al Africa and far across the Equator to the south" in the northern Congo (p. 310).
The Egyptians themselves generated a great deal of interest in Europe, falling to Alexander the Great and his conquering phalanxes in 332 BC, whose Greek "explorers found their way to the headwaters of the Nile" (Leithauser, 1955, p. 4). The historian Herodotus was said to have gone as far south as Aswan in 450 BC.
The Phoenicians founded in 814 BC in present day Tunisia the great city of Carthage and other cities along the North African coast. In about 595 BC, the Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa, beginning their voyage from the Red Sea and returning home through the Mediterranean. In dates variously reported as 530, 525 or 465 BC, the Carthaginian Admiral Hanno sailed down the west coast of Africa as far south as the Gulf of Guinea and returned. Isolated parties of Phoenicians and Romans, after the latter conquered Carthage and Egypt, respectively, made forays south of the Sahara, as far south as Lake Chad in the west and into Fezzan and Ethiopia. According to Moorehead (1960), the Emperor Nero sent two centurions into Nubia in search of the sources of the Nile who returned stating that "they had been blocked the far interior by an impenetrable swamp" (Iliffe, 1995, p. 1). In general, according to July (1992), "both Carthage and Rome seem to have been primarily interested in products commonly available in North Africa and neither appears to have been particularly sensitive to the potential gold resources of West Africa . . . [Trans-Sahara] trade was modest and intermittent" (p. 36).
The Arab conquest swept across North Africa in the 7th century AD but was confined at first to the coastal regions. Over time, Iliffe (1995) says "the Arab conquest of North Africa led to the transmission of Islam across the Sahara to the West African savannas" (p. 49). Motivations for crossing the Sahara include the lure of the lucrative trade in salt, slav...