the borders of the great Gulf of Guinea, the Sudan, and South Africa.
These divisions do not cover all of Negro Africa, but they take in the
main areas and the main lines in development.

First, we turn to the valley of the Nile, perhaps the most ancient of
known seats of civilization in the world, and certainly the oldest in
Africa, with a culture reaching back six or eight thousand years. Like all
civilizations it drew largely from without and undoubtedly arose in the
valley of the Nile, because that valley was so easily made a center for
the meeting of men of all types and from all parts of the world. At the
same time Egyptian civilization seems to have been African in its
beginnings and in its main line of development, despite strong influences
from all parts of Asia. Of what race, then, were the Egyptians? They
certainly were not white in any sense of the modern use of that
word--neither in color nor physical measurement, in hair nor countenance,
in language nor social customs. They stood in relationship nearest the
Negro race in earliest times, and then gradually through the infiltration
of Mediterranean and Semitic elements became what would be described in
America as a light mulatto stock of Octoroons or Quadroons. This stock was
varied continually; now by new infiltration of Negro blood from the south,
now by Negroid and Semitic blood from the east, now by Berber types from
the north and west.

Egyptian monuments show distinctly Negro and mulatto faces. Herodotus, in
an incontrovertible passage, alludes to the Egyptians as "black and
curly-haired"[4]--a peculiarly significant statement from one used to the
brunette Mediterranean type; in another passage, concerning the fable of
the Dodonian Oracle, he again alludes to the swarthy color of the
Egyptians as exceedingly dark and even black. Æschylus, mentioning a boat
seen from the shore, declares that its crew are Egyptians, because of