Bk.rry — The Sierra Leone Cannibals. 21 



Osiris and Horus, and in the alliance of the Osiris, Isis, and Horus worshippers, 

 who drove out the people of Set and conquered Lower Egypt from the south. 

 But these changes were very gradual, and there was no sudden break between 

 the Neolithic and early dynastic cultures, as there would be had the country 

 been overrun by an entirely different people. Such migrations would account 

 for the primitive cultural and linguistic connexions between the early 

 Sumerians, Semites, and Egyptians; and the systematic measurement and 

 comparison of skulls have shown that, although there are slight differences, 

 there is no trace of a foreign strain, and that the early dynastic people are 

 lineally descended from the pre-dynastic' 



" All northern Africa, as far as the country of the blacks, has been 

 inhabited by Berber races," says Ibn Chaldoun, their great historian, " since 

 an epoch of which we know neither its anterior events nor its commence- 

 ments." These races, as we have seen, lived on the coasts of Africa, and 

 cultivated the beautiful valleys of Tell long before the arrival of the 

 Phcenecian and Koman colonists. Carthage and Eome set the Berbers in 

 motion once again — this time towards the west, and by continually crowding 

 and pressing them back towards the interior, transformed them into a nomadic 

 people. 



The Eoman and Phoenician colonization was most intense in Tunis and 

 Algeria, pushing the Libyan inhabitants back on Morocco, part of whose 

 population, giving way, followed the coast-line of the Atlantic towards the 

 south, till they came to the country of the blacks. 



In those days the black races held all the Sahara, which was not as barren 

 as we find it now. 



From Greek writers we learn that a people in the Iron Age whom they 

 name the Nigretes, using bows and arrows and chariots armed with scythes, 

 lived between the black dwarfs and the Libyans, thus showing the existence 

 of different races and prevalence of a superior civilization in this part of Africa 

 at a very early date. Herodotus, writing some five hundred years before 

 ■ Christ, records a story of the King of Ammon in the Oasis of Siwah, how some 

 Nasamonians, attempting to penetrate the Libyan desert from east to west, 

 were captured by dwarfish men and conducted through extensive marshes, and 

 finally came to a town where all the men were of the same size as their 

 conductors, and black in colour ; a great river flowed by the town, running 

 from west to east, and crocodiles were seen in it.= These people are now 

 probably represented by the dwarfs and the Bavil of the Congo ; and if they 



1 " History of Sumer and Akkiid," by King. " Anthropological Work in Egypt," by Professor 

 G. Elliot Smith, Britisli Association, 1908, 

 » Herodotus, Book II, Chap. 32, 



