Middle Eastern chicken remains go back to a little earlier than 2000 BC, in Syria; chickens went southward only in the 1st millennium BC. They reached Egypt for purposes of cockfighting about 1400 BC, and became widely bred only in Ptolemaic Egypt (about 300 BC). Little is known about the chicken's introduction into Africa. It was during the Hellenistic period (4th-2nd centuries BC), in the Southern Levant, that chickens began widely to be widely domesticated for food. This change occurred at least 100 years before domestication of chickens spread to Europe.