a little to the north of that river by Arabs or people of allied language and race almost continuously from an approximate period of three thousand years ago down to the arrival of the Portuguese at the beginning of the sixteenth century of this era. In the days before the appalling religious disunion brought about by the conflicts between Christianity and Islam there was no bitter feeling against the European on the part of the Arab, and Greek adventurers and traders appear to have penetrated freely up the Nile, and to have worked cordially with the Sabæan Arabs whom they found established at various points between India on the one hand and Zanzibar and the Red Sea on the other. The Greek colony on the island of Sokotra no doubt traded industriously with the opposite coast of Somaliland. Rome displaced Greece in Egypt in the same way that Greece had displaced Persia, and that Persia had closed the five thousand years of fighting between Libyan, Gala, Arab, and Nubian. In 168 B.C. Rome extended her protection over Egypt. In 30 B.C. Egypt became a Roman province. When the Romans really took over the administration of the land, they too, like the Galas, Persians, and Greeks before them, and the French, Turks, and English after them, began to be interested in the quest for the Nile sources. Each newly-arrived race of Caucasian conquerors in Egypt has felt the same interest. But much of the exploring and recording work under Roman rule was done by Greeks. Strabo, a native of Amasia in Pontus, on the southern shore of the Black Sea, who was born somewhere about 50 B.C., became, when quite a young man, a geographer of the Roman world. He accompanied in B.C. 24 Ælius Gallus, the Roman Governor of Egypt, on a journey up the Nile as far as Philæ (beyond Assuan and the First Cataract). Pliny the Elder, writing some fifty years after the birth of Christ, shows us that just before and just after that event Greek explorers (mainly from Asia Minor) had been busy on the Nile above the First Cataract and perhaps south of Khartum. These were Bion, Dalion, and Simonides. Aristocreon and Basilis are also mentioned as authorities on Nile exploration, but not necessarily explorers themselves. Simonides, above mentioned, lived for five years in Meroe. Dalion is thought to have penetrated up the river some distance beyond Khartum. The “Meroe” which is so constantly mentioned by Greek and Roman writers from Herodotus to Ptolemy, was a name given originally to an important and flourishing city on the south or left bank of the Nile in Dongola,--the modern Merāwi. This place was also known as Napata (Egyptian, Nepet), and was the residence of Ethiopian (Abyssinian, Gala, Nubian) kings. Later the name Meroe was also applied to a place on the right bank of the Nile about one hundred miles south of that river’s confluence with the Atbara. This is probably where the Greek Simonides stayed and beyond which Dalion travelled. Finally, the term Meroe was applied to the “Island”