THE EARTH AND ITS INHABITANTS. 



NORTH-EAST AFEICA. 



CHAPTER I. 



GENERAL SUEVEY. 



ROM the very name of Africa, it is evident that down to a compara- 

 tively recent period this continent still formed part of the unknown 

 world. It was the Libya of the Greeks, a region of undefined limits 

 towards the south and the setting sun. Amongst other mytholo- 

 gical or poetic titles, they also gave it the vague designations of 

 Eskhate, or " The World's End," and Hesperia, or " Western Land," a term which 

 was also applied to Italy, and then to Spain, and which, under the Arab form of 

 Maghreb, has become the modern name of Mauritania. The term Africa itself, now 

 applied to the whole continent, is of doubtful origin. Whether it designated the 

 ancient Carthage in the sense of the " Separated," or " Colony," recalling the 

 supremacy of the Phœnician Tyre, or whether it was a collective name of the 

 Berbers, or only of a single tribe, that of the Auraghen or Aurigha, are questions 

 that cannot now be solved. In any case Africa, already so named by Ennius before 

 the second Punic war, was for the Romans at first nothing more than the Libyan 

 neighbour of Italy, the Tunisian Tell still called Friga, a name which became 

 gradually extended to the whole continent, just as the Asia of the Cayster Valley 

 ultimately embraced India, Siberia, and China. 



As now surveyed around its entire seaboard, Africa stands out as the best- 

 defined division of the Old World — a vast island, attached only by a narrow isthmus, 



1 AF. 



