During all this period of twelve hundred and twenty years (between, let us say, 690 and 1910) while Northern Africa lay under Islamic control, enormous numbers of Asiatics and Europeans colonized Egypt and Mauretania—Arabs, Jews, Syrians; Turks, Kurds and some Persians; Greeks, Slavs (sold by the conquering Germans to Jewish dealers who resold these Poles, Chekhs, Wends, Croats and Serbs to the Spanish Arabs, the Berbers, Egyptians and Turks); Italians, Spaniards, Germans; French; and even English and Irish. One is also struck with the power wielded over the Muhammadan world of North Africa by the Jew, which was not displaced till the modern Christian European conquest of North Africa. Arabs completely displaced the Hamitic tribes on the Desert Nile in Nubia, Dongola and Sennār after the 11th and 12th centuries, and in the last-named country, Sennār, founded the Funj dynasty of kings which powerfully affected North-East Africa from the 13th to the 18th centuries. In the 12th century, Somaliland was converted to Islam and from that period onwards permeated by Arabs. From the middle of the 8th century, the pre-Islamic settlements of southern Arabs along the East coast of Africa were revived by fresh bands of militant traders and missionaries of Islam. Arabs established themselves once more at Sofala, at Sena and Quelimane on the lower Zambezi, at Moçambique, Kilwa, Zanzibar, Mombasa, and various ports on the Somali coast. A colony of Muhammadanized Persians joined them in the 10th century at Lamu; and Persian as well as Muhammadan Indian influence began to be very apparent in architecture on the East coast of Africa. The powerful Sultanate of Kilwa was founded in the 10th century, and exercised for some time a dominating influence over all the other Arab settlements on the East coast of Africa. Arabs, as already related, had discovered the island of Madagascar, which they first made clearly known to history. In Islamic times they again settled as traders on its north and north-west coasts, while the adjoining Comoro Islands or Islands of the “Full Moon” (Komr) became little Arab sultanates practically in the hands of Arabized Negroes. Until the coming of the Portuguese in the 16th century these Arab East African states were sparsely colonized by Himyaritic or South Arabian Arabs from the Hadhramaut, Yaman, and Aden. But a development of power and enterprise amongst the Arabs of Maskat, which led to their driving away the Portuguese from the Persian Gulf and subsequently attacking them on the East coast of Africa, caused the Maskat[46] Arab to become the dominant type. The Maskat Arabs founded the modern Zanzibar sultanate, which quite late in the 19th century was separated by the intervention of the British Government from the parent state of ’Oman.