The History of Antiquity, Vol. 6 (of 6)Duncker, Max
History
The History of Antiquity, Vol. 6 (of 6)
Duncker, Max
History, Ancient
The Greeks call the red and black inhabitants of the
land of the south, Ethiopians. According to the statements of
Artemidorus of Ephesus and of Agatharchides, which have been preserved
by Strabo and Diodorus, the land of the elephant-hunters and
ostrich-eaters, who fought with the Ethiopians, men armed with the horns
of the antelope, began south of the confluence of the Atbara and
Bahr-el-Azrek or Blue River, and the Nile.[169] At the present time the
region of the ebony-woods and elephants begins in the marsh at the foot
of the Abyssinian Alps; elephants are not found elsewhere except in some
more northern regions on the Red Sea; and that the Ethiopians did not
acquire the elephants' tusks in the way of trade is proved by the small
amount of gold which they had to pay as tribute. As we find in the
reliefs of Persepolis and Naksh-i-Rustem, among the nations of the
Persian kingdom, certain figures which are marked out as negroes by
their short, curly hair, their snub nose, their bare breast and the
animal's skin on the shoulders; as the Ethiopians of Nysa and their
neighbours served, according to Herodotus, in the army of Xerxes, and
paid the tribute mentioned, as Herodotus expressly tells us, even in his
day, the march of Cambyses must have penetrated beyond the mouth of the
Atbara, and Napata must have been permanently maintained, otherwise such
distant tribes would not have furnished contingents in war fifty years
later, and their tribute would have come to an end long before
Herodotus.
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