Volume I Part 4 (2/2)

[39] The river should rise to this height upon the Niloypt the banks of the river are ypt In order to flow over those banks it ht of some eleven or twelve metres, and unless it rises more than thirteen metres it will not have a proper effect

[Illustration: FIG 1--During the Inundation of the Nile]

Thus nature has greatly facilitated the labour of the Egyptian agriculturist; the river takes upon itself the irrigation of the country for the whole width of its valley, and the preparation of the soil for the autumnal seed-tiround by the crops Each year it brings with it more fertility than can be exhausted in the twelvecapital, on both banks of the river, of the richest vegetable earth

[Illustration: FIG 2--Hoeing; Beni-Hassan (Champollion, pl 381 _bis_[40])]

[40] This work of Chareatly indebted, is entitled: _Monuypte et de la Nubie_, 4 vols folio It contains 511 plates, partly coloured, and was published between the years 1833 and 1845 The drawings for the plates were reat scientific expedition of which Chas were from the pencil of Nestor L'Hote, one of those who have yptian ; froypte_, ant V, pl 17)]

Thus the first tribes established theularly favourable conditions; thanks to the timely help of the river they found themselves assured of an easy existence[41] We kno often the lives of those tribes who live by fishi+ng and the chase are oppressed by care; there are soer Those who live a pastoral life are also exposed to cruel hardshi+ps from the destruction of their flocks and herds by those epideles in vain As for agricultural populations, they are everywhere, except in Egypt, at the mercy of the weather; seasons which are either too dry or too wet may reduce them to famine, for in those distant times local famines were far more fatal than in these days, when facility of transport and elaborate commercial connections ensure that where the deypt the success of the crops varied with the height of the Nile, but they never failed altogether In bad years the peasant may have had the baton of the tax-collector to fear, but he always had a few onions or a few ears of maize to preserve hihly appreciated by the ancients

Diodorus Siculus, speaking of the Egyptians, says that ”At the beginning of all things, the first ypt, in consequence of the happy climate of the country and the physical properties of the Nile, whose waters, by their natural fertility and their power of producing various kinds of alis who received the breath of life It is evident that froypt was, of all countries, the eneration of men and women, by the excellent constitution of its soil” (i 10)

[42] In all ages the rod has, in Egypt, played an important part in the collection of the taxes In this connection M Lieblein has quoted a passage frouardian of the archives of Ameneman to the scribe Pentaour, in which he says: ”The scribe of the port arrives at the station; he collects the tax; there are agents with rattans, and negroes with branches of palm; they say 'Give us some corn!' and they are not to be repulsed The peasant is bound and sent to the canal; he is driven on with violence, his wife is bound in his presence, his children are stripped; as for his neighbours, they are far off and are busy over their own harvest” (_Les Recits de Recolte dans l'ancienne egypte, coique_, in _Recueil de Travaux relatifs a la Philologie et a l'Archeologie egyptiennes et assyriennes_, t i p 149)

[Illustration: FIG 4--Harvest scene; from a tomb at Gizeh

(Champollion, pl 417)]

The first condition of civilization is a certain measure of security for life Now, thanks to the beneficent action of the king of rivers, that condition was created sooner in Egypt than elsewhere In the valley of the Nile man found himself able, for the first time, to calculate upon the forces of nature and to turn theypt saw the birth of the most ancient of those civilizations whose plastic arts we propose to study

[Illustration: FIG 5--The Bastinado; Beni-Hassan (Champollion, pl

390)]

Another favourable condition is to be found in the isolation of the country The tribes who settled there in centuries so remote that they are beyond tradition and even calculation, could live in peace, hidden as it were in a narrow valley and protected on all sides, partly by deserts, partly by an iive some idea of the natural features of their country before co our study of their art The terypt_, the _Delta_, and _Ethiopia_ will continually recur in these pages, as also will the names of Tanis and Sais, Memphis and Heliopolis, Abydos and Thebes, and of many other cities; it is important therefore that our readers should know exactly what is nations; it is necessary that they should at least be able to find upon the map those cities which by their respective periods of supreyptian history

”Egypt is that country which, stretching frole of Africa, or Libya as the ancients called it

It is joined to Asia by the isthmus of Suez It is bounded on the east by that isthmus and the Red Sea; on the south by Nubia, the Ethiopia of the Greeks, which is traversed by the Nile before its entrance into Egypt at the cataracts of Syene; on the west by the desert sprinkled here and there with a few oases, and on the north by the Mediterranean The desert stretches as far north on the west of the country as the Red Sea does on the east

”It penetrates ypt itself

Strictly speaking Egypt consists simply of that part of this corner of Africa over which the waters of the Nile flow during the inundation, to which may be added those districts to which the water is carried by irrigation All outside this zone is uninhabited, and produces neither corn nor vegetables nor trees nor even grass No water is to be found there beyond a feells, allatypt rain is an extremely rare phenomenon Sand and rock cover the whole country, except the actual valley of the Nile Up to the point where the river divides into several arms, that is to say for ypt, this valley never exceeds an average width of ues In a few districts it is even narrower than this For alth it is shut in between two mountain chains, that on the east called the Arab, that on the west the Libyan chain These mountains, especially towards the south, sometiypt the Libyan chain falls back and becoe of the canal which carries the fertilizing waters into the Fayoum, the province in which the remains of the famous reservoir which the Greek writers called Lake Mris exist Egypt, which was littlesize A little below Cairo, the present capital of Egypt, situated not far from the site of ancient Memphis, the Nile divides into two branches, one of which, the Rosetta branch, turns to the north-west, the other, that of Damietta, to the north and north-east The ancients knew five others which, since their time, have either been obliterated or at least have becoable All these branches took their nae nuh Lower Egypt; but as the earth there is e and still go on changing The Nile forues of earth and sand, and cos here and there The space comprised between the two most distant branches of the river is called the Delta, on account of its triangular form, which is similar to that of a capital Greek _delta_ (?)”[43]

[43] ROBIOU, _Histoire ancienne des Peuples de l'Orient_, ch

v

At one time the waves of the Mediterranean washed the foot of the sandy plateau which is noned by the Great Pyrahtly to the north of the site upon which Mee of tiht down from the mountains of Abyssinia were deposited as ulf, created instead wide marshy plains intersected by lakes Here and there ancient sand ridges indicate the successive watercourses The never-ceasing industry of its floods had already, at the earliest historic period, carried the hbouring coasts The Egyptian priests--whose words have been preserved for us by Herodotus--had a true idea as to how this vast plain had been created, a plain which now comprises twenty-three thousand square kiloely deceived when they thought and declared that Menes or Mena, the first of all kings, found alypt under the waters The sea, they said, penetrated in those days beyond the site of Memphis, and the remainder of the country, the district of Thebes excepted, was an unhealthy morass[44]