24 PAST AGES OF CONQUEST south of Meroe—which is chronicled by Herodotus, who lived about 430 B.C. ; also for the despatch of ambassadors to the Ethiopians by Cambyses, of the Twenty-seventh Dynasty (527 B.C.), followed by an abortive expedition against them. By this time Meroe, the site of which has been located near Shendi, had become the capital of the southern half of the kingdom, and the gold which is found in modern days in the higher portion of the Blue Nile indicates the locality where much of the loot of their expeditions came from.

The mantle of Piankhi descended by many Nubian Kings, of whom little is known, to a long line of Queens who were remarkable, as is shown by their representations at the temple of Nagaa, north of Khartoum, and elsewhere, for an amplitude of build often seen amongst the Bantu tribes of South Africa, but very seldom in the Sudan.

A representation in Dr. Wallis Budge's handbook on the Nile illustrates a female figure with characteristics particularly resembling those of a Pondo girl (South Africa), whose proportions commended themselves extravagantly to her swarthy admirers.

This series of Queens, who evidently ruled for some hundred years, appear invariably to have taken the name of Candace, for one hears of a Queen contemporary to Alexander the Great, who seems to have held her in a wholesome awe ; and of others through the Ptolemaic period to the Roman and the Christian era, there being mention of them