Upper Senegal and Niger, Vol. 2

to procure in exchange gold and slaves. No doubt those of these caravans that headed toward the countries of the Niger and Upper Senegal consisted mainly of Berbers, traveling either for their own account or for that of Punic, Greek, or Egyptian merchants. But nothing can fix us exactly in this regard.

It seems quite certain that the political changes that occurred in North Africa did not have any noticeable repercussion in the Sudan, outside of a few exodes determined by certain of these changes, which were discussed in the second part of this work.

The Egyptians may have constituted their different dynasties; the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, the Medes, and the Persians may have waged war in North Africa; the Phoenicians and the Greeks may have founded flourishing colonies there; the Romans may have seized power over the Carthaginians and the Berbers: it does not seem that the echo of these upheavals crossed the Sahara. If Roman columns advanced as far as the South of Morocco with Suetonius Paulinus, into the Fezzan and beyond with Cornelius Balbus and Septimius Flaccus, if they even reached the Air a mountainous region in present-day Niger with Julius Maternus, these reconnaissances were never pushed as far as the region that occupies us presently, and the information collected by the Latin officers—or at least those among these pieces of information that have reached us—do not shed any light on the state of the Sudan at that distant era.

If now we ask archaeology and epigraphy for the indications that history cannot provide us, we find ourselves in the presence of a similar void.

It is true that one has discovered in several points of Western Africa—in Guinea, in the basin of the Upper Senegal, in the bend of the Niger, on the Ivory Coast, in the Sudanese Sahara, and elsewhere—numerous deposits of polished or chipped stone utensils and even caves with walls constellations of diverse drawings. But it is absolutely impossible, up to now, to assign in general (1) any date to these utensils and drawings, in regions where certain tribes still belonged yesterday to the polished stone age and where others still belong to it today to a certain extent: these sites, whether one calls them paleolithic or neolithic, can go back a hundred years just as well as three or four thousand years. Nor is it demonstrated that the objects found in a site were not brought there from elsewhere: several Europeans—among others Mr. Vuillet, director of the agriculture service at Koulouba—have met in the bend of the Niger blacksmiths who, without having manufactured them themselves, use stone instruments in the practice of their trade; Lenz reported that the Negroes of Araouane use, for household chores, polished stone tools that they bring back from Taoudenni. And on the other hand, in several regions of the Upper Senegal-Niger and the Sudanese Sahara, one still manufactures today, at the same time as iron utensils, stone objects such as arm rings, lip ornaments, balls used to crush tobacco or peanuts, hammers to beat the bark of certain ficus trees, etc.; I have been able, for my part, to witness in the cercle administrative district of Gaoua the manufacture of these diverse objects, as well as the drilling of stone beads.