We cannot study Africa without, however, noting some of the other races concerned in its history, particularly the Asiatic Semites.  The intercourse of Africa with Arabia and other parts of Asia has been so close and long-continued that it is impossible to-day to disentangle the blood relationships.  Negro blood certainly appears in strong strain among the Semites, and the obvious mulatto groups in Africa, arising from ancient and modern mingling of Semite and Negro, has given rise to the term “Hamite,” under cover of which millions of Negroids have been characteristically transferred to the “white” race by some eager scientists.

The earliest Semites came to Africa across the Red Sea.  The Phoenicians came along the northern coasts a thousand years before Christ and began settlements which culminated in Carthage and extended down the Atlantic shores of North Africa nearly to the Gulf of Guinea.

From the earliest times the Greeks have been in contact with Africa as visitors, traders, and colonists, and the Persian influence came with Cambyses and others.  Roman Africa was bounded by the desert, but at times came into contact with the blacks across the Sahara and in the valley of the Nile.  After the breaking up of the Roman Empire the Greek and Latin Christians filtered through Africa, followed finally by a Germanic invasion in 429 A.D.

In the seventh century the All-Mother, Asia, claimed Africa again for her own and blew a cloud of Semitic Mohammedanism all across North Africa, veiling the dark continent from Europe for a thousand years and converting vast masses of the blacks to Islam.  The Portuguese began to raise the veil in the fifteenth century, sailing down the Atlantic coast and initiating the modern slave trade.  The Spanish, French, Dutch, and English followed them, but as traders in men rather than explorers.

The Portuguese explored the coasts of the Gulf of Guinea, visiting the interior kingdoms, and then passing by the mouth of the Congo proceeded southward.  Eventually they rounded the Cape of Good Hope and pursued their explorations as far as the mountains of Abyssinia.  This began the modern exploration of Africa, which is a curious fairy tale, and recalls to us the great names of Livingstone, Burton, Speke, Stanley, Barth, Schweinfurth, and many others.  In this way Africa has been made known to the modern world.

The difficulty of this modern lifting of the veil of centuries emphasizes two physical facts that underlie all African history:  the peculiar inaccessibility of the continent to peoples from without, which made it so easily possible for the great human drama played here to hide itself from the ears of other worlds; and, on the other hand, the absence of interior barriers—­the great stretch of that central plateau which placed practically every budding center of culture at the mercy of barbarism, sweeping a thousand miles, with no Alps or Himalayas or Appalachians to hinder.