This study exploits hitherto-overlooked information preserved in the early nineteenth-century travel accounts of Eduard Rüppell and Joseph von Russegger.

At that time a number of the arid north Kordofan hill clusters were inhabited by small agricultural communities who spoke one or more now-extinct western Nubian languages. (The Meidob of eastern Dar Fur survive.)

Precolonial merchants from these extinct communities established ties to a variety of leaders and communities in the Nuba Mountains.  Later, this precolonial network would be swept away by the bigger and better-known nineteenth-century diaspora of northern Nile valley traders called “jallaba.”

Examination of the lost diaspora will probably revise existing historiography of the Nuba Mountains area, which has emphasized a simple collaboration between jallaba with religious pretensions and would-be Nuba kings.

While the paradigm that links bookish interpretations of Islam with trade and state-building may be basically correct for the nineteenth century, the earlier diaspora asks for more subtle consideration.

Because the communities from which the traders came were miniscule, and their economic clout likewise very small, they could never exert an influence on Nuba communities comparable to that of the later jallaba.  The Nuba always held the upper hand in exchange relationships with the northerners, even where the host communities were politically decentralized.

Yet the prominence of slaves among the Nuba exports indicates that some of the social processes characteristic of the later age of the jallaba may also have been at work, on a small scale, in precolonial times.

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