INTRODUCTORY 13

Later accounts of the immense quantities of gold which abounded in Negroland render it not improbable that some of the gold so lavishly used by Phoenician artificers

in the decoration of Solomon's Temple may have been brought from the Valley of the Niger.

Greek influence in Africa was much later than that of Egypt and Phoenicia, and the colony of Gyrene, which afterwards became the province of Gyrenaica, between the borders of what is now Tripoli and Egypt, was not founded

till 620 B.C., about 100 years before the conquest of Egypt by Gambyses. It became subject to Egypt in 323, and afterwards shared in her fortunes.

Libyan, or, as we should call them, Berber tribes, held the extreme west, or divided it with the Garthaginian colonies until the conquest of the northern region by the

Romans, during the two hundred years which immediately preceded the birth of Ghrist. It may be remembered that

Scipio received the surname of Africanus in recognition of his triumph over Hannibal in the year 202 B.C. Africa proper, the territory owned by Garthage which corresponds to the modern Tunis, was created a Roman province in

146 B.C. But Egypt and Gyrenaica did not become Roman provinces until 30 B.C. Mauritania, in the north-western corner, also became a Roman province in ;^^ B.C. When the Romans completed the nominal conquest of Africa, they divided it into six provinces, of which Ethiopia or

Negroland was one. But though the northern strip was well known to them, and flourished under their rule, and they made some military expeditions to the south, they had little if any recorded intercourse with Negroland.

Thus from the earliest dawn of Western history the northern coast strip of Africa was the scene of civilised occupation. The introduction of the previously existing

Berber or Libyan inhabitants into Africa belongs, says

Ibn Khaldun, their great historian, to **a period so remote that God only knows the epoch of it." And as one race of conquerors displaced another, there was a perpetual

pressure driving the Libyan inhabitants with the dis-