[78]See Letronne’s note on Strabo, l. xvii. vol. v. p. 435.
[79]See Acts, chap. vi. vii. 33.
[80]Lib. iii. c. 2.
[81]Except Rameses II., who certainly penetrated as far as Gibel el Birkel; but there is no other Egyptian name on any rocks or edifices south of Solib and Toumbos.
[82]Herodotus (Thalia, 114.) describes Ethiopia as the last of the inhabited regions of the earth, and possessed by men of very great stature, beautiful, and of very long life; adding, that it produces much gold, and very large elephants, with long teeth, wild trees of every description, and ebony.
[83]Diodorus (lib. iii. p. 105.) says, that near the confines of Egypt and the adjacent Ethiopia and Arabia, there is a place which abounds in rich gold mines, whence, at a great expense and toil of a great multitude of criminals, gold is dug. He speaks also of the manner they pounded the gold; and also mentions veins of white marble. It is a singular coincidence, that at the mines in the great Nubian desert, there are actually remaining mortars exactly such as he describes; and, with one exception, the only place I found white marble during this journey was in that desert, not far from the mines. The marble, however, may perhaps be the white quartz the gold is found in.
[84]On the road to Abou Hashim, in the kingdom of Berber, and other places, I found rocks of sandstone, much charged with iron, and beyond Sennaar, they say that there are iron mines.
[85]I regret that in some few of the impressions the caps were printed black. The reader must be aware, that the management of such engravings as these is excessively difficult. Four colours are impressed from separate stones—red, blue, black, and the ground. The others were put in by hand. I took great pains in superintending the mixing of the colours, to give the reader as exact a representation of an Egyptian painting as was in my power. I am indebted to Mr. Bonomi for having drawn for me on the stones these and the other plates of sculpture.
[86]The past and present condition of Ethiopia are so admirably described in the first two verses, chap. xviii. of Isaiah, and the prophecy so admirably fulfilled, that I cannot refrain from repeating them:—“Woe to the land shadowing with wings, which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia: that sendeth ambassadors by the sea, even in vessels of bulrushes upon the waters, saying, Go, ye swift messengers, to a nation scattered and peeled, to a people terrible from their beginning hitherto; a nation meted out and trodden down, whose land the rivers have spoiled!” Can the expression “shadowing with wings” allude to the winged globe on all the edifices in Egypt and Ethiopia? Vessels of bulrushes are highly characteristic of a wild tribe in the interior, almost similar ones being used at the present day; but the “nation, terrible from the beginning, meted out and trodden down, whose land the rivers have spoiled,” can only be Ethiopia.
[87]Strabo mentions that Coptos was the entrepôt, not only of the merchandise of Ethiopia, but also of India and Arabia.