in the Nile valley, and wandered westward to the Niger. Herodotus tells of
certain youths who penetrated the desert to the Niger and found there a
city of black dwarfs. Succeeding migrations of Negroes and Negroids pushed
the dwarfs gradually into the inhospitable forests and occupied the Sudan,
pushing on to the Atlantic. Here the newcomers, curling northward, met the
Mediterranean race coming down across the western desert, while to the
southward the Negro came to the Gulf of Guinea and the thick forests of
the Congo valley. Indigenous civilizations arose on the west coast in
Yoruba and Benin, and contact of these with the Mediterranean race in the
desert, and with Egyptian and Arab from the east, gave rise to centers of
Negro culture in the Sudan at Ghana and Melle and in Songhay, Nupe, the
Hausa states, and Bornu.

The history of the Sudan thus leads us back again to Ethiopia, that
strange and ancient center of world civilization whose inhabitants in the
ancient world were considered to be the most pious and the oldest of men.
From this center the black originators of African culture, and to a large
degree of world culture, wandered not simply down the Nile, but also
westward. These Negroes developed the original substratum of culture which
later influences modified but never displaced.

We know that Egyptian Pharaohs in several cases ventured into the western
Sudan and that Egyptian influences are distinctly traceable. Greek and
Byzantine culture and Phoenician and Carthaginian trade also penetrated,
while Islam finally made this whole land her own. Behind all these
influences, however, stood from the first an indigenous Negro culture. The
stone figures of Sherbro, the megaliths of Gambia, the art and industry of
the west coast are all too deep and original evidences of civilization to
be merely importations from abroad.