THE GREEKS INTEREST EUROPE IN THE NILE QUESTION
The second division of the Caucasian species of man (the Iberian being
the first) was the Aryan,--a race of golden-haired, pink and white
complexioned people, with eyes that are blue, gray, or violet.[5]
The Aryans first came into Greece as barbarians and destroyers, but
were soon conquered by the preceding Iberian Mykenæan civilisation,
on which they built up that Hellenic art and knowledge which are the
foundations of European civilisation at the present day. This Hellenic
spirit first made itself felt in Africa through the Greek colonies of
the Cyrenaica. Greece, when it became conscious of a world beyond its
peninsulas and islands, was strongly drawn towards Africa. The power
of Egypt long withstood attempts at Greek colonisation, though in
quite early days Hellenic or Hellenised Europeans were employed by the
rulers of Egypt as mercenary soldiers. Therefore, following the line
of least resistance, Greece planted her first African colonies between
Egypt on the east and the settlements of the Phœnicians (Carthage) on
the west. Due west of the narrow coast belt of Egypt is a remarkable
projection of North Africa into the Mediterranean,--the modern Barka,
the ancient Cyrenaica. This projection has been, several times in
geological history, a series of islands in a larger Mediterranean, or
it has grown into a bridge connecting Greece with Africa. The land now
rises to heights of three thousand feet, and there is a sufficiency of
rainfall in ordinary seasons to nourish a vegetation not much less rich
than that of southern Italy. South of the Cyrenaica lies the Sahara
Desert in its most aggravated form of well-nigh impassable sand dunes.
No Greek expedition that we know of ever succeeded in crossing the
Sahara from Cyrenaica and reaching the Sudan; but Greek influence and
inquiries were dimly felt in Phazania (Fezzan) to the southwest, and
the existence and prosperity of these Greek colonies in North Africa
aroused the interest of the Greeks in matters of African exploration.
In about 457 B.C. Herodotus (a native of Halicarnassus, a Hellenised
state in Asia Minor under Persian rule) visited Egypt, which from 650
B.C. onwards had been more or less thrown open to Greek enterprise by
Psametik I. Herodotus himself travelled up the Nile as far as the First
Cataract, and collected with some industry information from Egyptians
and travelled Greeks as to the regions which lay beyond. From these he
learned that the origin of the Nile was unknown, but that the river
might come from the far west, from the region where we now know Lake
Chad to be; that there was a civilised city of Ethiopians in the great
bend of the Nile at Meroe (Merāwi of to-day), and that beyond this
nothing certain was known of the Nile course. Aristotle--the great
Greek philosopher, who was born in northern Greece in 384 B.C.--wrote
on African discovery and recorded the news that to the southwest of
the Nile were Pygmy races who frequently warred with the “cranes” (?
ostriches).
In B.C. 276 was born at Cyrene, in North Africa, Eratosthenes, a Greek
geographer, who was made Librarian at Alexandria. From the information
he collected and collated (supplied, no doubt, by Greek traders) he,
first of all known geographers, sketched out with fair accuracy the
course of the Nile and its two great Abyssinian affluents as far
south as the modern Khartum. He hinted at the lake sources and first
mentioned the Nubians.
It was the conquest of Egypt from Persian domination by Alexander the
Great which really did more to extend Greek commerce and civilisation
and the use of the Greek language over eastern Africa and western Asia
than has even been done at a far later date in other parts of the
world for German commerce, knowledge, and the German language by the
unification of Germany under Bismarck, William I., and William II.
Greek explorers visited the Nile as far south as the junction of the
Astapus (Blue Nile), and Greek settlements were made on the island of
Sokotra, and possibly at other points near the mouth of the Red Sea.
Greek traders even visited the East African coast as far as Pangani,
opposite Zanzibar. The Greeks revealed India to Europe, and the
commerce which sprung up there through Greek agencies on the Persian
Gulf and the Red Sea gave unwilling navigators, in those days before
steam force, some acquaintance with the eastern coast of Africa as far
south as Zanzibar.
Yet the Greeks in all these regions were (as subsequently happened
with the Portuguese) but the followers of the Arabs and Phœnicians.
Some impulse, kindred in origin, no doubt, to the evolution of the
Phœnicians, had created an ancient civilisation in southern and western
Arabia which perhaps reached its climax in the lofty, well-watered, and
fertile country of Yaman. Much of southern Arabia, however, several
thousand years ago, was less arid than at the present day. The rainfall
was greater, and the already civilised inhabitants industriously
preserved the precious water by dams for purposes of irrigation. This
civilisation may be briefly styled Himyaritic or Sabæan,--perhaps the
last name is the more comprehensive. These Sabæan Arabs of south and
southwest Arabia, separately or in conjunction with their Phœnician
cousins, pursued their search for metals down the east coast of Africa,
along which they made settlements which are probably the sites of most
of the modern emporiums of commerce on the same coast. They had reached
the mouth of the Zambezi and ascended that river, and had penetrated
as far south as, let us say, Delagoa Bay. It was perhaps their
exploration of the Zambezi which led them to discover alluvial gold
in the vicinity of that river, though they afterwards found a shorter
route to the gold fields by way of Sofala. In this way they forestalled
by some twenty-five hundred years modern Rhodesian enterprise, and
gold was worked in the regions to the south of the Lower Zambezi and
a little to the north of that river by Arabs or people of allied
language and race almost continuously from an approximate period of
three thousand years ago down to the arrival of the Portuguese at the
beginning of the sixteenth century of this era. In the days before the
appalling religious disunion brought about by the conflicts between
Christianity and Islam there was no bitter feeling against the European
on the part of the Arab, and Greek adventurers and traders appear to
have penetrated freely up the Nile, and to have worked cordially with
the Sabæan Arabs whom they found established at various points between
India on the one hand and Zanzibar and the Red Sea on the other. The
Greek colony on the island of Sokotra no doubt traded industriously
with the opposite coast of Somaliland.
Rome displaced Greece in Egypt in the same way that Greece had
displaced Persia, and that Persia had closed the five thousand years
of fighting between Libyan, Gala, Arab, and Nubian. In 168 B.C. Rome
extended her protection over Egypt. In 30 B.C. Egypt became a Roman
province. When the Romans really took over the administration of the
land, they too, like the Galas, Persians, and Greeks before them, and
the French, Turks, and English after them, began to be interested in
the quest for the Nile sources. Each newly-arrived race of Caucasian
conquerors in Egypt has felt the same interest. But much of the
exploring and recording work under Roman rule was done by Greeks.
Strabo, a native of Amasia in Pontus, on the southern shore of the
Black Sea, who was born somewhere about 50 B.C., became, when quite a
young man, a geographer of the Roman world. He accompanied in B.C. 24
Ælius Gallus, the Roman Governor of Egypt, on a journey up the Nile as
far as Philæ (beyond Assuan and the First Cataract). Pliny the Elder,
writing some fifty years after the birth of Christ, shows us that just
before and just after that event Greek explorers (mainly from Asia
Minor) had been busy on the Nile above the First Cataract and perhaps
south of Khartum. These were Bion, Dalion, and Simonides. Aristocreon
and Basilis are also mentioned as authorities on Nile exploration, but
not necessarily explorers themselves. Simonides, above mentioned, lived
for five years in Meroe. Dalion is thought to have penetrated up the
river some distance beyond Khartum. The “Meroe” which is so constantly
mentioned by Greek and Roman writers from Herodotus to Ptolemy, was a
name given originally to an important and flourishing city on the south
or left bank of the Nile in Dongola,--the modern Merāwi. This place
was also known as Napata (Egyptian, Nepet), and was the residence
of Ethiopian (Abyssinian, Gala, Nubian) kings. Later the name Meroe
was also applied to a place on the right bank of the Nile about one
hundred miles south of that river’s confluence with the Atbara.
This is probably where the Greek Simonides stayed and beyond which
Dalion travelled. Finally, the term Meroe was applied to the “Island”
(peninsula) formed by the Atbara, the Blue Nile, and the White Nile, a
region formerly of great fertility.
The Emperor Nero, though the Beast of the Apocalypse, had a certain
genial interest in geography. He despatched--or caused to be
despatched--an expedition under two centurions in about the year 66
A.D., to discover, if possible, the source or sources of the White
Nile. Before dealing with Egypt the Romans had taken over control of
the old Greek colonies of the Cyrenaica and on the coast of Tripoli.
This had led (A.D. 19) to their having extensive relations with the
Berber kingdom of Fezzan, with whom and with the Tawareq people of
Garama to the south they maintained friendly relations. Through this
friendly co-operation a Roman expedition under Septimus Flaccus had in
the year 50 A.D. (perhaps) reached to some trans-Saharan place like
Bilma. Much later, about 150 A.D., another expedition under Julius
Maternus joined forces with the friendly Berber King of Garama, and
actually travelled to the vicinity of Lake Chad, or, as some think,
to the oasis of Air or Asben farther to the west. It was a country
which they called Agisymba, and abounded in rhinoceroses. From this
expedition the Romans derived some inkling of the possibilities, beyond
the sandy wastes and sun-smitten rocks of the Sahara Desert, of a
fertile Sudan, populated with an excellent material for slaves. But a
hundred years earlier they had realised the enormous difficulties which
attended any enterprise (in the days before camels were used in Africa)
across the Sahara Desert, and this gave them an added desire to follow
up the Nile and ascertain its practicability as a waterway into Negro
Africa.
Nero’s two centurions were passed on by Roman prefects to friendly
Nubian chiefs, one of whom ruled the principality of Meroe along the
main Nile between Atbara and the Blue Nile confluence. Furnished with
boats which they later exchanged for dug-out canoes, they appear to
have ascended the Nile above Fashoda, and possibly above the confluence
between the Bahr-al-Ghazal and the Kir or White Nile. At any rate they
got far enough south to come in contact with the Great Marsh which
extends from the vicinity of Fashoda to the frontiers of the Uganda
Protectorate. Their passage was stopped by the accumulation of water
vegetation which we now know as the “sudd.” Some writers on ancient
geography believe that the two centurions penetrated as far south as
the sixth degree of north latitude, or the verge of the Bari country.
At any rate they got well into the land of the naked Nile Negroes.
Their discouraging reports seem to have put an end to any further Roman
enterprise in the matter.
Greek traders in Egypt prospered greatly under the peace imposed by the
Roman Empire. Their commerce with Arabia, East Africa, and India grew
to a wonderful development in the first century after Christ. About 77
A.D. was published by a Greek of Alexandria the celebrated “Periplus of
the Red Sea,” a pilot’s manual not unlike the modern Admiralty “sailing
directions.” This “Periplus” shows us that the Greeks by the middle of
the first century knew the Zanzibar coast very well under the name of
Azan or Azania.
Among these Greek merchants trading with India was one Diogenes,
who, on returning from a voyage to India in about 50 A.D., landed on
the East African coast at Rhaptum (Pangani or the mouth of the river
Rufu?). Thence, he said, he “travelled inland for a twenty-five days’
journey, and arrived in the vicinity of the two great lakes and the
snowy range of mountains whence the Nile draws its twin sources.” As
nothing is recorded about his return journey, it is more probable that
he merely conversed on the coast with Arab settlers and traders who
told him that at a distance of twenty-five days’ march in the interior
began a series of great lakes from two of which were derived the twin
sources of the White Nile; that farther to the south of the most
western of these two lakes was a range of mountains of great altitude
covered with snow and ice, and named for their brilliant appearance of
white the Mountains of the Moon. The Nile, he was told, united its twin
head-streams at a point to the north of these two great lakes, and
then flowed through marshes until it joined the River of Abyssinia (the
Blue Nile), and so reached the regions of the known.
[Illustration: THE MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON: A GLIMPSE ON ONE OF
RUWENZORI’S HIGHEST PEAKS.]
This story was told by Diogenes to a Syrian geographer called
Marinus of Tyre, who published it in his geographical works in the
first century of the Christian era. The writings of Marinus of Tyre
disappeared, probably with the dispersal of the Alexandrian Library,
but fortunately for us at the present day all that portion of them
dealing with the sources of the Nile was quoted almost _in extenso_
by another geographer, Claudius Ptolemæus, a Greek-Egyptian, born at
Ptolemais in the Delta of the Nile, and resident at Alexandria (perhaps
in connection with the celebrated Library). Ptolemy (as he is currently
and incorrectly called) wrote in about the year 150 A.D., and therefore
to Ptolemy is commonly attributed the first clearly expressed theory
as to the main origin of the White Nile, the twin lakes (Victoria and
Albert), and the great snowy range called the Mountains of the Moon
(Ruwenzori).[6] Neither Marinus of Tyre nor Claudius Ptolemæus was the
first person to hint at this origin of the Nile. Besides Eratosthenes
and Pliny there are indications in various records of the two centuries
before Christ that the idea of the White Nile issuing from two great
lakes and passing through a vast marshy region before it reached
Ethiopia was vaguely known. The idea had perhaps even reached the ears
of Cambyses and of such of the earlier Ptolemies as may have cared for
geographical speculations. The bearers of the news would undoubtedly
have been men of the Gala (Abyssinian, Somali, Cushite) race, who at
that distant period of time seem to have freely penetrated through
the lands of the brutish and unarmed Negroes. No doubt many a Greek
adventurer in passing along the east coast of Africa brought back
tidings similar to those of Diogenes, but his grain fell among the
rocks, and the only definite record of the existence of this theory as
to the Nile’s origin is the story of Diogenes preserved through the
industry of Marinus of Tyre and Claudius Ptolemæus of Alexandria.
[Illustration: THE COURSE OF THE NILE, ACCORDING TO PTOLEMY.
From the oldest version of Ptolemy’s Map in existence, about 930 A.D.,
preserved in Mount Athos Monastery.]
The recording of travellers’ tales as to the twin lake sources of
the main Nile stream and the existence of a great snowy range called
the Mountains of the Moon was not the only contribution made by
Claudius Ptolemæus to Nile geography. The Egyptian Greek indeed was
a geographical giant compared with any of his predecessors, nor was
the height of his knowledge concerning the geography of Europe, Asia,
and Africa reached and passed until the fifteenth century of the
present era, some twelve hundred years after his death. The results
of the later Crusades, intercourse with the Arabs, and the journeys
of Marco Polo and other enterprising Venetians had brought in some
cases confirmation of Ptolemy’s theories, had corrected some of his
errors, and had filled up gaps in his information. But as regards the
geography of Africa more especially, Ptolemy remained ostensibly the
great authority until the end of the fifteenth century, although, as
already mentioned in a footnote, the latest editions of Ptolemy’s
maps (the latest ascribed to Ptolemy was published about 1485) show
that the geographers at the closing part of the fifteenth century,
consciously or unconsciously, touched up Ptolemy’s work by later
information received from Arabs, Italians, and Turks. Ptolemy discussed
with much detail the whole course of the Nile so far as it lay to any
extent within the regions of the known. He described the approximate
outline of its course about as far as the present site of Berber,
which district he describes as the Greater Primis, a name which Sir
E. H. Bunbury takes to be identical with the locality of Primnis[7]
rumoured by Strabo. Above this point Ptolemy applies the name of Meroe
(so often attributed to settlements or districts in Dongola) to that
great peninsula which is so nearly enclosed between the Atbara, the
main and the Blue Niles. Ptolemy indeed, and most writers of earlier
and later days, believed this district to be an actual island.[8]
The junction of the Blue and the White Niles is wrongly placed by
Ptolemy in latitude 12° north, instead of 15° 40′, and from this point
southwards Ptolemy’s proposed latitudes of places on the White Nile
became increasingly incorrect, so that by him the Nile system was
carried a little too far to the south of the equator. South of the site
of modern Khartum Ptolemy had but little information to go upon, other
than the account of the Centurions’ voyage; but from such suggestions
as he could obtain, together with the story of Diogenes, he guessed
that the twin sources of the White Nile joined their streams into one
river at 2° north latitude. This junction described with the knowledge
of later days would be equivalent to the exit of the Nile from Lake
Albert, the real latitude of this point being 2° 25′--an uncommonly
good guess on Ptolemy’s part. Ptolemy, however, imagined nothing quite
like Lake Albert, but thought that the waters coming respectively from
the two great equatorial lakes effected their junction at a point some
two hundred and fifty miles north of the western lake source (Lake
Albert); for he surmises that this lake lies approximately under the
sixth degree of south latitude (its southernmost extremity is in 1° 10′
north of the equator). His hypothetical Lake Victoria lies under or
extends to the seventh degree of south latitude, instead of no farther
than about 3° 30′ south. Ptolemy, however, was careful to discriminate
between the lake sources of the White Nile and the lake (Tsana) from
which the Blue Nile issues in the highlands of Abyssinia. This sheet
of water he calls definitely Coloe, and states that it is the source of
the river Astapus (or Blue Nile). It is thought that Strabo also made
allusion to Lake Tsana under the name of Psebo. It is probable that
both Strabo and Ptolemy heard of this lake source of the Astapus or
Blue Nile from Greek traders who had penetrated Abyssinia; for, during
the first centuries after Christ, Axum (then called Auxuma) had become
an important trading-centre which was reached from Adulis (Adulis
being a port on the Red Sea not far from the modern Masawa). Ptolemy’s
location of Lake Tsana, however, like the equatorial lakes, is too far
to the south. His sketch of the main course of the Atbara (Astaboras)
on the one hand, and of the Blue Nile (Astapus) on the other, would not
be very incorrect, but for the fact that he makes these streams unite
somewhere in the latitude of Khartum and then separate again, their
northern separation enclosing the island of Meroe. The Græcicised names
of Astapos (Blue Nile) and Astaboras (Atbara) were recorded before
the days of Ptolemy by Eratosthenes, but were not applied in the same
definite way to the Blue Nile and the Atbara. Eratosthenes sometimes
applies the name of Astapos to the main stream of the Nile and not
specially to the Blue Nile. He also mentions that the main stream of
the Nile is called Astasobas. It is evident that in these words we have
corruptions of local names, possibly derived from Nubian, or it may be
from Hamitic languages. Astaboras needs but little identification with
the Atbara. Astapus (Greek = Astapos) is not clearly recognizable under
the modern Abyssinian name of the Blue Nile,--Abai. The second part of
Astasobas certainly recalls the name Sobat, which besides being applied
by the Sudanese Arabs to the Baro or Sobat is also sometimes given by
them or by the Nile Negroes to the main course of the White Nile south
of Khartum. Asta may have been some Ethiopian term meaning “river.”
The present writer is unable to understand why that able geographer,
Mr. E. G. Ravenstein, has doubted the identification of Ruwenzori with
Ptolemy’s Mountains of the Moon. It must be obvious, when all facts
are considered, that Ruwenzori was the principal germ of this idea.
The Greek traders at Rhapta (Pangani) no doubt had some idea of the
existence of Kilimanjaro, but it is doubtful whether either the single
dome of Kilimanjaro or the gleaming pinnacle of Kenia would impress the
imagination so strongly as the whole brilliant range of Ruwenzori’s
four or five snow-peaks and thirty miles of glaciation. On such
occasions, as when this range is visible from a distance, and broadside
on, the dark blue forested slopes merge into the morning mists of the
lowlands, leaving the splendid phantasmagoria of cream-coloured snow
and gray rock floating in the sky like an exaggerated lunar landscape.
Ptolemy places this range, as he does his lakes, too far to the south,
and associates it more with the modern country of Unyamwezi than
with the region between the two lakes Albert and Victoria. But no
doubt then, as in Speke’s day, Ruwenzori and Lake Albert were reached
by Greek adventurers, by Sabæan Arabs, or by natives who served
as intermediaries, by way of the established trade route through
Unyamwezi. This word, which means “the Land of the Moon,” appears to
be rather old for a Bantu place name: Unyamwezi indeed seems in the
history of Bantu migrations to have played an important part, and to
have been one of those many sub-centres from which great dispersals of
the Bantu races took place. Indeed the Zulus (who were probably the
dreaded Mazimba or Bazimba spoken of by the Portuguese) seem to have
halted in their cannibal days in Unyamwezi before they descended on
South Africa in the sixteenth century. Ruwenzori is not, after all,
such a very long journey to the northwest of Unyamwezi, and it is very
possible that the returning travellers, having stated that they reached
the Nile sources and these wonderful snow-mountains through the Land of
the Moon thus caused this lunar name to be applied by Ptolemy to the
Ruwenzori range.
Though not an explorer, Ptolemy stands (for his age) in the highest
rank of Nile geographers; but he had to wait something like seventeen
hundred and forty years before Sir Henry Stanley, by his discovery
of the Semliki, the Ruwenzori snow-range, and the last problems of
the Nile sources, did justice to that remarkable foreshadowing of the
main features of the Nile system due to the genius of the Alexandrian
geographer.