24 Proceedings of the Roi/al Irish Acndemi/. 



Africa, joiuiug hands, or nearly so, with their kinsmen moving south on the 

 eastern side of the continent. Besides the Libyans, this region has been 

 invaded by powerful Hamitic and Semitic peoples, who have been pressed 

 forward by Iberian invasions in the north — all peoples sprung from the same 

 Mediterranean stock, once speaking a common language, the ancestral speech 

 from which the Semitic, Hamitic, the Berber dialects and ancient Iberian are 

 descended. Older languages were displaced, and the movements of this 

 people impressed on the Somali and Gala their present Hamitic speech. 

 Kubian was driven south from Egypt and its place taken by the old Egyptian 

 language, which had both Hamitic and Semitic affinities, and this in its turn 

 had to give place to the present Semitic. lu the west the speech of the 

 Berbers drove southwards the older tongues of the Tibu, the Kanuri, the 

 Songhoi, and the Fulla ; but one branch of these negro languages, the 

 Haussa, was captui'ed by Liljyan in\aders, probably the Fullas, and given a 

 Libyan twist and complexion. 



La historic times the movement of the Fulla people has, without doubt, been 

 from west to east. The Arab records of the black kingdoms of the Soudan 

 are imantmous in describing a kingdom of a white people which lay to the 

 west, between the sources of the Senegal and the Niger, in the high lands of 

 the Fota Jalon, which they call the Mali empire. But before the Mali 

 empire extended to the proportions we get glimpses of in the fourteenth 

 centiuy through the historians of the Songhay empire, lying further east in 

 the valley of the Xiger, there appears to have been a pagan kingdom in the 

 Fota Jalon known as the kingdom of Ghana, where twenty-two white kings 

 ruled over the country before the year of the Hegiia. 



" In the Mali army it was the custom," says Ibn Batuta, a fourteenth-eentmy 

 traveller, " for a captain, on being given a command, to be placed upon a shield 

 and raised above the heads of the soldiers," in exactly the same manner as a 

 chief amongst the Scandina%T.aiis and other Teutons was elevated above the 

 heads of his subjects. The coirrt ceremonial was elaborate and servile, and 

 there was an ancient practice of dressing in masks like birds or animals. Poets 

 commented fi-eely on the actions of the ilali monarch, like the mummers at 

 the court of the Aztec emperor. 



Amongst the pagans who ruled in Ghana maternal succession pre^'ailed, 

 and the throne went to the son of the king's sister. They buried in tumuli, 

 many of which are to be found on the banks of the upper waters of the Niger ; 

 and they placed with the dead the things the deceased used and treasured in 

 this life. Of this practice an Arab writer has left us a graphic description. 



" The royal town of Ghana," says El Bekri, the Arab historian, " was 

 surrounded by sacred groves in which the priests dwelt and the idols of the 



