This author, however, in his desire to ascribe to climate the chief agency in the transformation of the Negro into the Nubian, seems to overlook the fact that while the Negroes flow into the country on the one side, the migratory Arabs invade it on the other, thus furnishing inexhaustible materials for the blending of the two races. I fully acquiesce, as before hinted, in the accuracy of the following opinion, as applied to a large proportion of the modern Nubians; namely, “that they are descended, not from the possessors of Ethiopia in its flourishing period, but from the prædial and slave population of the country, increased by colonists, and raised into a nation by peculiar circumstances between the third and sixth centuries of the Christian era.”[107] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 8. THE NEGROES. We have the most unequivocal evidence, historical and monumental, that slavery was among the earliest of the social institutions of Egypt, and that it was imposed on all conquered nations, white as well as black.[108] So numerous was this unfortunate class of persons, that it was the boast of the Egyptian kings, recorded by Diodorus, that the vast structures of Luxor and Karnak were erected by the labour of foreigners alone. Of Negro slavery, in particular, the paintings and sculptures give abundant illustration. “Black people,” says Sir G. Wilkinson, “designated as natives of the _foreign land_ of Cush, are generally represented on the Egyptian monuments as captives or bearers of tribute to the Pharaohs;” and the attendant circumstances of this inhuman traffic appear to have been much the same in ancient as in modern times. It is curious, also, in a numerical point of view, to observe that Arrian, who wrote in the second century, gives three thousand as the number of Negroes annually brought down the Nile in his time; while Madden, writing in our own day, and consequently sixteen hundred years later than Arrian, estimates the present number in nearly the same words. If it be allowable to make these data the basis of calculation for the past thirty-five centuries, it will follow that upwards of ten millions of Negroes have been brought as bondsmen into Egypt during that period. This I regard a reasonable calculation; for in the present wasted and depopulated condition of the country, the demand for servants and slaves must be far below what it was in the flourishing epoch of the Pharaohs.[109]