18 
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 Iudia. 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 Iiomer 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 
utter 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, 
