Thus, in the history of the Phœnicians, and therefore, in the earliest authentic epoch, a great historical and social law manifests itself in full action. This activity it retains through all the subsequent social and political catastrophes in the life of nations and empires, down even to Hayti with her immortal Toussaint. Slavery generates bloody struggles. Many of these have resulted in the slaves violently regaining their liberty, while others have destroyed the whole state—swallowing up the slaveholders in their own blood, or burying them under the ruins of their own social edifice.
LIBYANS.
AUTHORITIES:
Diodorus Siculus, Corippus, Moevers, etc.
The primitive social and intellectual condition of the populations dwelling along the shores of Africa washed by the Mediterranean sea, can only be inferred from their respective relations with the Phœnicians and Carthaginians. Other sources of historical information as to that remote period there are none, while later times also give comparatively scanty satisfaction.
Ethnology has not yet positively determined who the aborigines of Libya were, and it is questionable if it can ever be satisfactorily settled. Egyptian inscriptions indicate a white race in the north-eastern corner of Libya, adjoining Egypt; while further to the west lived the blacks. At a period exceedingly remote, the whites mixed with these negro blacks, who probably immigrated from the centre of Africa—Soudan—and spread over the whole of Libya. These remote epochs, however, altogether refuse chronological limitation. But when chronology, even of the most rudimentary kind, becomes possible, history shows us the existence, in Libya, of a nomadic and agricultural people, who can be no other than these cross-breeds, and who had brought a part of the land to a high degree of cultivation. The Libyans may thus be considered as an autochthonous African population—a theory which is confirmed by other evidence not now necessary to give.
Among these Libyans—called by the Greeks Afri, and by the Romans, Africani—agriculture was in a highly flourishing condition at the epoch of the earliest myths and legends of Greece: all the Hellenic legends relating to the distant sea-wanderings of gods or heroes, carry them to the Libyan shores about the Regio Syrtica—Tripolis. Among these are the Argonauts and Heraklides, Perseus, Kadmos, Odysseus, and Menalaos. So the Greek myths of Atlas and the Garden of the Hesperides have their spring and source in that part of Libya. All this presupposes a very old culture. Herodotus says that the Ægis of the Greek Pallas originated in Libya, as also that Athene here received Gorgona's head for her Ægis. Even at the present day, the chiefs of some of the tribes in the southern part of ancient Libya carry the skins of leopards and other wild beasts on their shoulders in such a way that the head of the animal, Ægis-like, covers their breast. The adventurous Phœnician and Greek navigators of the earliest period accordingly found the Libyans already a highly cultivated people. This culture, too, they possessed previous to their intercourse with the Canaanites, Phœnicians, or Greeks—anterior even to the wanderings of Astarte, Anna, or Dido.