Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ni. LIBYANS. AUTHORITIES : Diodorus Siculus, Corrippus, Mcevers, etc. The primitive social and intellectual condition of the populations dwelling along the shores of Africa washed by the Mediterranean sea, can only be inferred from their respective relations with the Phoenicians and Carthaginians. Other sources of historical information as to that remote period there are none, while later times also give comparatively scanty satisfaction. Ethnology has not yet positively determined who the aborigines of Libya were, and it is questionable if it can ever be satisfactorily settled. Egyptian inscriptions indicate a white race in the north-eastern corner of Libya, adjoining Egypt; while further to the west lived the blacks. At a period exceedingly remote, the whites mixed with these negro blacks, who probably immigrated from the centre of Africa— Soudan—and spread over the whole of Libya. These remote epochs, however, altogether refuse chronological limitation. But when chronology, even of the most rudimentary kind, becomes possible, history shows us the existence, in Libya, of a nomadic and agricultural people, who can be no other than these cross-breeds, and who had brought a part of the land to a high degree of cultivation. The Libyans maythus be considered as an autochthonous African population—a theory which is confirmed by other evidence not now necessary to give. Among these Libyans—called by the Greeks -Afri, and by the Romans, Africani—agriculture was in a highly flourishing condition at the epoch of the earliest myths and legends of Greece: all the Hellenic legends relating to the distant sea-wanderings of gods or heroes, carry them to the Libyan shores about the Regio Syrtica—Tripolis. Among these are the Argonauts and Heraklides, Perseus, Kadmos, Odysseus,...