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Muyser has pointed out that the Arabic text bears all the indications of a translation from the Coptic, and that the Scala copte 44 identifies “Aidhab” with Berenike. According to the text of the Synaxarion, Bishop Nabis was born in a village near Coptos and became a monk at an early age. Bishop Nabis did not reside in “Aidhab” but in a small church at Coptos. When it was necessary for the bishop to go there himself, the Beja, a tribe that lived in Nubia and the Eastern Desert in Upper Egypt, carried him and the church ornaments on their camels, receiving a price for the hire of their beasts. The life of Pesynthios also records that Patriarch Theophilus (385–412) consecrated John, the younger brother of Pesynthios, as bishop of the diocese of Hermonthi.

The early history of Quseir Fort during the Ottoman period and its hinterland demonstrates the ephemeral nature of human settlement in the Eastern Desert. It is true to some degree, long-term inhabitants in many ways have been the nomadic tribes people: in this area, the Ababda to the north and the Beja to the south. The two periods of occupation at Quseir al-Qadim were clearly based upon trade with, later combined with pilgrimage to, Arabia and the east, in times when political and strategic conditions were favorable. When the winds of fortune shifted so, too, did trading patterns. It is probable that this change in trade and pilgrimage routes was actively encouraged by the Cairo authorities. The foundation of the Ottoman fort at Quseir is the result of one of these brief flurries of political concern with Red Sea affairs and specifically the supply of the Holy Cities and the Hejaz.

This chapter considers how Beja, born in 1946 in the African archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe, seeks to produce a signifying chain that emerges from the centuries-long impact of imperial power on the world, particularly on disenfranchised peoples and spaces. Beja, in this sense, takes a further step by reflecting on ways to enunciate identity and collective struggle in a decolonial fashion. The chapter reads select poems from three of her collections spanning her poetic trajectory and oeuvre: Bô Tendê? [Do You Understand?] (1992), No País do Tchiloli [In the Country of Tchiloli] (1996), and Aromas de Cajamanga [Aromas of Ambarella] (2009). In doing so, we shall examine what we may call a decolonial remapping; one that Beja carries out, I argue, in a poetic narrating/signifying of movement through time and space that re-orders imperial signifiers.

Chapter Eight, “The Beja in Time and Space” is the first of two chapters pondering a curious anomaly that occurs in every medieval Islamic map of the world. Located on the eastern flank of Africa is a double-territorial ethnonym for an obscure East African tribe: the Beja. Mention of them in medieval Middle Eastern historiography is rare and, at best, superficial, yet no Islamic map from the 11^th to the 19^th century leaves them out. This chapter queries who the Beja were and why they are so prominently located on every KMMS world map. This chapter tracks and locates the Beja on KMMS and modern maps.

Chapter Nine, “How the Beja Capture Imagination” builds on the answer to Chapter Seven’s query by asking another question. Knowing who the Beja are, we are led to wonder, why are they so absent in Islamic historiography, yet ever present on the KMMS world maps? The surprising answers help us to understand how capturing of the imagination of the cartographer effects what makes it onto a world map. This chapter shows changes that creep into the representation of the Beja on KMMS world maps over time and uses historical developments to account for and explain the variations. This chapter completes my contextual reading of the Beja ethnonym.