Some evidence, chiefly traditional, is adduced to show that Madagascar was once inhabited by a yellow-skinned dwarfish race of Bushman stock known as the “Kimo.” But it is still more difficult to imagine a Bushman race possessing canoes sufficiently large and seaworthy for the crossing of the Moçambique channel; or to ascribe to the prehistoric Arabs, who may have traded with south-east Africa, the motiveless transportation of Bushmen to south-west Madagascar. The supposed negro aborigines, apart from the dwarfish Kimo, are known traditionally by the Malagasy as “Ba-zimba” or “Va-zimba,” and their burial places are pointed out. The Ba-zimba may have been the mysterious race which built Zimbabwe. Footnote 14: Yet from two to ten thousand years ago, the Comoro island chain was probably larger and approached much nearer to the mainland, thus permitting Madagascar to be reached (by swimming) by two or three species of hippopotamus (now extinct) and by the bush-pig which still exists there. It is very improbable that either of these mammals could have swum the distance of 200 miles which now separates East Africa from the nearest Comoro Island. CHAPTER II THE MEDITERRANEAN COLONIZATION OF AFRICA The historical colonization of Africa by alien peoples (if we regard the dynastic Egyptians as autochthonous) commences with the exploits of the Phoenicians in Mauretania. This remarkable Semitic people, no doubt akin to the ancestors of the Jews in race and language, is believed to have originated on the S.W. shores of the Persian Gulf, and at a period of some remoteness—perhaps four thousand years ago—to have made its way up the Euphrates and across the Syrian Desert to the coast of the Mediterranean, where eventually the great trading cities of Tyre (Tsur or Ṣor), Akko, Saida or Sidon, Sarepta, Arvad or Ruad, Biruta or Biruna (Beirūt), etc., were established mostly on islets off the Syrian coast which eventually grew into peninsulas. From these strongholds their galleys ranged the Mediterranean and reached the North African coast, the Straits of Gibraltar, and the open Atlantic Ocean. By about the twelfth century before Christ the Phoenicians from Sidon had established trading stations at Utica (Atiqa) at the mouth of the Majerda River in North-East Tunisia, and at Lixus on the coast of Morocco (perhaps mouth of River Draa, opposite to the Canary Islands). At the same period—perhaps earliest of all—Gades (Cadiz) was founded as a Sidonian colony at the mouth of the Guadalquivir in Southern Spain. Carthage (Kart-hadshat or Kart-hadasht = the New City), afterwards the Phoenician metropolis in North Africa, did not come into existence till about 822 B.C. It was a settlement of the Tyrians on the west side of the Gulf of Tunis not far from Utica on the Majerda River, and was called the New City in contrast to Utica the “Ancient” (Atiqa). The Tyrians and perhaps