the river side, for the export of iron.  Excavations have also shown that for 150 years Egypt was a dependency of Ethiopia.  The kings of the twenty-third and twenty-fourth Egyptian dynasties were really governors appointed by Ethiopian overlords, while the twenty-fifth dynasty was founded by the Ethiopian king, Sabako, in order to check Assyrian aggression.  Palestine was enabled to hold out against Assyria by Ethiopian help.  Sennacherib’s attempt to capture Jerusalem and carry the Jews into captivity, was frustrated by the army of the Ethiopian king, Taharka.  The nation and religion of Judah were thus preserved from being absorbed in heathen lands like the lost Ten Tribes.  The Negro soldiers of the Sudan saved the Jewish religion.

The old Greek writers were well acquainted with Ethiopia.  According to them in the most ancient times there existed to the South of Egypt a nation and a land designated as Ethiopia.  This was the land where the people with the sunburnt faces dwelt.  The Greek poet, Homer, mentions the Ethiopians as dwelling at the uttermost limits of the earth, where they enjoyed personal intercourse with the gods.  In one place Homer said that Neptune, the god of the sea, “had gone to feast with the Ethiopians who dwell afar off, the Ethiopians who are divided into two parts, the most distant of men, some at the setting of the sun, others at the rising.”  Herodotus, the Greek historian, described the Ethiopians as long lived and their country as extending to the Southern Sea.

The great fame of the Ethiopians is thus sketched by the eminent historian, Heeren, who in his historical researches says:  “In the earliest traditions of nearly all the more civilized nations of antiquity, the name of this distant people is found.  The annals of the Egyptian priests were full of them; the nations of inner Asia, on the Euphrates and Tigris, have interwoven the fictions of the Ethiopians with their own traditions of the conquests and wars of their heroes; and, at a period equally remote, they glimmer in Greek mythology.  When the Greeks scarcely knew Italy and Sicily by name, the Ethiopians were celebrated in the verses of their poets; they spoke of them as the ‘remotest nation,’ the ‘most just of men,’ the ‘favorites of the gods,’ The lofty inhabitants of Olympus journey to them and take part in their feasts; their sacrifices are the most agreeable of all that mortals can offer them.  And when the faint gleam of tradition and fable gives way to the clear light of history, the luster of the Ethiopians is not diminished.  They still continue the object of curiosity and admiration; and the pens of cautious, clear-sighted historians often place them in the highest rank of knowledge and civilization.”