A SUMMARY OF THE ANCIENTS’ KNOWLEDGE OF THE NILE
The next page in the history of the Nile Quest is marked by the coming
of the Portuguese; but before we proceed to consider what effect this
movement had on the revelation of Africa to the knowledge of the
Caucasian species, let us sum up briefly the purport of the foregoing
chapters:--
1. The lands through which the Nile flows were inhabited some ten
thousand years ago--let us say at a guess--by Pygmies in the north,
east, and southwest, and elsewhere by big black Negroes, these types
being offshoots from the original Negro Asiatic stem.
At some such period as ten thousand years ago northeast Africa was
repeatedly invaded from Arabia by a branch of the Caucasian race--the
Hamites--which in Arabia had absorbed a certain proportion of early
Negro and Dravidian[13] blood. About the same time in Egypt itself
there were invasions of other Caucasian immigrants; some perhaps of
the Dravidian stock still met with in Baluchistan and India, and
others of Libyan (Iberian, Algerian) race. There had also been early
minglings between the big black Negroes on the Central Nile and Hamite
invaders which had resulted in further hybrids such as the Nubians or
“Ethiopians.” These Ethiopians constantly invaded and raided Egypt,
thus mingling with the Caucasian Egyptians, but also at other times
acted as middlemen between civilised Egypt and the utterly barbarous
countries of the Bahr-al-Ghazal and the Sudan; they brought to Egypt
knowledge of the Pygmies and such of the bigger beasts of Africa as had
become extinct in Egypt before the arrival of intelligent man. Through
these Nubians the Egyptians occasionally had glimmering ideas as to the
sources of the White Nile.
2. The Egyptians kept up a fairly constant communication with Abyssinia
and Somaliland by sea and overland. They had a fair knowledge of the
geographical features of Abyssinia and of the origin and source of the
Blue Nile. Moreover, through the ancestors of the Galas and Somalis
they came slightly into contact with the peoples of Lake Rudolf and the
Victoria Nyanza.
3. The Greeks, who began to travel in Egypt five hundred years before
Christ, expressed some curiosity about the origin of the Nile, and
communicated this inquiring spirit to the Romans. This resulted for a
time in the knowledge of the White Nile as far south as Fashoda.
4. The Arabs of western and southern Arabia very early in the history
of civilisation developed a culture scarcely inferior to that of the
Egyptians, and entered into trading and colonising relations with
Abyssinia and Somaliland, and with the East African coastlands as far
south as the modern Rhodesia. From their settlements on the Zanzibar
coast (such as Mombasa) they probably journeyed inland on trading
expeditions, or else the natives, who came to trade with them at the
coast, gave them geographical information. In one or other way they
learnt the existence of great lakes and snow-mountains. These stories
the Arabs passed on to inquiring Greeks as far back as two thousand
years ago; and an account which was an uncommonly near guess at the
truth was given to the reading world during the first two centuries
after the birth of Christ by writers on geography like Marinus of Tyre
and Claudius Ptolemæus of Alexandria.
5. This was the high-water mark of knowledge concerning the sources of
the White Nile for something like eighteen hundred years. Information
on the subject in the interval began to grow less rather than more.
The stories of the Nile lakes were, however, revived after the Arab
invasions of northeast Africa in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
and were communicated to the European world of the Renaissance through
the intermediary of the Saracen writers of Sicily, the theologians of
Rome, and the merchants of Venice.