10 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY
influenced, it may be useful, at the risk of repeating very familiar facts, briefly to recall some of the commonly accepted dates relating to the rise and fall of the early ^ civilisations of the Mediterranean.j
The great period of Egyptian civilisation, including that of the southern end of the Nile Valley, under its
Ethiopian, Coptic, and Libyan Pharaohs, extends from an antiquity which recent excavations tend to show ever more remote, to the conquest of Egypt by Cambyses,
King of Persia, b.c. 527. Egypt then became a province of the Persian Empire. It was in the early period, before the time of Herodotus and Cambyses, that Egypt would seem to have given the first inspiration of civilised life to Western Negroland. It remained a dependency of the Persian Empire for two hundred years, but during the whole period was constantly at war with its conquerors.
In 332 B.C. Egypt was invaded by Alexander of Macedon as a part of his campaign against Persia. It submitted willingly, and on his death in 321 the dynasty of the
Ptolemies was founded and continued, until, on the death
of Cleopatra, who was the last sovereign of that dynasty,
Egypt became a Roman province, B.C. 30. On the division of the Roman Empire it was included in the
Prefecture of the East, and it remained a province of the Byzantine Empire until it was conquered by the Arabs in 638 a.d.
The civilisation of the Phoenicians, contemporary at least in part with the history of Egypt, dates also from the earliest periods of which civil history has any record. The Phoenicians are believed to have migrated from
Erythrea on the coast of the Red Sea, about the year 2000 B.C., to the Mediterranean, where they were first established on a strip of Syria between the chain of
Lebanon and the sea, and afterwards took possession of a
portion of Greece, of some of the islands of the Medi-
terranean, and of the principal promontories along the coast of Africa to the Straits of Gibraltar, and as far down the western coast as the mouths of the Senegal. They