A few hundred miles to the West, in the Gold Coast region, is the home of the famous "aggry" beads. These beads, the manufacture of which is now a lost art, were found in the possession of natives by the earliest European explorers.[31] The beads are of two kinds, a plain type and a variegated. "The plain aggry beads," say Bowdich, who made a careful study of them, "are blue, yellow, green or a dull red; the variegated consist of many colors and shades; the variegated strata of the aggry bead are so firmly united and so imperceptibly blended that the perfection seems superior to art. Some resemble mosaic work; the surface of others is covered with flowers and regular patterns so very minute and the shades so delicately softened one into the other and into the ground of the bead that nothing but the finest touch of the pen could equal them. The agate parts disclose flowers and patterns deep in the body of the bead and thin shafts of opaque colors running from the center to the surface. The coloring matter of the blue bead has been proved by experiment to be iron; that of the yellow, without doubt, is lead and antimony, with a trifling quantity of copper, though this latter is not essential to the production of the color. The generality of these beads appears to be produced from clays colored in thin layers, afterwards twisted together into a spiral form, and then cut across; also from different colored clays raked together without blending. How the flowers and delicate patterns on the body and on the surface of the rarer beads have been produced cannot be so well explained."[32] In the earlier days, when much less was known of the technical and artistic ability of the African, the origin of these beads was quite a problem. The fact that similar beads were sometimes found in tombs in North Africa and in the graves and tombs of ancient Egypt and India led some to suppose them of probable Phoenician origin. Such a theory implies the existence of a rather extensive trade between the ancient Phoenicians and the ancient Africans of the West Coast. This may have been the case, for from Herodotus, and from the fragments of Hanno from the Temple of Milcarth in Carthage, we learn that frequent voyages were made beyond the Straits of Gibraltar and to the Gold Coast hundreds of years before Christ by Phoenicians as well as the Egyptians. This theory would, however, imply an act of conservation and preservation of minute objects over a period of thousands of years on the part of African "savages," which, to say the least, would be very remarkable. It is likely, in the light of recent research upon the subject, that the Phoenician theory will have to be made with caution; for, as will be pointed out, there is now available much evidence which seems to indicate that these beads were of indigenous African origin.