text: ## General  
  Historians who are accustomed to reconstruct history from written documents or from tablets or papyri do not find a fruitful field of research in Negroid Africa outside the sphere of the Egyptian civilization. In Africa, documented history does not begin before the arrival of the Europeans in the fifteenth century A.D., although in some parts of the continent, notably in North and East Africa, recorded history may be said to begin with the advent of the Arabs in the centuries immediately following Mohammed's death in A.D. 632. It is true that Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, and others have left a few documents concerning the continent, but these, although important and instructive, are only episodical in character. Thus the reference to Hanno's Phoenician expedition to the Cape Verde region of Africa's West Coast (ca. 500 B.C.) or "The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea" referring to Africa's East Coast (ca. A.D. 80) are too isolated in their import to contribute to any serious historical reconstruction. Even the early Arabian and European periods of Africa are insufficiently known. With the exception of a few coastal regions of East, West, and South Africa, the interior of the continent remained historically unknown until the middle, or even the end, of the last century.