438 OF THE AFRICAN ORIGIN 



as AM, Assa, Galla, Nil, and others, that to avoid 

 confusion, I have called Avian. That so many 

 proper names, should all be derived from an 

 Asiatic language in a country where no represen- 

 tatives of the modern people who speak it can now 

 be found, is only to be accounted for, by supposing 

 that the African original of 'the Arian family of 

 man yet continues in some of the secluded oases of 

 Intra-tropical Africa, to reward by their discovery 

 future enterprize. 



Bahr Dembea, or the Lake of the Sun, would 

 give a very appropriate designation to the plateau 

 upon which it is found. It was that, and the 

 course of the Abi, which occasioned the country 

 visited by the messengers of Cambyses to be called 

 the Table of the Sun. It was also the presence 

 of these singularly situated geographical features, 

 and their supposed reference to the sun's track in 

 the zodiac, that determined the reputed sanctity of 

 this portion of Ethiopia in the classic ages. 



The connexion of the ancient Persian empire 

 with its Ethiopic tributary kingdoms, did not extend 

 so far as the country of Sasu, and the fate of Cam- 

 byses, in his attempted conquest of that country, 

 would be, I have no doubt, an instructive lesson to 

 his successors. The claims of these monarchs to 

 supremacy in Ethiopia appears, in fact, to have 

 been founded upon former family connexion with 

 some father-land in Africa, not situated upon the 

 plateau of Abyssinia, then inhabited by the Gongas, 



