ethnology]
AFRICA 139 ance in the extreme north and south, and in several inter- have in many places preserved their racial purity almost intact mediate places, under conditions which leave no doubt so tha.t a tolerably correct estimate may still be formed of their that the whole area was peopled since the early Pleistocene, essential physical characters. The Samites, as the Caucasic aboare conventionally called, present striking analogies both if not even the late Pliocene, epoch. Thus, in Egypt rigines with the Asiatic Semites and with the South Europeans, so that Professor Flinders Petrie has collected large quantities of by many ethnologists all are regarded as belonging fundamentally Palaeoliths on the limestone Abydos plateau, 1400 feet to one stock, collectively classed as Afro-Europeans or Mediterabove the present Nile level, and others embedded in the raneans. Thus many of the Mauritanian Hamites (Berbers of Algeria, and Tunisia) are of even lighter colour than the ancient gravels of the former High Nile, when the main Morocco, Spaniards or Italians, with blue eyes, yellow or brown beard stream still rolled down fifty times its present volume. In oval head of the long type, large straight or aquiline nose, perthe same region of Upper Egypt M. J. de Morgan has fectly regular features, shapely build, medium height, and altoidentified four stations where primitive man worked his gether exceedingly handsome men. Similar traits occur amongst southern kinsmen, the Tuaregs of the Western Sahara, and rude weapons, and where Oppert finds indications of a their even amongst the Fellahin, of Egypt, who, however, are generally thoroughly established social and political organization in of swarthier complexion and often startlingly like their Beta the New Stone Age, some 12,000 years before the new ancestors, as figured and carved on the old Egyptian monuments. era. In Tunisia M. A. Dumont found flints in abundance Still darker are the Herratin, or “ Black Berbers,” of the Southern Atlas, and all the eastern Hamites between Egypt and the equator under limestone beds deposited by a river which has since who betray a varying strain of negro blood in their tumid lips’ disappeared, and declares that the origin of man in Mauri- and especially in their crisp or ringlety and always black hair. ’ tania must be set back to an age which deranges all The Hamitic language also, which is of the inflecting order chronology and confounds the very fables of the mytho- presents several features in common with the Semitic, on the one and on the other with the old Iberian, still surviving in the logies. The same inference is drawn by Sir John Evans hand, Basque of the Western Pyrenees. This Hamitic form of speech from the results of Mr Seton Karr’s researches in Somali- which, like the Semitic and unlike the Aryan, is of an extremely land, while the wide range of early man is further attested tenacious character, pervades the whole of the African Caucasic by the objects recovered by Sir R. Burton in Upper Guinea, domain, where it has been current for countless ages, and had and by W. D. Gooch and J. Sanderson in Cape Colony already been reduced to written form by the Egyptians some 5000 or 6000 years before the new era. Letters were also known in and Natal. remote times to some other members of the Hamitic family, as by the not yet deciphered rock inscriptions in the Nile All the works of the Old Stone Age present, wherever found, a shown valley above Egypt, and in the peculiar Tafnagh script still in striking resemblance in their appearance, form, and method of pro- restricted use amongst the Mauritanian and Saharan Berbers. duction, implying that they date from an age when all the in. Except in Egypt, where all were merged many millenniums ago habitants of Africa were still of one type and stood at the same in a single despotic monarchy, the Hamitic peoples have always low stage of culture. They appear to have migrated westwards shown a marked tendency towards Democratic institutions. In from Indo-Malaysia, probable cradle of mankind, in two streams, the tribal system everything is regulated by the public assembly, °Anfe. by the not yet submerged or but partly submerged Indo- m which all have a voice, so that the Berber is what he calls African continent, now flooded by the Indian Ocean ; the other, by himself, Amzigh (plural Imazighen, the national name), a “ freethe overland Asiatic route, which was also followed by the large man, whereas the more theocratic and feudal Semitic community partly extinct and partly surviving Pliocene and Pleistocene mam- is ruled by a despotic hereditary sheikh. The Berber is also less malian fauna. fanatical, though all have long been Mohammedans, more generous In their new homes these two groups, originally of the same to his womenfolk, and of rather sedentary habits, preferring fixed generalized proto-human Pleistocene type, gradually became dwellings and agriculture wherever possible to the tent-life of the specialized under the influence of the different physical environ- nomad Bedouin Pastoral ways, however, prevail ments relatively hot and dry in the north, hot and moist in the largely amongst stock-breeder. the Eastern Hamites—Bejas, Somali, Gallas, south. Thus may well have arisen on African soil the two now Turkanas, Masai—who roam the steppe lands between the Nile highly specialized divisions of mankind which share the continent Red Sea and the Man plateau, which are unfavourable between them, although the process of specialization may have and for tillage. Hence it is that the Wahumas, who are of Galla been, and probably was, already in progress before their arrival. descent, retain their nomad pastoral habits amid the Bantu It now becomes easy to understand how what are accepted as the Negroid populations of East Central Africa. highest and the lowest sections of the human family are found negroes themselves, whose physical and mental characters occupying conterminous domains since prehistoric times, the areThe elsewhere described (Art. Negro), form almost everywhere southern stream being still represented by the Negro or black settled agricultural communities. But this is not due to any populations of Sudan and thence southwards to the extremity of superiority over the nomad Hamites and Semites, to whom they the continent, the northern by the Caucasic or white populations are greatly inferior most respects, but to the nature of their of the Sahara, and thence northwards and westwards into Europe environment, which,inlying mainly between the tropics, enjoys an and .Asia. We also see how unnecessary it is with a former school abundant rainfall, and is consequently more favourable for agriculof anthropologists to derive the whites from their black neighbours, ture than for pasturage. Hence it is that the inhabitants of the or, a still more difficult process, the blacks from the whites. Both arid south-western steppes (Damara and Namaqua lands) form an have been evolved independently in their present respective exception to the general rule, and are excellent herdsmen, but habitats, where they may therefore be regarded as aborigines in cultivate very little land. Compared with the Hamites, the negroes the strict sense of the term. also extremely cruel and superstitious, and with the exception But the two ethnical zones are nowhere separated by any marked are of the mixed negroid populations of Sudan—Sorcgfoq/, Hausas, mountain barriers except in the eastern (Abyssinian) highlands, or Baghirmi, Kanuri, Mabas, and others now mostly Mohammedans— even by great marine or desert spaces, such as would be impassable are still mainly pagans, though Christianity has made some proby primitive man, for we now know that at all events since the amongst the JVaganda of Lake Victoria, and the Zulus-Xosas, early Tertiary epoch the Sahara has been dry, and, till later times, gress Basutos, and Bechuanas of the extreme south. Ancestor-worship even habitable land, and not, as formerly supposed, a marine prevails on the eastern, nature-worship on the western seaboard, basin. Hence there have been constant and continuous over- with, interminglings in the interior. This is clearly seen by the lappings and interminglings all along the ethnical divide, and as distribution of the two chief names of the Deity—Munkulunkulu, the large fauna—elephant, hippopotamus, giraffe, lion, hyaena, . Great-grand-Father, ” and Nzambi—of uncertain meaning, but ostrich range over the whole continent, so the dark Sudanese indicative of the forces of nature, variants of which terms occur, the peoples have encroached at various points—Tibesti Range, Nile former almost exclusively along the east, the latter along the west A alley, &c.—on the Caucasic domain, while the Caucasians have side of the continent, while both are intermingled in the central to a far larger extent penetrated into the Negro zone, reaching regions. especially on the eastern seaboard to the southern limits of the It is further to be noticed that the two primordial stocks—the mainland. white and the black—are found from remote times already divided These diverse secular blends have resulted in a multitude of into several secondary groups, whose obscure inter-relations still transitional forms between the two primeval stocks, presenting a offer many difficult problems to the ethnologist. In general such kaleidoscopic picture which has been further complicated by the secondary groups are far less aberrant from the normal type, and intrusion of numerous foreign elements—Semitic Himyarites, more easily accounted for, in the Caucasic than in the negro domain. .Phoenicians, and Arabs, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Malays, Hindus, Amongst the Hamites the chief divergences are represented by the modern Europeans, and others—generally round the periphery, Nubians of the Nile valley above Egypt, who are usually regarded but in some cases penetrating far into the interior. as. Hamites with a black strain, but are on the contrary true negroes But amid all this ethnical confusion the two original groups with a Hamitic strain (Art. Nubia) ; the Tibbus of the Eastern
