Note 12 — GOMES EANNES DE AZURARA; (continued 2)

(p. 8). Ancient and venerable city of Thebes.—Here we have again a MS. note.

[We must understand that there are two cities of Thebes—the one in Egypt and the other in Greece. That in Greece was the selfsame which in the time of Pharaoh Nicrao (Necho, see Herodotus, ii, 158-9: Josephus Antiq. Jud.) was called Jersem, as saith Marco Polo, whence came the Kings of Thebes who reigned in Egypt C I R (190) years. And this was one of the places which were given to Jacob, by the countenance of his son Joseph, when by the needs of hunger he went with his eleven sons to Egypt, as it is writ in Genesis. And Saint Isidore saith in his xvth book (of Origins) that Cadmus built Thebes in Egypt, and that he, passing into Greece, founded the other and Grecian Thebes, in the province of Acaya (Achaia), the which is now called the land of the Prince of the Amoreans.]

It is not necessary to dwell on the additional confusion furnished by this "explanation"—Thebes given to the Israelites (as part of Goshen?), Cadmus building the Egyptian Thebes, Achaia for Bœotia, and so forth; but the point really noticeable is that in Azurara's text the "dwellers on the Nile who possess Thebes" came in here as "wearing the Prince's livery:" i.e., the negroes of the Senegal are supposed to live on the western branch of the Nile, which mediæval conceptions obstinately brought from Egypt or Nubia to the Atlantic, and which Prince Henry's seamen thought they had discovered when they reached the Senegal; just as later in the Gambia, the Niger, and the Congo, other equivalents were imagined for the Negro Nile of Edrisi, and the West African river-courses of Pliny and Ptolemy. Cf. chs. xxx, xxxi, lx-lxii, of this Chronicle.