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
Abyssinians on March 1, 1896, inflicted a crushing defeat on the Italians,
killing four thousand of them and capturing two thousand prisoners. The
empress, Taitou, a full-blooded Negress, led some of the charges. By this
battle Abyssinia became independent.

Such in vague and general outline is the strange story of the valley of
the Nile--of Egypt, the motherland of human culture and

"That starr'd Ethiop Queen that strove To set her beauty's praise above
The sea nymphs."

FOOTNOTES:

[4] [Greek: "autos de eikasa tede kai hote melanchroes eisi kai
oulotriches."] Liber II, Cap. 104.

[5] Cf. Maciver and Thompson: _Ancient Races of the Thebaid_.

[6] _Journal of Race Development_, I, 484.

[7] Petrie: _History of Egypt_, I, 51, 237.

[8] _From West Africa to Palestine_, p. 114.

[9] Depending partly on whether the so-called Hyksos sphinxes belong to
the period of the Hyksos kings or to an earlier period (cf. Petrie, I,
52-53, 237). That Negroids largely dominated in the early history of
western Asia is proven by the monuments.

[10] Petrie: _History of Egypt_, II, 337.

[11] Chamberlain: _Journal of Race Development_, April, 1911.

[12] Petrie: _History of Egypt_, II, 337.

[13] Reisner: _Archeological Survey of Nubia_, I, 319.

[14] Hoskins declares that the arch had its origin in Ethiopia.

[15] Maciver and Wooley: _Areika_, p. 2.

[16] Acts VIII, 27.

IV THE NIGER AND ISLAM

The Arabian expression "Bilad es Sudan" (Land of the Blacks) was applied
to the whole region south of the Sahara, from the Atlantic to the Nile. It
is a territory some thirty-five hundred miles by six hundred miles,
containing two million square miles, and has to-day a population of
perhaps eighty million. It is thus two-thirds the size of the United
States and quite as thickly settled. In the western Sudan the Niger plays
the same role as the Nile in the east. In this chapter we follow the
history of the Niger.

The history of this part of Africa was probably something as follows:
primitive man, entering Africa from Arabia, found the Great Lakes, spread
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 dwar