civilization of some height had flourished in Abyssinia, but all authentic
records were destroyed by fire in the tenth century. When the Portuguese
came, the older Axumite kingdom had fallen and had been succeeded by a
number of petty states.

The Sudanese kingdoms of the Sudan resisted the power of the Mameluke beys
in Egypt, and later the power of the Turks until the nineteenth century,
when the Sudan was made nominally a part of Egypt. Continuous upheaval,
war, and conquest had by this time done their work, and little of ancient
Ethiopian culture survived except the slave trade.

The entrance of England into Egypt, after the building of the Suez Canal,
stirred up eventually revolt in the Sudan, for political, economic, and
religious reasons. Led by a Sudanese Negro, Mohammed Ahmad, who claimed to
be the Messiah (Mahdi), the Sudan arose in revolt in 1881, determined to
resist a hated religion, foreign rule, and interference with their chief
commerce, the trade in slaves. The Sudan was soon aflame, and the able
mulatto general, Osman Digna, aided by revolt among the heathen Dinka,
drove Egypt and England out of the Sudan for sixteen years. It was not
until 1898 that England reëntered the Sudan and in petty revenge
desecrated the bones of the brave, even if misguided, prophet.

Meantime this Mahdist revolt had delayed England's designs on Abyssinia,
and the Italians, replacing her, attempted a protectorate. Menelik of
Shoa, one of the smaller kingdoms of Abyssinia, was a shrewd man of
predominantly Negro blood, and had been induced to make a treaty with the
Italians after King John had been killed by the Mahdists. The exact terms
of the treaty were disputed, but undoubtedly the Italians tried by this
means to reduce Menelik to vassalage. Menelik stoutly resisted, and at the
great battle of Adua, one of the decisive battles of the modern world, the