Beja

The Beja are Cushitic-speaking camel nomads of the Eastern Desert between the Nile and the Red Sea, heirs of the Medjay and Blemmyes. The kings of Aksum made them tributary in the third century, and al-Yaqubi counted five Muslim Beja kingdoms there in the ninth, though al-Maqdisi found Christians among them a hundred years later.

Their chief port, Suakin, had a sultan of mixed Meccan and Beja blood when Ibn Battuta visited in 1332; the Hedareb tribe made it their capital, and after Adal the town fell to the Ottomans in the 1550s.

Inland, Arab migration brought intermarriage and Islam, so by the fifteenth century the Beja were Muslim, organized in the Ababda, Bisharin, Hadendoa and Beni-Amer clans, some keeping their Cushitic tongue, others turning to Tigre or Arabic. By the eighteenth century the Hadendoa dominated much of eastern Sudan.