HAVING LOST BOTH UPPER AND LOWER EGYPT, ETHIOPIA'S northern border had been pushed to the First Cataract at Assuan, and Necho II eventually became king of Egypt, beginning the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, 665-525 B.C. The Egyptian armies were increasingly made up of foreigners and enslaved Blacks . It was during this dynasty that the Assyrians were expelled again, this time by nationalistic Egyptians . The Blacks' loss of their beloved Memphis, Thebes, and even their Egyptian name now seemed to be final.
Other invasions came . The Persians under Darius the Great took over, and their domination of Egypt lasted from 525 to 404 B.C.,with the assistance of Greek mercenaries . They returned in 343 B .C . to reestablish their rule, but again for only a relatively short duration . Alexander reached Egypt in 332 B .C.,on his world conquering rampage . But one of the greatest generals in the ancient world was also the Empress of Ethiopia. This was the formidable black Queen Candace, world famous as a military tactician and field commander . Legend has it that Alexander could not entertain even the possibility of having his world fame and unbroken chain of victories marred by risking a defeat, at last, by a woman. He halted his armies at the borders of Ethiopia and did not invade to meet the waiting black armies with their Queen in personal command. Upon his death, one of his most outstanding generals became Pharaoh as Ptolemy I, thus beginning 300 years of Macedonian-Greek rule. Toward the end of Greek domination, the

expansion of the Roman Empire had transferred the real center of power to Rome . Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome-the continuing process of transforming a black civilization into a near-white civilization long before the Christian era .
The Ptolemaic period had been largely one of confusion. The division
of power among the Greeks, Macedonians and Egyptians, and inter- marriages with the latter, joint rule, etc., made the Ptolemies, at times,
merely nominal rulers. There were times when a native Afro-Asian ruler gained the center of the stage as the star attraction, as in the case of Cleopatra. Upon her death, in 30 B.C, Romans assumed direct control, ruling the country for seven centuries, beginning their reign thirty years before Jesus Christ would be born in the same Palestine where Blacks had lived and ruled so long.
After this long period of domination, the Arab general Amr-ibn-al- As, entered Alexandria in 642 A .D. with only 4,000 men. The conquest of Egypt by the Muslim armies, which had reached Pelusium two years earlier, was not only to change the character of Egyptian civilization radically, but it was to have a `disastrous impact on the dignity and destiny of Africans as a people . The Arab conquest had opened the floodgates wider and Arabs poured in . Colonization and Islamization progressed. As Egypt became a main center of Arab power, this fact found concrete expression in Arab-Islamic expansion over North Africa into Spain, and southward into what remained as "The Land of the Blacks."
THE NEW BORDERLINE OF THE BLACKS
We have traced the ancient struggles between Africans, Mulattoes and Asians, where the Africans sought not only to resist conquest, but to retake the whole of Egypt. They succeeded at times, but finally lost all of Egypt, as we have seen.
Ethiopia now began at the First Cataract in the north and extended
south into present-day Ethiopia . It was now bounded by Upper Egypt, the Red Sea and the Libyan desert. These are rather general geographical designations without any precise meaning, for ancient Ethiopia had no precise southern boundaries . Ancient Ethiopians would say that their land included Egypt and was in fact without boundaries in Africa insofar as non-Africans were concerned . All of the European and Asian.
doctrines about "unoccupied" regions of Africa at any given period in history are quite meaningless and unacceptable to Africans . For to them, it is just as senseless as it would be to say to a farmer anywhere, "See here now! There are large sections of your land unoccupied and untended. So we'll just come in and take it!"
The Africans' area of great concentration was ancient Nubia between the First and the Sixth Cataracts . It was the land where they had developed the great civilization which they had extended over Egypt. Their work had been appropriated by the invaders as their own.
The geography of Nubia is the geography of much of present-day Sudan and beyond. The Nile flows through its sand and rock deserts with a series of falls and a number of rapids. The country is almost rainless. It is the land of the great Nubian desert . West of the Nile towards the Red Sea was the mining area, rich in gold . It was, even within the concept of these geographical boundaries, the heartland of the black world.
Already pushed by the invaders from the Mediterranean areas in the north, northeast and northwest, the Africans were to be further hedged in from the east and southeast as the Asian hordes continued to stream across the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean and, much later, as the Dutch
Boers poured in from the southernmost tip of the continent .
SCRAPS FROM PREHISTORY
The stone age Africans lived about the same as stone age peoples all over the world. They were hunters, fishermen and craftsmen . Archae- ologists have dug up some of their tools and other artifacts at Wadi Haifa, Wawa, Sai Island, Wadi Hudi, the Selima oasis, Tangasi, Tagiya and other places. These areas are between the Second and Fourth Cataracts. Our discussion of specific, concrete evidence of early black civilization up to this point has been confined to the Egyptian north. Most notable among the Neolithic finds in the south were the beautiful, highly burnished, black-topped and red potterly bowls, jars, etc. The pottery was artistically decorated in wavy ripples or squares . Their earliest writing was in pictures. So many hundreds of these rock "messages" were found along the Nile through Nubialand that one may well wonder if these prehistoric "historians" had posterity in mind . While many of the pictures portrayed wildlife and other objects of interest in the environment, others went beyond this role of the artist
and recorded such historic facts as the conquest of Northern Nubia by the Nubian Pharaoh of the Old Kingdom, Sneferu, in 2730 B.C.' This war left a vast wasteland and practically wiped out a civilization that had been developing before Neolithic times .
THE "CHILDREN OF THE SUN"
For one thing, the land to the south of Egypt had developed a strong economy that was continuously enriched by a thriving export trade in
paper (from papyrus), ivory, gold, ebony, emeralds, copper, incense, ostrich feathers (always greatly in demand), and its famous decorated
earthenware. A strong economy also meant a strong Ethiopian army, posing a threat even to an African-ruled Egypt . From the Egyptian viewpoint, the "Land of the Blacks" was a threefold threat . Historically, the Blacks who had fled below the First Cataract to escape the various, conquests never seemed to accept those conquests as final, and attempted to retake Egypt from time to time . (These repetitions are deliberate because nowhere in history is this very important fact clearly stated.)
But it is clear that, having reconquered the Asian-dominated Lower Egypt, the black pharaohs sought integration with the Asians instead of driving them out of the country . This policy of moderation and accommodation was apparently anathema to the "extremist" Ethiopians, proud Blacks for whom the prospects of having their children come into
the world with a color distinctly different from their own was at once an
insult to their watching ancestors, and an offense to the Gods them- selves.
This attitude might also explain the hostility of the Southern Blacks toward the Afro-Asian. The latter were not "true" Africans because they were becoming Egyptians, a mixed breed of many races . They were, therefore, traitors in the eyes of "true" Africans whose badge of eternal honor was the blackness of their skin. This was color racism, deeply rooted, for it sprang from religion: They were "Children of the Sun" blessed with blackness by the Sun God himself and thus protected