IB MEMOIR OF BRUCE. 



" Ethiopia above Egypt," which corresponds to the 

 Nubia and Abyssinia of modern geography. The 

 knowledge of these districts possessed by the Greeks 

 and Romans was chiefly traditionary, derived from 

 the merchants of the Red Sea, who imported into 

 Egypt the rich products and manufactures of Arabia, 

 Persia, and India. But their poets and philosophers 

 universally regarded that mysterious region as the 

 cradle of those arts which, at a later period, covered 

 the kingdom of the Pharaohs with so many won- 

 derful monuments and stupendous edifices ; as also 

 of those religious rites, which, after being slightly 

 modified by the priests of Thebes, were adopted by 

 the predecessors of Homer and Virgil as the basis 

 of their mythology. 



From the days of the Ptolemies, or about the 

 beginning of the Christian era, more than a thou- 

 sand years passed away, during which no European 

 acquired any knowledge of that remote land, or set 

 a foot within its borders. Its history is shrouded in 

 titter darkness ; and we can only conjecture that the 

 Mahommedan conquerors, after subduing the Greek 

 province of Egypt, or more probably some of the 

 barbarous native hordes, more potent than the rest, 

 may have established their dominion in the desert, 

 and extinguished in their civil wars those lights of 

 civilization which once illumined the fabled regions 

 of ancient Meroe. The only gleams of intelligence 

 that break occasionally through that long night of 

 historical silence, are the feeble rays of uncertain 

 information afforded by the early Christian writers, 



