The history of antiquity is the description of the forms of culture first attained by the human race. If it is impossible to discover the origin of these forms historically, and the attempt is made to indicate their preliminary stages, so far as the recorded elements allow connected conclusions, it becomes the chief object of such a history to recover from the fragments of monuments and tradition the culture of the ancient East, and of the Hellenes so closely connected with the East: to reconstruct from isolated relics and myths the image of that rich and ample life which filled the East in religion and state, in art and industry, in research and commerce, in political struggles and intense religious devotion, long before the time when Solon gave laws to the Athenians, and the army of Cyrus trod the shore of the Ægean Sea. The oldest civilisation, the oldest state grew up on that quarter of the globe which seems least favourable to the development of mankind. On either side of the equator, Africa stretches out in huge land-locked masses. A vast table-land occupies the whole south of the continent, and in the north sinks down to a plain more impassable even than the broad seas which wash the coasts of Africa on the west, south, and east. This plain--the bed of a dry sea--lies in the burning sun without vegetation. Only where springs water the thirsty soil do fruitful islands rise out of the moving sand, the lonely waste of ravines, the craggy ridges, and bald platforms of rock. As the sea nowhere indents the coasts of Africa with deep bays, the rivers cannot excavate broad and fruitful valleys, and provide means of access to the interior. The high table-land is surrounded by a steep rampart of mountains, which descend in terraces to the coast, and here, almost without exception, leave narrow strips of low and marshy land. Through the barrier drawn around them by this rampart the rivers must force their path in a violent course, in waterfalls and rapids, in order to fall into the sea after a short, and proportionately more sluggish course through the narrow strip on the shore. The table-land, its rampart of mountains, and the long lines of coast, are, with the exception of the southern apex and the Alpine territory of Abyssinia in the east, the dwelling-places of the black race--the negro. However great the number of negro nations and tribes, however much they differ in physical form and in dialect--living as they do beneath a vertical sun, in regions difficult of access--they have never risen beyond the infancy of human civilisation--a rude worship of gods. Wherever they have not been powerfully affected by the introduction of foreign elements, generation has followed generation without remembrance or essential alteration.