In the Moors the old type is to some extent still preserved. They are warlike, brave tribes, not without talent. But none of them, it is true, developed a high civilisation, although they adopted certain elements of civilisation from the Egyptians, and later on, in Mauretania, from the Carthaginians. According to the representations on the monuments, the custom of tattooing their arms and legs ruled amongst them; among the engraved signs we also meet with the symbol of Nit, the patron goddess of Saïs, whose population would appear to have consisted chiefly of Libyans.
As in the west, Libyans and Moors, to judge from their language, are connected with the Egyptians, so this is true in the south of a great number of tribes east of the Nile Valley. These are the ancestors of the modern Bedia tribes (_i.e._ of the Ababde, the Bischarin, and others, dwelling in the deserts and steppes east of the Upper Nile Valley), and of their relations the Falaschas, the Gallas, the Somali. Among them the country and people of Cush attained particular pre-eminence in antiquity; they were the southeastern neighbours of the Egyptians, who had their original settlements in the wastes and steppes of the mountain country east of the Nile. In the course of history they press forward against the negroes of the Nile Valley, the ancestors of the modern Nubians, and finally establish here a powerful empire.
The Hebrews and the Assyrians are accustomed to call this country Cush, and we too are in the habit of using this name Cushite instead of Egyptian. The Greeks call them Ethiopians. In the Christian era this name was adopted by a people living much farther south, the Semitic inhabitants of the great highlands of Habesh (Abyssinia), and this people and its language (Ge-ez) are therefore to-day called Ethiopian. But care must be taken not to transfer this term of modern usage in its modern significance to the circumstances of antiquity. The Ethiopia of antiquity is geographically about coterminous with modern Nubia.
A still more bewildering confusion has been engendered by the term Cushites. In the Old Testament, in the review of the races taking their departure from Noah, the name Cush has been transferred to Babylonia (Gen. x. 8; possibly also in the story of the Fall, ii. 13). This is to be explained by the fact that the robber mountain horde of the Kossæans, or, as they called themselves, the Kasshu, maintained supremacy for centuries in Babylonia; this name was identified by the Hebrew narrator with that denoting the African tribe. Recent experts have derived the most illusory consequences from this misunderstanding. In consequence of it the Cushites have become for them an Asiatic-African aboriginal people of wide extent, appearing everywhere and never at home; and wherever we encounter riddles in the matter handed down to us, or a bold combination has to be made possible, these Cushites are trotted out, only to sink again into nothingness as soon as they have done their work. Conceptions of this character have found their way into ethnographical, philological, and historical works of high merit.
