Nubia is the name of a former African country now divided between Egypt and Sudan, and the name remains for the Nubian Desert South of Lake Nasser. Ancient Egypt was briefly ruled by Nubian kings in the 8th 7th centuries BC. The ancient Egyptians knew the north as Wawat and the south as Kush, with the dividing line roughly at Dongola. Egyptian building work in the area included temples at Abu Simbel, Philae, and a defensive chain of forts that established the lines of development of medieval fortification. Between about 600 BC AD 350, the capital of Nubia was Meroe, near Khartoum. About AD 250 550 most of Nubia was occupied by the X group people, of whom little is known; their royal mound tombs were mistaken by earlier investigations for natural mounds created by wind erosion and were excavated in the 1930s.
Little was known about Africa, which was called the Dark Continent because of the lack of knowledge of the place on the part of most Americans. Africa is the largest of the continents after Asia. The Western image of the continent is that it is filled with jungles and rain forests, but this is incorrect as only a small portion of the continent can be so classified. There is anthropological evidence that Africa may be the site where human beings first evolved:
It was in Africa that the first hominids appeared more than three million years ago. It was in Africa that the immediate ancestors of modern human beings--Homo sapiens--emerged for the first time about 40,000 B.C.E. Both the cultivation of crops and the domestication of animals may have occurred first in Africa. Certainly, one of the first states appeared in Africa, in the Nile valley in the northeastern corner of the continent, in the form of the kingdom of the pharaohs. (Duiker and Spielvogel, 1994, 229)
Of course, Europe was aware of the kingdom in Egypt, but this was seen as a thing of the past, a civilization that had faltered, and for that matter Egypt...