On the same monument some four hundred and seventy years later, in about 127 A.D., a Semitic Abyssinian king (possibly Ela-Auda) recorded in turn his own victories and extensions of rule. These conquests seem to have done much to carry the Abyssinian (Semitic as distinct from Hamitic) arms as far south as the ninth degree of north latitude. Other indications would show that from this time onwards to about the tenth century A.D. Abyssinian influence and conquests extended southward intermittently to the vicinity of Lake Rudolf (the northern end of that lake). Owing to these conquests, Christianity was carried as far south as the modern province of Kaffa, and northwestwards along the course of the Blue Nile to the site of the modern Khartum; for at one time Abyssinian suzerainty or rule extended almost to the verge of Kordofan on the west.[10] The introduction of Islam among the Somalis, among some of the Gala tribes, and all round the north and west of Abyssinia in the centuries that followed the eleventh, checked any further spread of Christianity, and limited--even curtailed--the political aspirations of Abyssinia. In the sixteenth century a Muhammadan ruler--Muhammad Granye--arose in the Danākil country (Tajurra Bay), and practically smashed the Ethiopian Christian power in Abyssinia, which did not recover from the ravages of these Muhammadan (Arab and Somali) armies for a century or more. Soon after the wars of Muhammad Granye the heathen Galas[11] from the south and southwest entered Abyssinia in force, and it was a long time before the Semitic rulers of that country could bring them under control. The arrival of the Portuguese (to be described in the next chapter) gave a fillip to the power of the Christian Semites of Abyssinia, mainly through the introduction of guns and gunpowder. It is possible, indeed, that at different times after the commencement of the Christian era Abyssinian raiders may have ridden south on their slave, ivory, and cattle-hunting expeditions as far as the vicinity of Mount Elgon. At the present day their raiders come almost to the frontiers of Busoga, for there is no tsetse fly in all the district between Abyssinia and the Victoria Nyanza; therefore, as the Abyssinians have possessed horses for several thousand years, there has been little to stop their making rapid expeditions into the Land of the Blacks. In this way they may have raided and traded as far south as the Victoria Nyanza and as far west as the White Nile, bringing back with them for the edification of the Greeks stories of the Great Lakes and Snow-mountains, and assisting, perhaps, to distribute over the lands now comprised within the Uganda Protectorate those remarkable blue Egyptian beads of unknown antiquity which have been referred to by the present writer in his book, “The Uganda Protectorate,” as being some slight indication of ancient trading relations between the countries of the Great Lakes and those under the dominion of Egypt.