No such cultured peoples are anywhere to be found in Bantuland except on the east coast, where the "Moors" founded great cities and flourishing marts centuries before the appearance of the Portuguese in the eastern seas. Among the results of the gold trade with these coastal settlements may be classed the Zimbabwe monuments and other ruins explored by Theodore Bent in the mining districts south of the Zambesi. But in all the Negro lands free from foreign influences no true culture has ever been developed, and here cannibalism, witchcraft, and sanguinary "customs" are often still rife, or have been but recently suppressed by the direct action of European administrations. Numberless authorities have described the Negro as unprogressive, or, if left to himself, incapable of progress in his present physical environment. Sir H. H. Johnston, who knows him well, goes much further, and speaks of him as a fine animal, who, "in his wild state, exhibits a stunted mind and a dull content with his surroundings, which induces mental stagnation, cessation of all upward progress, and even retrogression towards the brute. In some respects I think the tendency of the Negro for several centuries past has been an actual retrograde one[138]." There is one point in which the Bantu somewhat unaccountably compare favourably with the Sudanese. In all other regions the spread of culture has tended to bring about linguistic unity, as we see in the Hellenic world, where all the old idioms were gradually absorbed in the "common dialect" of the Byzantine empire, again in the Roman empire, where Latin became the universal speech of the West, and lastly in the Muhammadan countries, where most of the local tongues have nearly everywhere, except in Sudan, disappeared before the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish languages. But in Negroland the case is reversed, and here the less cultured Bantu populations all, without any known exception, speak dialects of a single mother-tongue, while the greatest linguistic confusion prevails amongst the semi-civilised as well as the savage peoples of Sudan.