According to their own tradition, the original homeland of the Berti is the Tagabo Hills region in Northern Darfur Province of the Republic of the Sudan. Until quite recently, the Berti spoke their own language and the linguistic material which I collected among them in 1961 was analysed by Petracek (1975; 1978), who classified it as one of the Central Sahara language group and closest to Zaghawa. This linguistic evidence would indicate that their original migration into their present territory was from the northwest, but if such a migration indeed occurred, it must have been a very early one. Probably the first historical reference to the Berti is in ‘the description of the world’ compiled by Giovanni Lorenzo d'Anania, which was first published in 1573 in Naples and revised and expanded in two subsequent editions in 1575 and 1582. The third chapter of this work is concerned with the description of Africa (Lange 1972: 299–301) and towards its end d'Anania describes the city of Vri which can be identified as Uri – nowadays a ruined hill-top palace in Northern Darfur (Arkell 1946; Balfour-Paul 1955: 11) which might have been the capital of the early Tunjur state (O'Fahey and Spaulding 1974: 111). D'Anania also enumerates the peoples subject to the rule of Vri's ‘emperor’ Nina: Aule, Zurla, Sagava, Memmi, Musulat, Morga, Saccae and Dagio (Lange 1972: 342–5).