The second division of the Caucasian species of man (the Iberian being the first) was the Aryan,--a race of golden-haired, pink and white complexioned people, with eyes that are blue, gray, or violet.[5] The Aryans first came into Greece as barbarians and destroyers, but were soon conquered by the preceding Iberian Mykenæan civilisation, on which they built up that Hellenic art and knowledge which are the foundations of European civilisation at the present day. This Hellenic spirit first made itself felt in Africa through the Greek colonies of the Cyrenaica. Greece, when it became conscious of a world beyond its peninsulas and islands, was strongly drawn towards Africa. The power of Egypt long withstood attempts at Greek colonisation, though in quite early days Hellenic or Hellenised Europeans were employed by the rulers of Egypt as mercenary soldiers. Therefore, following the line of least resistance, Greece planted her first African colonies between Egypt on the east and the settlements of the Phœnicians (Carthage) on the west. Due west of the narrow coast belt of Egypt is a remarkable projection of North Africa into the Mediterranean,--the modern Barka, the ancient Cyrenaica. This projection has been, several times in geological history, a series of islands in a larger Mediterranean, or it has grown into a bridge connecting Greece with Africa. The land now rises to heights of three thousand feet, and there is a sufficiency of rainfall in ordinary seasons to nourish a vegetation not much less rich than that of southern Italy. South of the Cyrenaica lies the Sahara Desert in its most aggravated form of well-nigh impassable sand dunes. No Greek expedition that we know of ever succeeded in crossing the Sahara from Cyrenaica and reaching the Sudan; but Greek influence and inquiries were dimly felt in Phazania (Fezzan) to the southwest, and the existence and prosperity of these Greek colonies in North Africa aroused the interest of the Greeks in matters of African exploration. In about 457 B.C. Herodotus (a native of Halicarnassus, a Hellenised state in Asia Minor under Persian rule) visited Egypt, which from 650 B.C. onwards had been more or less thrown open to Greek enterprise by Psametik I. Herodotus himself travelled up the Nile as far as the First Cataract, and collected with some industry information from Egyptians and travelled Greeks as to the regions which lay beyond. From these he learned that the origin of the Nile was unknown, but that the river might come from the far west, from the region where we now know Lake Chad to be; that there was a civilised city of Ethiopians in the great bend of the Nile at Meroe (Merāwi of to-day), and that beyond this nothing certain was known of the Nile course. Aristotle--the great Greek philosopher, who was born in northern Greece in 384 B.C.--wrote on African discovery and recorded the news that to the southwest of the Nile were Pygmy races who frequently warred with the “cranes” (? ostriches).