220 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY Ethiopia and Egypt assert that the worship of Ammon and Osiris, with its feasts and processions, was first settled at the metropolis of Meroe. This remarkable spot is regarded by the ancients as the "cradle of the arts and sciences, where hieroglyphic writing was discovered, and where temples and pyramids had already sprung up while Egypt still remained ignorant of their existence." From this temple the worship of Ammon and his attendant gods would seem to have spread to Egypt, and through the oasis of Siwah to Carthage and the Mediterranean coast.

The carvings of the monuments of Meroe show a people in possession of the arts and luxuries of civilisation, and having some knowledge of science. On the base of one of the monuments a zodiac has been found, and in the more northerly monuments of Nubia, which portray the conquest of Meroe by Rameses the Great of Egypt at a much later date, the conquered nation is shown as being not only rich, civilised, and important, but also as possessing tributary states, presumably in Central Africa, whence came giraffes and other Central African produce. We learn from the same monuments that the women of Meroe were frequently armed, and appeared to live on equal terms with men. They are constantly portrayed as queens. The Empire of Meroe had its settled constitution and its laws. It was composed of many little states, but the whole were apparently governed by a priest-caste, and the portraits of priests, frequently repeated upon the monuments, show them as tall and slender, with handsome profile, red-brown In colour, and with hair indifferently straight or curled. The general population are believed to have been of the black and straight-haired Nubian race. Here is the conclusion drawn by a competent German critic, nearly a hundred years ago, from the discoveries made by Gau, Champollion, and others : " In Nubia and Ethiopia stupendous, numerous, and primeval monuments proclaim so loudly a civilisation contemporary to, aye, earlier than