he decision that the son of the
one contestant was to take to wife the daughter of the other, the
treasure to be their marriage portion. Alexander marvelled greatly at
this decision. "With us," he said, "the government would have had the
litigants killed, and would have confiscated the treasure." Hereupon
one of the wise men exclaimed: "Does the sun shine in your land? Have
you dumb beasts where you live? If so, surely it is for them that God
sends down the rain, and lets the sun shine!"

In biblical literature, too, frequent mention is made of Africa. The
first explorer of the "Dark Continent" was the patriarch Abraham, who
journeyed from Ur of the Chaldees through Mesopotamia, across the
deserts and mountains of Asia, to Zoan, the metropolis of ancient Egypt.
When Moses fled from before Pharaoh, he found refuge, according to a
Talmudic legend, in the Soudan, where he became ruler of the land for
forty years, and later on, Egypt was the asylum for the greater number
of Jewish rebels and fugitives. As early as the reign of King Solomon,
ships freighted with silver sailed to Africa, and Jewish sailors in part
manned the Phoenician vessels despatched to the coasts of the Red Sea
to be loaded with the gold dust of Africa, whose usual name in Hebrew
was _Ophir_, meaning gold dust. In the Talmud Africa is generally spoken
of as "the South," owing to its lying south of Palestine. One of its
proverbs runs thus: "He who would be wise, must go to the South." The
story of Alexander the Great and the African lawyers is probably a
sample of the wisdom lauded. Nor were the doctors of the Talmud ignorant
of the physical features of the country. A scoffer asked, "Why have
Africans such broad feet." "Because they live on marshy soil, and must
go barefoot," was the ready answer given by Hillel the Great.

In the course of a discussion about the appearance of the cherubim,
Akiba pointed out that in Africa a little child is called "cherub."
Thence he inferred that the faces of cherubim resembled those of little
children. On his travels in Africa, the same rabbi was appealed to by a
mighty negro king: "See, I am black, and my wife is black. How is it
that my children are white?" Akiba asked him whether there were pictures
in his palace. "Yes," answered the monarch, "my sleeping chamber is
adorned with pictures of white men." "That solves the puzzle," said
Akiba. Evidently civilization had taken root in Africa more than
eighteen hundred ye