EASTERN AND WESTERN INFLUENCE i6i Under the pagan " Zas " Songhay influence extended as far west as the town of Jenne, which was founded by them in the eighth century, though afterwards cut off from their possessions and isolated on the westerly frontier of the "Bend of the Niger" by the Morabite invasion of the Soudan. Jenn, it will be remembered, maintained its paganism until the twelfth century in the midst of surrounding Islam, and, though tributary to Melle, kept the independence of the town until, as will be seen, it was once more incorporated with the Songhay Empire in or about 1477. The most westerly manifestation of the influence of ancient Egypt in the Soudan is placed by the talented author of ''Timbuctoo the Mysterious" in this town of Jenn6, where, when he visited it at the end of the nineteenth century, he found, to his amazement, **a colony of ancient Egypt " in the heart of the Soudan. He describes the architecture of Jenne as '* neither Arabic nor Byzantine, Greek nor Roman, still less Gothic nor Western." "At last," he says, " I recall these majestically solid forms, and the memory is wafted to me from the other extremity of Africa. . . . It is in the ruins of ancient Egypt, in the valley of the Nile, that I have seen this art before."

Jenne may be taken as marking the limit of pagan Songhay development, though at a later period of conquest the dominion of the Songhays included the whole of the Western Soudan from the Atlantic to Lake Chad. The Songhay kingdom flourished exceedingly under the Mohammedan Zas. Their capital was, of all the cities of the blacks, that which had most gold. It had also abundance of cotton and rice, and it is at this period that Idrisi says of it that "it was populous, commercial, and industrial, and that in it was to be found the produce of all arts and trades necessary for its inhabitants." After Za Kosoi there were twelve more Mohammedan " Zas" before the country was conquered by Mansa Musa, and the two sons of the reigning Za Yasiboi were taken by him to be educated at his court. After that