ABABDA, a nomad tribe of Arabs who reach northward to the Kena-Kusayr road, in the country east of Luxor Diran, Aswan and the Northern Atbai. They call themselves "sons of the Jinns," and they are the Gebadei of Pliny and probably the Troglodytes of classical writers. From time immemorial they have acted as guides to caravans through the Nubian desert and up the Nile valley as far as Sennar. Many of them are employed in the telegraph service across the Arabian desert. They are great trade carriers and visit far away districts. The Ababda of Egypt, numbering some 30,000, are governed by an hereditary "chief"; they generally speak Arabic mingled with Barabra words. As a tribe they claim descent from Selman, an Arab of the Beni Hilal. They have adopted the dress and habits of the fellahin. In Nubia they live in villages, and their principal means of livelihood include agriculture, fishing, peddling, charcoal burning, wood-gathering and trading in gums and drugs. The Ababda build huts with hurdles and mats or live in natural caves. Their chief means of transportation is the camel and their chief foods are milk and durra. They are very superstitious, believing, for example, that evil would overtake a family if a girl member should after her marriage, ever set eyes on her mother; hence the Ababda husband has to make his home far from his wife's village. In the Mahdist troubles (1882-98) many "friendlies" were recruited from this tribe.

BIBLIOGRAPY.--Sir F. R. Wingate, Mahdism and the Egyptian Sudan (1891); Giuseppe Sergi, Africa: Antropologia della Stirpe Camitica (1897); A. H. Keane, Ethnology of Egyptian Sudan (1884); Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, edited by Count Gleichen (1905) Joseph von Russegger, Die Reisen in Afrika (1841-50) H. A. MacMichael, History of the Arabs in the Sudan (1922).