills, fixes on the Nile as the natural frontier between the true Nubian, sometimes, though wrongly, called Berber, in the west, and Kushitic tribes coming from the east, these being represented by the modern Bejas as their most advanced post. What gives an additional interest to these Nubian tribes is that they alone among African races have something like a history, to be read on the monuments of their neighbours, the Egyptians. The Egyptian monuments distinguish from the earliest times between the red or brown Southern race and the negroes, who are called Nahasi. Among these the Uaua occupy a prominent place so far back as the third millennium before our era, and they are identified by Lepsius with the Nubians. Whether the so-called Nubian inscriptions which are found scattered over the country oc

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