Khartoum (state) and November. The 2008 population census estimates the population of Khartoum state to be about 5,274,321 capita, composed of various tribes of the Sudan. The population is 79% urban, and 74% of the state's population reported their region of origin to be outside Khartoum. The areas of Omdurman and the rural South are inhabited by the tribe of Gamowia, as well as by the Kordofani tribes displaced to these areas by the drought and desertification that hit their areas in the early- and mid-1980s. These are the tribes of the Kababish and the Kawahla. In the northern countryside of Karari
Khartoum recently as the 13th-17th centuries A.D. Captain J.A. Grant, who reached Khartoum in 1863 with Captain Speke's expedition, thought the name was most probably from the Arabic "qurtum" ( ', i.e., "Carthamus tinctorius"), which was cultivated extensively in Egypt for its oil to be used as fuel. Some scholars speculate that the word derives from the Nubian word, "Agartum" ("the abode of Atum"), the Nubian and Egyptian god of creation. Other Beja scholars suggest "Khartoum" is derived from the Beja word, "Hartoom" ("meeting"). Additionally, the dream-interpreting magicians in Genesis 41:8 are referred to as חַרְטֻמֵּ֥י מצרים("Khartoumei Mitzrayim" - Magicians of