By the time Alexander the Great was sweeping the civilized world with conquest after conquest from Chaeronia to Gaza, from Babylon to Cabul; By the time this first of the Aryan conquerors was learning the rudiments of war and government at the feet of the philosophic Aristotle; and by the time Athens was laying down the foundations of modern European civilization, The earliest and greatest Ethiopian culture had already flourished and dominated the civilized world for over four centuries and a half.

Imperial Ethiopia had conquered Egypt and founded the XXVth Dynasty, and for a century and a half the central seat of civilization in the known world was held by the ancestors of the modern Negro, maintaining it and defending it against the Assyrian and the Persian Empires of the East.

Thus at the time when Ethiopia was leading the civilized world in culture and conquest, East was East, but West was not, and the first European (Graecian) Olympiad was yet to be held. Rome was nowhere to be seen on the map, and sixteen centuries were to pass before Charlemagne would rule Europe and Egbert would become the first King of England.

Even then history was to drag on for another seven hundred weary years, before Roman Catholic Europe could see fit to end the Great Schism, soon to be followed by the news of the discovery of America and by the fateful rebirth of the youngest of world civilization.

- Dr Joseph B. Danquah in his introduction to the book United West Africa (or Africa) at the bar of the family of Nations , by Ladipo Solanke (1927)

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• Ethiopia