A History of the Colonization of Africa by Alien Races by Harry Johnston

The historical colonization of Africa by alien peoples (if we regard the dynastic Egyptians as autochthonous) commences with the exploits of the Phoenicians in Mauretania. This remarkable Semitic people, no doubt akin to the ancestors of the Jews in race and language, is believed to have originated on the S. W. shores of the Persian Gulf, and at a period of some remoteness-perhaps four thousand years ago-to have made its way up the Euphrates and across the Syrian Desert to the coast of the Mediterranean, where eventually the great trading cities of Tyre (Tsur or Ṣor), Akko, Saida or Sidon, Sarepta, Arvad or Ruad, Biruta or Biruna (Beirūt), etc., were established mostly on islets off the Syrian coast which eventually grew into peninsulas. From these strongholds their galleys ranged the Mediterranean and reached the North African coast, the Straits of Gibraltar, and the open Atlantic Ocean. By about the twelfth century before Christ the Phoenicians from Sidon had established trading stations at Utica (Atiqa) at the mouth of the Majerda River in North-East Tunisia, and at Lixus on the coast of Morocco (perhaps mouth of River Draa, opposite to the Canary Islands). At the same period-perhaps earliest of all-Gades (Cadiz) was founded as a Sidonian colony at the mouth of the Guadalquivir in Southern Spain. Carthage (Kart-hadshat or Kart-hadasht = the New City), afterwards the Phoenician metropolis in North Africa, did not come into existence till about 822 B. C. It was a settlement of the Tyrians on the west side of the Gulf of Tunis not far from Utica on the Majerda River, and was called the New City in contrast to Utica the "Ancient" (Atiqa). The Tyrians and perhaps the Phoenicians from other sea-cities also created trading depôts on the Cyrenaic and Tripolitan coast, thus coming into contact with the Egyptians. But from the seventeenth to the twelfth century before Christ the Phoenicians had been under the overlordship of Egypt; and it was only when the Egyptian power began to weaken that the great ships built at Sidon and at Tyre from the timber of Cyprus and the Lebanon dared to found African colonies immediately to the westward of Egypt.

Long afterwards, in the days when the strength of the Phoenicians was itself to decline in the grip of the Assyrian kings, these bold navigators hired themselves and their ships to the rulers of Egypt for naval transport and geographical discovery. In about 600 B. C., according to the story of Herodotos, the last but three of the native Egyptian Pharaohs, Niku (Necho) II, summoned a captain of the Phoenicians whose ships were stationed in the Gulf of Suez (perhaps conveyed thither from the Mediterranean through some canal between the Nile and the Bitter Lakes), and despatched him in command of an expedition of two or three vessels, with the order to attempt to sail round the peninsular continent of Africa and through the Straits of Gibraltar back to the Nile Delta. Very likely the ship-masters from South Arabia had already spread the news that the east coast of Africa trended steadily westwards beyond the equator, and had guessed that Africa was circumnavigable from the land of the negroes on the east back to that land of black men on the west of which the Carthaginians were beginning to spread some dim foreknowledge from their journeys southward along the Morocco and Sahara coasts.