Nineteenth-century Egyptian usage labeled Sudanese people Nubian rather than Berber

Evidence

43. This speech is delivered in a thick accent, with certain Arabic letters left unpronounced. Regarding the character’s identification as a Nubian, some con- temporary critics of nineteenth-century Arabic literature translate the widely used word barbarï as berber, but my study of contemporary dictionaries (i.e., Socrates, A Dictionary of the Colloquial Arabic of Modern Egypt), as well as proverbs and the patterns of trade and migration between Egypt and the Sudan, make Nubian seem a more accurate translation. Berber is located just north of Atbara, which was a major trade center in the nineteenth century. There were also instances in the 1800s of the term Barabra being used inaccurately to refer to people in the Nuba mountains of the western Sudan, which was then an area of frequent slave-trading with Egypt. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 1107

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: Shows how the term applied to Sudanese people carried translation and ethnographic baggage, relevant to the reader’s tracing of colonial categorization across Egypt and Sudan.
• QUESTION: The conflation of Barabra with Nuba-mountain slave-trading suggests the word had become a loose colonial ethnic catch-all worth tracing further.

Related

• Nineteenth-century Egyptians collapsed Nubians and Sudanese into one ‘barbari’ identity (similarity 0.86)
• Egyptian law drew conscription boundaries by Nubian versus Sudanese parentage (similarity 0.86)
• Egyptians conflated Nubian, Sudanese, and Ethiopian identities in racial terms (similarity 0.84)
• Egyptian nationalists actively used European race discourse to frame views on Sudan (similarity 0.82)
• Nile Valley racial vocabulary preceded colonialism in market and slave trade contexts (similarity 0.80)
• Egyptian nationalists argued only Islam could pacify the recalcitrant Sudanese. (similarity 0.80)
• Egyptian writers framed Egyptian rule as a civilizing force over a wild Sudan (similarity 0.80)
• Nubians and Sudanese differed linguistically but Egyptians erased the difference. (similarity 0.79)
• Egyptian writers collapsed Nubian and Sudanese into one racial type. (similarity 0.79)
• Arabic terms like ‘nation’ reached Egypt only recently and met British contradiction (similarity 0.79)
• The term Sudanese in 1924 connoted slave origins and detribalization (similarity 0.78)
• The term Sudanese originally denoted southern slaves, not northern Arabs. (similarity 0.78)
• Egyptians produced their own Orientalist-style stereotypes about Sudan and Africa. (similarity 0.78)
• Egyptian colonial courts and press conflated Nubian, Sudanese, and Ethiopian identities (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Early Egyptian nationalism fused Sudanese racial denigration with Nile Valley unity #corroborates (0.60)
• Egyptian nationalists reproduced stereotypes about Sudan paralleling Orientalist imagery #corroborates (0.50)