Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 01.djvu/232

AFRICA. are found in many villages in the very heart of the land. Consult: F. P. Noble, The Redemption of Africa (New York, 1899, 2 volumes); A. P. Atterbury, Islam in Africa (New York, 1899); H. P. Beach, Geography of Protestant Missions (New York, 1901). HISTORY.

. In the earliest historic times, when civilization centred around the Mediterranean, Libya, as Africa was known to the ancients, was one of the three great divisions of the earth, of which Europe and Asia were the other two. The details of its history are to be found in the history of Egypt, still the earliest recorded civilization, and of the other states of northern Africa, as well as of the Roman Empire, which absorbed them all. The brown-hued Berbers seem to have been the fundamental race stock throughout northern Africa, with perhaps Aryan and Semitic infusions, due to the contact of Egypt with Asia and Europe. Whether the Hamitic peoples of Africa were or were not autochthonous is a problem for the settlement of which no sufficient data exists. The knowledge possessed by the ancients of the continent as a whole, so far as we have accounts of it, can be briefly stated. The rulers of Egypt, as subsequently those of Carthage, attempted to extend their influence toward the south and west; but the physical and climatic conditions and the savage tribes encountered presented an effective bar to extended progress at that time. An inscription assigned to the period of the Eleventh (Theban) Dynasty tells of a voyage made by command of one of the rulers of that dynasty to the land of Punt, probably Somaliland. Recent discoveries also seem to increase the credibility of traditions which assigned the biblical lands of Ophir to the eastern coast of Africa. About thirty centuries ago the enterprising Phœnicians planted Utica (c.1100 B.C.), Carthage (826 B.C.), and other lesser colonies along the Mediterranean coast, and Greek colonies were founded in Egypt, in Cyrenaica, and just east of Carthage, during the period of Greek colonization, which began in the eighth century B.C.

The known explorations of the Dark Continent may be said to begin with the famous voyage made by Phœnicians about 600 B.C., an account of which is preserved by Herodotus (iv. 42). There are no sufficient reasons for doubting the general accuracy of the account, which describes the voyage as made by command of Necho, King of Egypt, who had just completed a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea. The expedition sailed down the Red Sea and along the coast of Africa, until the sun for many weeks &ldquo;rose on their right hand.&rdquo; After a long absence the explorers returned to Egypt through the Pillars of Hercules, so that they must have circumnavigated the continent. A hundred years later, also according to Herodotus (iv. 43), a Persian of noble birth, Sataspes, started, with a Carthaginian crew, down the west coast of Africa, but was compelled to turn back. It is doubtful if he went far beyond the Phœnician settlements, which, beginning at Gades, just without the Pillars of Hercules, already extended well down the coast of Morocco, along which Hanno, about 450 B.C., planted a series of colonies. The &ldquo;Islands of the Blessed&rdquo; also (the Madeira and Canary islands) were probably within the scope of the sea-going trade of the Phœnicians and

Carthaginian traders trafficked by sea with the Gold Coast, and by land along the caravan routes which communicated with the flourishing regions of Upper Egypt and the Niger. It is probable that almost contemporaneously with the Phœnician settlements in Northern Africa, Arabs entered the country south of the Zambezi, and, going inland, found and worked the gold mines which have been recently rediscovered. The Greeks began to colonize Northern Africa in the seventh century B.C. After the conquest and destruction of Carthage by Rome (146 B.C.), all Northern Africa was gradually drawn into the growing empire; but Rome's interest lay in the known and organized regions, upon which she strengthened the hold of civilization, ignoring all that lay beyond her well-defined boundaries, a policy which was accentuated as the empire tended toward decay.

Christianity was introduced into Africa in the earliest days, and the North African Church was a recognized division of the Christian Church in the second century, and when a synod of this Church was held in 258 it was attended by 87 bishops. Its chief city was Carthage. Three names in this Church are prominent: Tertullian (third century), the first to employ the Latin language in the service of Christianity; Cyprian (third century), Bishop of Carthage, and one of the great ecclesiastics of the early Church; and Augustine (fifth century), Bishop of Hippo, the greatest of the Latin fathers. The earliest translation of the Bible into Latin was made in North Africa, and it was the battle ground of the famous fights with heretics and schismatics, such as Donatists, Pelagians, and Montanists. But the Church was destined to have a short life. Undermined by formalism and apathy, it fell beneath the Mohammedan onslaught in the seventh century. During the Germanic invasions the Vandals grasped the African provinces, and in the early mediæval period much that had been known to Ptolemy and the geographers who preceded him was forgotten. The maps of Ptolemy, representing the knowledge of the second Christian century, indicate the course and sources of the Nile and the mountains of West Central Africa more accurately than they were again shown on maps before the middle of the nineteenth century. What Europe was forgetting, the Arabs, in the advance of the Mohammedan power, rediscovered. From Arabia the new faith spread rapidly westward along the southern shores of the Mediterranean and inland across the desert. It took such deep root in Northern Africa that the Christian religion, which in many places was then well established, has never been able to regain a real foothold among the native races.

Northern Africa became a battle ground during the later Crusades and all the succeeding struggles on the Mediterranean between Cross and Crescent, and was the scene of changes and strife among rival Mohammedan dynasties; but ignorance of the rest of the continent only deepened with the centuries, except among the Arabs, who occasionally pushed their expeditions southward. If traditions may be believed, Norman vessels from Dieppe visited the Gold Coast as early as 1364, and in 1413 the Normans built a fort at Elmina. There is neither inherent improbability in this story nor satisfactory evidence to prove it, but it is