I. 3. XVI. AND THE NUBA OF MERGE 41

Napata, but probably by 440 B.C. the political headquarters had been shifted to Meroe, about two hundred miles away to the south-

east near the junction of the Atbara with the Nile, the religious

capital remaining, as before, at Napata.

The original substratum of population in the country round Meroe, or at least to the south and east of it, may have consisted of

that same red-brown race which is held once to have occupied the banks of the Nile, the south-western littoral of Asia and the Red Sea

coast^; but by the first millennium B.C., if not long before, this race

must have become submerged in the negro hordes which had surged up from the south and acquired predominance in the Nile valley.

XV The earliest extant remains at Meroe prove that, though the

population was predominantly negro in the fourth and fifth centur\-

B.C., Egyptian motives in art and manners were still predominant, and that they continued so until about the third century B.C. The account of Meroe given by Herodotus^ (c. 450 B.C.) is evidence lead-

ing to the same conclusion ; but before we deal with this and with the

scraps of information left us by later Greek and Roman geographers

a digression is necessary to point out that there was apparently another

cultural influence at work besides that of Egypt.

XVI We have already had occasion to note the continued con-

nection between Abyssinia, the Nile valley and the Yemen of

Arabia, which probably began at least four or five thousand years

before the Christian era and became intimate in the second and first

millennia b.c.^ The temples of Meroe, the Sun Temple, the Lion Temple, and the original Temple of Isis, all of which belong to the

"Early Meroitic" period, and the sitting stone lions of Basa, Naka,

el Musowwarat, Um Soda and Soba are certainly connected with

the Sun Temple of Talmis*, the two lions before the great pylon of

the temple of Isis at Philae, and, one supposes, with those sitting "dogs" which Bruce saw in Abyssinia and which Heeren and Crowfoot unite in thinking were lions of the same type as those at Basa and the other places mentioned^.

"In Abyssinia," Bent considers®, "Christianity must have succeeded a form of Sabaean sun-worship; the monoliths and altars all point to this; and in the ritual of their church we can still clearly see traces of this cult. The nightly services which end at sunrise, the circular churches with four

^ Elliot Smith, Ancient Egyptians, pp. 6i, 79.

- Bk. u, 29.

'

3 See Chap. i.

* Sun worship was, of course, prevalent in ancient Egypt from the time of the Old Kingdom: see Breasted, Hist. pp. 59, 62, etc.

^ Crowfoot, loc. cit. p. 23. Stone lions of this type are rare in Egypt.

* The Sacred City..., p. 83, and cp. ibid. pp. 138-197 and 231-293.