The American Encyclopedia of History, Biography and Travel: Comprising Ancient and Modern History: the Biography of Eminent Men of Europe and America, and the Lives of Distinguished Travelers.Prescott, Thomas H.
History
The American Encyclopedia of History, Biography and Travel: Comprising Ancient and Modern History: the Biography of Eminent Men of Europe and America, and the Lives of Distinguished Travelers.
Prescott, Thomas H.
Biography; World history
seats in the primitive historic times, and those antecedent to them;
they appear first very late as conquerors and destroyers in the
history of the west. If, indeed, the hero-king of the Ethiopians,
Tearcho, were one and the same with the Tirhakah of the book of Kings
(2 Kings, xix. 9), then the wonder of those stories would disappear
which were handed down by tradition to the Greeks; but even Bochart
has combatted this belief, and we cannot reconcile it with the
circumstances which are related of both. It remains for us only to
observe, by way of summary, that in an age antecedent to the historic,
the Ethiopian peoples may have been associated together in a more
regular manner than in our own or Grecian and Roman times; and that
their distant expeditions may have been so formidable, both to the
Europeans as far as the Ægean Sea in the east, and to the dwellers on
the Gaditanian Straits (Gibraltar) on the west, that the dim knowledge
of the fact was not lost even in late times. In more recent ages we
observe here and there an Ethiopian influence, and especially in the
Egyptian history; but as concerns the general progress of the human
species, the Negro race never acquired any vital importance.
The foregoing observations may be summed up in this proposition:――That
in the most remote antiquity, Africa was overspread by the Negro
variety of the human species; that in those parts of the continent to
which the knowledge of the ancient geographers did not extend――namely,
all south of Egypt and the Great Desert――the Negro race degenerated,
or at least dispersed into tribes, kingdoms, etc., constituting a
great savage system within its own torrid abode, similar to that which
even now, in the adult age of the world, we are vainly attempting to
penetrate; but that on the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Red
Sea, the race either preserved its original faculty and intelligence
longer, or was so improved by contact and intermixture with its
Caucasian neighbors, as to constitute, under the name of the
Ethiopians, one of the great ante-historic dynasties of the world; and
that this dynasty ebbed and flowed against the Caucasian populations
of western Asia and eastern Europe, thus giving rise to mixture of
races along the African coasts of the north and east, until at length,
leaving these mixed races to act their part awhile, the pure Ethiopian
himself retired from historic view into Central Africa, where he lay
concealed, till again in modern times he was dragged forth to become
the slave of the Caucasian. Thus Negro history hitherto has exhibited
a retrogression from a point once occupied, rather than a progress in
civilization. Even this fact, however, must somehow be subordinate to
a great law of general progress; and it is gratifying to know that, on
the coast of Africa, a settlement has recently been formed called
Liberia, peopled by liberated negro slaves from North America; and
who, bringing with them the Anglo-American civilization, give promise
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