CHAPTER IV ISLAMITES AND ITALIANS When Egypt had become part of the Byzantine dominions, all interest in the Nile sources had died away, and men’s minds were mainly centred on religious controversies of greater or less violence. Greek Christianity penetrated to Abyssinia and south of Abyssinia to countries not far from the north end of Lake Rudolf. Most of the Nubian kingdoms became nominally Christian, and Christianity was the religion of the people on the Nile banks as far south as the confluence of the Blue and White Niles. It is thought by the missionaries of the White Fathers’ Mission to Uganda that the sign of the cross and the idea of baptism, with one or two other practices found in the old heathen religions of Unyoro and Uganda, may have reached those countries from Abyssinia. Greek and Arab Christians in the first six centuries of the Christian era certainly penetrated to the East African coast, but after the official adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire all mundane knowledge began to decay. Christianity inspired a contempt for science, and the only ideas of geography which floated about the world were connected with the wanderings of propagandists or pilgrimages to the shrines of saints. Arab enterprise, moreover, in these sad centuries suffered a curious eclipse. Far to the south, in Zambezia, no doubt the invasion of the country by the earlier and later sections of the Bantu Negroes brought about the destruction of Sabæan power; and the somewhat degenerate successors of the Sabæans from the south coast of Arabia only occupied the coast emporiums dotted along the littoral from Somaliland to Sofala.