We can hardly as yet answer the question whether the Congo was known to the ancients.  Our acquaintance with the oldest explorations is at present fragmentary, and we are apt to assume that the little told us in our school-books is the sum-total of former exploits.  But possibly inscriptions in the New World, as well as in the Old, may confirm the “first circumnavigation” so simply recounted by Herodotus, especially that of the Phoenicians, who set out from the Red Sea, and in three years returned to the Mediterranean.  The expression, “they had the sun to the right,” is variously explained.  In the southern hemisphere the sailors facing west during our winter would see the sun at noon on the right, and in the northern hemisphere on the left.  But why should they face west?  In the “Chronicle” of Schedel (p. ccxc., printed in 1793, Pigafetta, Pinkerton, xi. 412) we read:  “These two, (i.e.  Jacob Cam and Martin Behem, or Behaim) by the help of the gods, ploughing the sea at short distance from shore, having passed the equinoctial line, entered the nether hemisphere, where, fronting the east, their shadow fell towards the south, and on their right hand.”  Perhaps it may simply allude to the morning sun, which would rise to port as they went southwards, and to starboard as they returned north.  Again, the “First Overland Expedition” is related by the Father of History with all the semblance of truth.  We see no cause to doubt that the Nasammones or Nasamones (Nas Amun), the five young Lybians of the Great Syrtis (Fezzan) crossed the Greek (watered strip along the Mediterranean), passed through the Greek (the “bush”) on the frontier, still famed for lions, and the immeasurably sandy wastes (the Sahara proper, across which caravan lines run).  The “band of little black men” can no longer be held fabulous, since Miani and Schweinfurth added the Akya to M. du Chaillu’s Obongo.  The extensive marshes were the northern limit of the tropical rains, and the “City of Enchanters” is the type of many still existing in inner Africa.  The great river flowing from west to east, whose crocodiles showed it to be the Nile, must have been the Niger.  The ancients knew middle Ethiopia to be a country watered by lakes and streams:  Strabo (xvii. 3) tells us that “some suppose that even the Nile-sources are near the extremities of Mauritania.”  Hence, too, the Nilides, or Lake of Standing Water in Pliny (v. 10).  For the most part they made a great central river traverse the northern continent from west to east, whereas the Arabian geographers of the middle ages, who were followed by the Portuguese, inverted the course.  Both may be explained by the lay of the Quorra and the Binuwe, especially the latter; it was chronically confounded with the true Nile, whose want of western influents was not so well known then as now.