Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/172

148 the existence of such a vast sheet of water or of the mass of land that closed it in on the western side.

Upon the death of Solomon his kingdom was divided into two sections, each too weak to carry on such great enterprises as he had engaged in, and though on one occasion subsequently the rulers of the separate states united to fit out and despatch a fleet from Ezion-geber, the attempt ended in failure and was never again repeated.

The extensive commerce of Tyre continued to be carried on, but whether she still maintained fleets in the Red sea is doubtful, for she may have needed foreign assistance to be able to do that. In the twenty-seventh chapter of Ezekiel, written about 588 years before Christ, there is a graphic account of her enormous trade, and from the twenty-second verse it would appear that her Indian wares were furnished by the merchants of Southern Arabia.

The splendid city was taken and destroyed after a siege of thirteen years by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, in the year 573 before Christ, but was soon afterwards rebuilt on an island close to the mainland, and partly recovered its commercial importance. It was taken again in 332 B.C. by Alexander the Great, of Macedon, after a siege of eight months, when its celebrity ceased for ever, as Alexandria, at the mouth of the western outlet of the Nile, took its place as the greatest commercial city of the world.

The Israelites and the Phoenicians not having supplied any information concerning the dark-skinned people of Africa, we turn now to the Greeks to ascertain whether they perchance knew and placed on record anything about them.

In the Homeric age, which is believed to have been somewhere between 1200 and 850 before Christ, the Greeks were aware that such people lived somewhere to the south, but of them, beyond their existence, they knew nothing. They considered the inhabited world to be a circular plane, with a great stream flowing round it, and farther away than the renowned city of Thebes in Egypt, on the border of this ocean stream, the Ethiopians were stated in the Iliad to dwell. The name Ethiopian was of