Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 2.djvu/500

 in Abyssinia, and wonders how they should have represented a thing they had never seen, and, having done so, remained still incapable to make or use it. Poncet was no man of reading out of his own protection; he nowhere pretends it; he recorded this fact because he saw it, as a traveller should do, and left others to give the reason which he could not. Poncet calls this place Heleni, from a small village of that name in the neighbourhood. Had he been a scholar he would have known that the ruins he was observing were those of the city of Axum, the ancient metropolis of this part of Ethiopia.

, the third Grecian king of Egypt, conquered this city and the neighbouring kingdom; resided some time there; and, being absolutely ignorant of hieroglyphics, then long disused, he left the obelisk he had erected for ascertaining his latitudes ornamented with ligures of his own choosing, and the inventions of his subjects the Egyptians, and particularly the door for a convenience of private life, to be imitated by his new-acquired subjects the Ethiopians, to whom it had hitherto been unknown.

Dobarwa he arrived at Arcouva, which, he fays geographers miscal Arequies. M. Poncet might have spared this criticism upon geographers till he himself had been better informed, for both are equally miscalled, whether Arcoava or Arequies. The true and only name of, the place, known either to Mahometans or Christians, is Arkeeko, as the island to which he passed, crossing an arm of the sea, is called Masuah, not Messoua, as he everywhere spells it.