o, and Negro kings. Far
to the west, near Lake Chad, arose in 1520 the sultanate of Baghirmi,
which reached its highest power in the seventh century. This dynasty was
overthrown by the Negroid Mabas, who established Wadai to the eastward
about 1640. South of Wadai lay the heathen and cannibals of the Congo
valley, against which Islam never prevailed. East of Wadai and nearer the
Nile lay the kindred state of Darfur, a Nubian nation whose sultans
reigned over two hundred years and which reached great prosperity in the
early seventeenth century under Soliman Solon.

Before the Mohammedan power reached Abyssinia the Portuguese pioneers had
entered the country from the east and begun to open the country again to
European knowledge. Without doubt, in the centuries of silence, a
civilization of some height had flourished in Abyssinia, but all authentic
records were destroyed by fire in the tenth century. When the Portuguese
came, the older Axumite kingdom had fallen and had been succeeded by a
number of petty states.

The Sudanese kingdoms of the Sudan resisted the power of the Mameluke beys
in Egypt, and later the power of the Turks until the nineteenth century,
when the Sudan was made nominally a part of Egypt. Continuous upheaval,
war, and conquest had by this time done their work, and little of ancient
Ethiopian culture survived except the slave trade.

The entrance of England into Egypt, after the building of the Suez Canal,
stirred up eventually revolt in the Sudan, for political, economic, and
religious reasons. Led by a Sudanese Negro, Mohammed Ahmad, who claimed to
be the Messiah (Mahdi), the Sudan arose in revolt in 1881, determined to
resist a hated religion, foreign rule, and interference with their chief
commerce, the trade in slaves. The Sudan was soon aflame, and the able
mulatto general, Osman Digna, aided by revolt among the heathen Dinka,
drove Egypt and England out of the Sudan for sixteen years. It was not
until 1898 that England reentered the Sudan and in petty revenge
desecrated the bones of the brave, even if misguided, prophet.

Meantime this Mahdist revolt had delayed England's designs on Abyssinia,
and the Italians, replacing her, attempted a protectorate. Menelik of
Shoa, one of the smaller kingdoms of Abyssinia, was a shrewd man of
predominantly Negro blood, and had been induced to make a treaty with the
Italians after King John had been killed by the Mahdists. The exact terms
of the treaty were