CHAPTER XVIII MEETING OF EASTERN AND WESTERN INFLUENCE UPON THE NIGER It has been said that civilisation flowed to the Soudan from two sources. There was a civilisation of the East, and a civilisation of the West. The two streams flowed in from different ends of the country, and there was a point at which they met and overlapped. We have now come to that very interesting point.

We have seen in the fall of Ghana under Mohammedan influence the final extinction at its most westerly limit of an order of civilisation which belonged to a different epoch of the world's history. It is probable that the civilisation of Ghana may have drawn its original inspiration also from the East. But historical documents are wanting. The care of students has not been devoted to this point, or if it has, the results of their labours have been unfortunately lost in the many holocausts made by ignorant conquerors of learned libraries. The Christians distinguished themselves in Spain by destroying Arab libraries wherever they conquered Arab towns, and at a later period their example was unhappily imitated in the Soudan by Moors and Fulahs in relation to the documents of local learning. Hence of the antique civilisation which preceded that of the Middle Ages under the Tropic of Cancer in West Africa we know but little. What we know either by document or direct tradition is first connected with the rise of the Songhay people, and it is at a point farther east than Ghana, and at a period subsequent to the Mohammedan domination of that town, that the advancing 153