Search the history of over billion web pages on the Internet. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. No archaeologist, no historian, no philologist will be more startled by the data collected in this book than I have been in their discovery. While I to a certain ex- tent foresaw the end toward which the presence of Africans in America before Columbus must ultimately lead in the social and religious orders, I did not allow myself in my first two volumes to be influenced by any such considerations, but confined myself to an analysis of the documentary evidence as to the American origin of cotton, tobacco, the bread roots, and wampum. When it became necessary similarly to subject the spiritual culture of the New World to a comparative study, it turned out that the difficulties in the way were far more serious than when I undertook to brush aside the accumulated misconceptions in regard to the mater- ial civihzation of pre-Columbian times. Not only was the documentary proof scanty for America and fre- quently distorted by the monks and later by those who had theories to defend, but the parallel material for Africa, especially for the Western Sudan, turned out to be in a more fragmentary condition and even more dis- torted by investigators totally unacquainted with the Arabic antecedents of the Sudanic beliefs and customs. With the exception of the more or less objective attitude and cautious work of Delafosse and a very few others, the African material bearing on fetishism and kindred subjects is a mass of extravagances of which it is not possible to avail oneself seriously. In archaeology the Sudan represents almost a blank. The task seemed hopeless. But it soon became clear that the prospect was brighter than it had appeared, when the Sudanic languages were examined for the Arabic element contained in them. This foreign in- trusion, as regards Moslem conceptions, had long been known and studied, but there was a residue of cultural ideas in nearly every intimate relation in life which had not even been suspected. Steinthal, in his study of the Mande languages, pointed out the fact that the "all- devouring" tendency of the Negro languages often completely obliterated the borrowed prototype; but, by including a study of the Arabic influence through the oases and in the Berber languages, especially in Zenaga, in the languages of the Niger Bend, such as Songay and Peul, down to the furthest outposts of the Arabic trader and magician, among the Yoruba, Asante, Dahome tribes, and even further, to the Congo, it was possible to overcome this "all-devouring" tendency and lay the foundation for an African philology and then to trace the religious conceptions of the greatest part of Northern Africa back to Islamic religion and magic. This study cast a new aspect upon the religious ideas of the Negroes, heretofore contemptuously denominated as fetishism, and the delusive totemism, which has led to a prolixity of theories, became simple and intelligible. In fact, the spiritual culture of the Sudan appears not very different from the popular undercurrent of belief and practice among Europeans or Asiatics, while its connection with the Moslem folk religion is still closer. FOREWORD xi The powerful Moslem interpenetration in spiritual matters among tlie pagan Negroes became as clear as it had been in the case of the Moslem Negroes, hence the thought suggested itself that the caste system of the Blacks, with their contempt for the blacksmith, which they share with the Arabs, might itself be of Arabic origin.
