Notes on Strabo and Agatharchides
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Both authors are in here with extracts of their writings because of what they wrote about the troglodytes. The troglodytes were a nomadic race that lived in S. Somalia and N. Kenya. As in the period concerned, the people of these areas were immigrating into east Africa, the description of their habits might be useful.
What follows is what the encyclopedia's say about the troglodytes.
According to Aristotle a dwarfish race of troglodytes dwelt on the upper course of the Nile, who possessed horses and were in his opinion the pygmies of fable. But the best known of these African cave dwellers were the inhabitants of the Troglodyte country on the coast of the red sea, as far north as the Greek port of Bernice. Of whom an account has been preserved by Diodorus and Photius from Agatharchides of Cnidus, and by Artemidorus in Strabo.
They were a pastoral people, living entirely on the flesh of their herds, or, in the season of fresh pasture, on mingled blood and milk. But they killed only the old and sick cattle (as indeed they killed old men who could no longer follow the flock), and the butchers were called unclean. They called the cow their mother and the bull their father. This last point seems to be confused indication of totemism. They went almost naked, the women wore necklaces of shells as amulets. Marriage was unknown, except among the chiefs. A fact which agrees with the prevalence of female kinship in these regions in much later times. They practiced circumcision or a mutilation of a more serious kind.
Their burial rites were peculiar. The dead body, its neck and legs bound together with withies of the shrub called paliurus, was set up on a mound, and pelted with stones amidst the jeers of the onlookers, until its face was completely covered with them. A goat's horn was then placed above it, and the crowd dispersed with manifestations of joy.
It is supposed that the Horim or Horites, the aboriginal inhabitants of Mount Seir, if their name is correctly interpreted "cavedwellers", were a kind of people related to the troglodytes on the other side of the Red Sea.