Abyssinia between 350 and 500 A.C. accepted Christianity from the teaching of Egyptian Greek missionaries, and developed a considerable degree of strength from the civilization which followed in the track of the Christian faith. Not only did Abyssinian kings rule over the opposite parts of Western Arabia, but their armies and slave raids penetrated far south from Galaland towards Equatorial Africa. A debased edition of the Christian faith was carried almost to the shores of Lake Rudolf; while the kingdom of Merawi, before the Arab invasions of this stronghold of the Ethiopian negroids, became a Christian state, which retained its Christianity well into the 12th century of our era. Through the Abyssinian traders, Graeco-Roman commerce began again to get indirectly into touch with the Upper Nile and East Africa. But the Christian-Abyssinian conquest of South-west Arabia seems to have arrested for a time the Arab trade with Madagascar and the East African coast, and may have contributed to the overthrow (by the invading hordes of Bantu negroes) of the Zimbabwe civilization of South-east Africa. It was however just as Graeco Roman rule in northern Africa was coming to an end that its effects on Negro Africa became apparent. The great racial movements in the northern Sudan, which led to the creation of the Mandingo, Songhai, and Bornu kingdoms of the 8th century, were undoubtedly due to impulses coming across the desert from Greek or Roman Egypt, Tripoli, or Tunis. Christianized Berbers from North Africa even carried Jewish and Christian ideas of religion as far into the Dark Continent as Borgu, to the west of the Lower Niger. ----- Footnote 15: The alleged records on stone scarabs are discussed by Prof. Flinders Petrie in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, Nov. 1908. Footnote 16: This is an interesting observation. Not only does the statement repeatedly occur in the writings of ancient Greek and Roman geographers that the African elephant was found wild in Mauretania in these times, but this animal is pictured in the remarkable rock engravings in the Sus country in the extreme south of Morocco and in the central and south-eastern part of Algeria, besides being represented in the Roman mosaics of Tunisia, now exhibited at the Bardo Museum near Tunis. (See for this the travels of the Moroccan Jewish Rabbi, Mordokhai, the various works recently published by Mons. Gautier of the University of Algiers, and the researches of Professor A. Pomel.) The Phoenicians tamed the African elephant, found wild in the forests of Western Tunisia, which was a somewhat smaller breed than the Indian elephant or the elephant of tropical Africa, yet a typical African elephant in its large ears. It was more often figured on Roman medals and in Roman sculpture than the Indian type. Footnote 17: