BERBER AND BLACK 95 on the northern frontier of India. We get, therefore, somewhere about the time of Moses a spot in Persia whence the Wangara may have originated. The fact that Persian influence extended at a very early period to the black countries of Africa is also attested by the ruins of Persepolis, where amongst the bas-reliefs believed to have been carved in commemoration of the glories of Cyrus and his immediate successors, there is one which shows the king in the act of receiving tribute from the ambassadors of subject nations, and amongst them there is a negro. Niebuhr tells us that the profile is unmistakable, and that the hair of the negro is so carefully carved that it is impossible to mistake it for the hair of an Asiatic. Cambyses, son of Cyrus, conquered Egypt in 527 B.C., and his army perished in marching into Ethiopia. There is nothing impossible in the supposition that fragments of that defeated army may have remained and settled in the Soudan.

Further information of the remote antiquity of Ghana seems unfortunately to be at present unattainable. So far as we are aware, no monuments remain to confirm the traditions of the people. I give these surmises, therefore, for what they may be worth, and have myself found nothing to connect the Taurud of Ghana with the ancient Babylonians except two characteristics mentioned by El Bekri : one is that they were workers in gems, the other is that their notables indulged a passion for fine dogs. Both of these, as we know, were also characteristics of the people of Babylon. We are on safer ground when we return to the medieval records of Arab writers.

In the years 1067 Ghana was still the principal black kingdom of the Western Soudan. The name of its reigning sovereign was Tenkamenin, who ascended the throne in the year 1062, in succession to his maternal uncle, Beci. It was the custom amongst these blacks for the succession to go always to the son of the king's sister.