AFRICA - ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTIQUITIES The boundary between Negro Africa and "White" Africa, i.e., Egypt and the northern and north-western portions of the con tinent, must be both conventional and provisional. The explora tions of Reisner at Kerma in Nubia (between the third and fourth cataracts) and of Garstang at Meroe, have carried Egyptian influ ence so far south in the Nile valley that these sites, although in habited by peoples of mixed culture, must from the archaeologi cal standpoint be referred rather to Egypt than to the Sudan.
No such line of division exists in the west between the North African cultures and those of negro-land ; indeed Gautier ("Etudes d'ethnographie saharienne," L'Anthropologie, i 907) has shown that there is good reason to suppose that the latter has advanced perhaps as much as i,000km. at the expense of the former, during the last 2,000 or 3,00o years. Moreover, Meroe itself does not accurately represent the southern limits of the mixed civilization to which it has given its name ; some I 2m. south of Khartum on the right bank of the Blue Nile are the remains of Soba, a Meroitic site, later the capital of the Christian kingdom of 'Aiwa (the Alut of the hieroglyphs), while Meroitic remains have been recently discovered 200M. south of Khartum.
Yet Meroe, which lies in the neighbourhood of the i 7th par allel of north latitude, may well stand as the main southern bastion of Egyptian influence, and the area with which this article will deal is that part of Africa lying south of 16° north, which will be divided into three provinces, eastern, western and southern.
The Nile-Congo watershed, a natural feature of geographical and ethnic importance, constitutes part of the dividing line be tween the eastern and western areas, which continues northwards along the broad ridge of relatively high land that roughly divides the territories of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan from those adminis tered by France. Thus the boundary line somewhat closely follows the western confines of Darfur, while south of the Nile-Congo watershed it coincides with the boundary between the Belgian Congo and British territories to the east, both eastern and western provinces being limited to the south by a line roughly following the loth parallel of south latitude.