The introduction to this book, consisting of a hundred and twenty-six pages, is in itself a colossal achievement. We devoted a special treatise[90] to it soon after its appearance. By means of it the reader is as it were raised upon a hovering cloud, whence he can survey all Africa, and pass in review a portion of the early history of its peoples. He is able, under the guidance of the most skillful of commentators, to obtain thence a general view of all the African nations and their languages. These are presented to him classified into zones and groups, and in fact, in all those stages of their historical existence which are accessible to investigation. This is particularly the case with regard to those peoples with whom the book is especially concerned. The author had recognized in the Nubians a branch of the original African population, who never possessed a historical literature in their own language, and it was no slight matter, from the records of the Egyptians and the occasional reports of the Greeks, Romans and Arabians, to construct the general outlines of a history which begins at such an early period as the building of the pyramids, and ends with the destruction of the great Christian Nubian kingdom at the end of the thirteenth century after Christ. Lepsius was also induced to construct a history of the Kushite peoples from the records on the monuments of the struggles which the more feeble Nubians had to sustain against that race. At an early date the Kushites were in possession of both shores of the Red Sea, and had also made themselves masters of the eastern bend of the Nile adjacent thereto. Lepsius was also inspired by the desire to approach more nearly to a solution of the problem whether the so-called Ethiopian stone inscriptions, which were yet undeciphered and many of which are to be found between Philae and the confluence of the two sources of the Nile, were written in the African tongue of the Nubians, or in the Kushite language. Of this latter the present Begá language, which is comparatively little known must be considered the successor. This portion of his work is one of the author’s boldest intellectual feats. The chapters which he devotes to the Kushite Puna, as the predecessors of the Phoenician colonists on the Mediterranean, and to their emigration to Babylon, have roused much opposition, and have encountered serious doubt even in ourselves. But other portions of this same historical statement are of great value, and must give repeated impulse to fresh investigation.