Though Pliny the Elder[164] does not appear to have visited Africa, or at any rate to have carried his explorations farther than a trip to Alexandria and visits to the ports along the Barbary coast, he nevertheless did much to collect and edit the geographical knowledge of the day; and has thus transmitted to our knowledge the slender information which the Romans possessed of interior Africa during the early years of the Empire. Pliny is remarkable for having handed down to us the first mention of the Niger, which he calls Nigir or Nigris and somewhat confounds with the humbler river Draa to the south of Morocco. About the middle of the second century of the Christian Era there flourished in Egypt the famous geographer called Claudius Ptolemæus, better known to us as ‘Ptolemy.’ Though he also was mainly a compiler and owed much of his information to the works on geography published by his predecessor or contemporary, Marinus of Tyre, yet it seems probable that he travelled up the Nile for a certain distance, and visited the African coasts along the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. At any rate he published the most extended account of African geography given by any classical writer. His accounts of the Nile lakes, of the East African coast and of the Sahara Desert are the nearest approach to actuality of any geographer before the Muhammadan epoch. With the decline of the Roman Empire came a cessation of geographical exploration, and there was no revival until the Muhammadan invaders of Africa had attained sufficient civilization to record their journeys and observations. Masudi and Ibn Haukal in the 10th century, and other Arab travellers whose wanderings have not been recorded, furnished from their journeys information embodied in the map of Idris or Edrisi drawn up by a Sicilian Muhammadan geographer for Count Robert of Sicily in the 12th century. By these journeys the first definite and reliable information about the geography of Africa south of the Sahara, and along the East coast to Zanzibar and Sofala was brought to European knowledge. Ibn Batuta, a native of Morocco, in the 14th century[165], and Leo Africanus (a Spanish Moor who afterwards turned Christian), in the 16th century, reached the Niger and the regions round Lake Chad. The geographical enterprise of the Moors communicated itself to their conquerors, the Portuguese. Besides their great navigators, the Portuguese sent out overland explorers, the first, named João Fernandez, having in 1445 explored the Sahara Desert inland from the Rio d’Ouro. It is stated that Pero d’Evora and Gonçalvez Eannes actually travelled overland in 1487 from Senegambia to Timbuktu; but doubt has been thrown on their having reached this distant city; they may possibly have got as far as Jenné.