That which increased the celebrity of the northern portion of the table-land of Abyssinia, and established the superiority in dignity of its stream, was the circumstance of its flowing through the lake Tzana or Dembea. No little light breaks upon the subject when it is understood, that the literal interpretation of these two words in very different languages, is the same, both signifying the lake of the sun. Dembea, let me observe, is a word in use in Abyssinia that belongs to the same language as _Abi_, _Assa_, _Galla_, _Nil_, and others, that to avoid confusion, I have called _Arian_. That so many proper names, should all be derived from an Asiatic language in a country where no representatives of the modern people who speak it can now be found, is only to be accounted for, by supposing that the African original of the Arian family of man yet continues in some of the secluded oases of Intra-tropical Africa, to reward by their discovery future enterprize. Bahr Dembea, or the Lake of the Sun, would give a very appropriate designation to the plateau upon which it is found. It was that, and the course of the Abi, which occasioned the country visited by the messengers of Cambyses to be called the Table of the Sun. It was also the presence of these singularly situated geographical features, and their supposed reference to the sun’s track in the zodiac, that determined the reputed sanctity of this portion of Ethiopia in the classic ages. The connexion of the ancient Persian empire with its Ethiopic tributary kingdoms, did not extend so far as the country of Sasu, and the fate of Cambyses, in his attempted conquest of that country, would be, I have no doubt, an instructive lesson to his successors. The claims of these monarchs to supremacy in Ethiopia appears, in fact, to have been founded upon former family connexion with some father-land in Africa, not situated upon the plateau of Abyssinia, then inhabited by the Gongas, but in another desert-surrounded country, of the same character; probably, that which surrounds the sources of the Bahr ul Abiad. The African origin of other ancient nations can also be most easily demonstrated, and the historical accounts of their descent from gods, which have come down to us, although they consist of exaggerated and distorted relations, in consequence of having been derived from the ignorant translation of hieroglyphical records, in which it would appear that the earlier history of Africa was preserved; still we are able to gather from these mythological enigmas everything that is necessary to connect their origin with a common centre of divergence, which I believe to have been the country around the sources of the Nile.