Liberia 



<;*- 



Syria as to Rome and Carthage. But these patterns of beads 

 also seem to have been continuously manufactured in Italy (at 

 Venice) and perhaps also in Egypt down to the close of the 

 Middle Ages. One or two ornaments, and some beads 

 possibly of Ancient Egyptian origin, have been found in the 

 possession of Negroes of the Bahr-al-Ghazal and the north- 

 eastern part of the Uganda Protectorate, and Agri beads of 

 a very Roman appearance have been obtained from the Central 

 Niger (see p. 23). 



But certainly two or three centuries after the death 

 of Muhammad the Semitic world had got into touch with 

 the gold-bearing regions of West Africa by way of Lake 

 Chad and the Niger, and later through direct trans-Saharan 

 journeys from Tripoli, Tunis, and Morocco. Guinea gold 

 therefore first inspired the European adventurers of the four- 

 teenth and fifteenth centuries in their exploration of West 

 Africa. 



The next most potent inducement was pepper. Pepper 

 is a word derived through the Greek or Latin from an Indian 

 root — pipli. The spice had become popular even amongst 

 the Greeks in the Classical period ; still more amongst the 

 Romans of the Empire. The taste for it reached the northern 

 barbarians, and when Alaric the Goth put Rome up to ransom in 

 408 he demanded three thousand librae of pepper. India sup- 

 plied the condiment exclusively, and down to the eleventh century 

 the trade was almost entirely carried on through Greeks and 

 Arabs by way of India, the Rea Sea, and Egypt. In the eleventh 

 century the Venetians took up the trade, owing to the increasing 

 warfare between the Byzantine Greeks and Turks. Venice, in 

 fact, soon obtained the monopoly of the pepper trade, created 

 a '* Trust " in pepper, and made the price of this condiment 

 so high that " peppercorn rents " in the Middle Ages were 



56 



