an was Jenne. The chronicle says "that
its markets are held every day of the week and its populations are very
enormous. Its seven thousand villages are so near to one another that the
chief of Jenne has no need of messengers. If he wishes to send a note to
Lake Dibo, for instance, it is cried from the gate of the town and
repeated from village to village, by which means it reaches its
destination almost instantly."[23]

From the name of this city we get the modern name Guinea, which is used
to-day to designate the country contiguous to the great gulf of that
name--a territory often referred to in general as West Africa. Here,
reaching from the mouth of the Gambia to the mouth of the Niger, is a
coast of six hundred miles, where a marvelous drama of world history has
been enacted. The coast and its hinterland comprehends many well-known
names. First comes ancient Guinea, then, modern Sierra Leone and Liberia;
then follow the various "coasts" of ancient traffic--the grain, ivory,
gold, and slave coasts--with the adjoining territories of Ashanti,
Dahomey, Lagos, and Benin, and farther back such tribal and territorial
names as those of the Mandingoes, Yorubas, the Mossi, Nupe, Borgu, and
others.

Recent investigation makes it certain that an ancient civilization existed
on this coast which may have gone back as far as three thousand years
before Christ. Frobenius, perhaps fancifully, identified this African
coast with the Atlantis of the Greeks and as part of that great western
movement in human culture, "beyond the pillars of Hercules," which
thirteen centuries before Christ strove with Egypt and the East. It is, at
any rate, clear that ancient commerce reached down the west coast. The
Phoenicians, 600 B.C., and the Carthaginians, a century or more later,
record voyages, and these may have been attempted revivals of still more
ancient intercourse.

These coasts at some unknown prehistoric period were peopled from the
Niger plateau toward the north and west by the black West African type of
Negro, while along the west end of the desert these Negroes mingled with
the Berbers, forming various Negroid races.

Movement and migration is evident along this coast in ancient and modern
times. The Yoruba-Benin-Dahomey peoples were among the earliest arrivals,
with their remarkable art and industry, which places them in some lines of
technique abreast with the modern world. Behind them came the Mossi from
the north, and many