History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12)

Chapter I.--the Nile and Egypt

THE RIVER AND ITS INFLUENCE UPON THE FORMATION AND CHARACTER OF THE COUNTRY--THE OLDEST INHABITANTS OF THE LAND--THE FIRST POLITICAL ORGANIZATION OF THE VALLEY.

_The Delta: its gradual formation, its structure, its canals--The valley of Egypt--The two arms of the river--The Eastern Nile--The appearance of its hanks--The hills--The gorge of Gehel Silsileh--The cataracts: the falls of Aswan--Nubia--The rapids of Wady Halfah--The Takazze--The Blue Nile and the White Nile.

The sources of the Nile--The Egyptian cosmography--The four pillars and the four upholding mountains--The celestial Nile the source of the terrestial Nile--the Southern Sea and the islands of Spirits--The tears of Isis--The rise of the Nile--The Green Nile and the Bed Nile--The opening of the dykes---The fall of the Nile--The river at its lowest ebb.

The alluvial deposits and the effects of the inundation upon the soil of Egypt--Paucity of the flora: aquatic plants, the papyrus and the lotus; the sycamore and the date-palm, the acacias, the dom-palms--The fauna: the domestic and wild animals; serpents, the urstus; the hippopotamus and the crocodile; birds; fish, the fahaka.

The Nile god: his form and its varieties--The goddess Mirit--The supposed sources of the Nile at Elephantine--The festivals of Gebel Silsileh-Hymn to the Nile from papyri m the British Museum.

The names of the Nile and Egypt: Bomitu and Qimit--Antiquity of the Egyptianpeople--Their first horizon--The hypothesis of their Asiatic origin--The probability of their African origin--The language and its Semitic affinities--The race and its principal types.

The primitive civilization of Egypt--Its survival into historic times--The women of Amon--Marriage--Rights of women and children--Houses--Furniture--Dress--Jewels--Wooden and metal arms--Primitive life-Fishing and hunting--The lasso and "bolas"--The domestication of animals--Plants used for food--The lotus--Cereals--The hoe and the plough.

The conquest of the valley--Dykes--Basins--Irrigation--The princes--The nomes--The first local principalities--Late organization of the Delta--Character of its inhabitants--Gradual division of the principalities and changes of then areas--The god of the city._

THE NILE AND EGYPT

The river and its influence upon the formation of the country--The oldest inhabitants of the valley and its first political organization.

* The same expression has been attributed to Hecatseus of Miletus. It has often been observed that this phrase seems Egyptian on the face of it, and it certainly recalls such forms of expression as the following, taken from a formula frequently found on funerary "All things created by heaven, given by earth, brought by the Nile--from its mysterious sources." Nevertheless, up to the present time, the hieroglyphic texts have yielded nothing altogether corresponding to the exact terms of the Greek historians-- gift of the Nile, or its natural product.

A long low, level shore, scarcely rising above the sea, a chain of vaguely defined and ever-shifting lakes and marshes, then the triangular plain beyond, whose apex is thrust thirty leagues into the land--this, the Delta of Egypt, has gradually been acquired from the sea, and is as it were the gift of the Nile. The Mediterranean once reached to the foot of the sandy plateau on which stand the Pyramids, and formed a wide gulf where now stretches plain beyond plain of the Delta. The last undulations of the Arabian hills, from Gebel Mokattam to Gebel Geneffeh, were its boundaries on the east, while a sinuous and shallow channel running between Africa and Asia united the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. Westward, the littoral followed closely the contour of the Libyan plateau; but a long limestone spur broke away from it at about 31 deg. N., and terminated in Cape Abukir. The alluvial deposits first tilled up the depths of the bay, and then, under the influence of the currents which swept along its eastern coasts, accumulated behind that rampart of sand-hills whose remains are still to be seen near Benha. Thus was formed a miniature Delta, whose structure pretty accurately corresponded with that of the great Delta of to-day. Here the Nile divided into three divergent streams, roughly coinciding with the southern courses of the Rosetta and Damietta branches, and with the modern canal of Abu Meneggeh. The ceaseless accumulation of mud brought down by the river soon overpassed the first limits, and steadily encroached upon the sea until it was carried beyond the shelter furnished by Cape Abukir. Thence it was gathered into the great littoral current flowing from Africa to Asia, and formed an incurvated coast-line ending in the headland of Casios, on the Syrian frontier. From that time Egypt made no further increase towards the north, and her coast remains practically such as it was thousands of years ago:[*] the interior alone has suffered change, having been dried up, hardened, and gradually raised. Its inhabitants thought they could measure the exact length of time in which this work of creation had been accomplished. According to the Egyptians, Menes, the first of their mortal kings, had found, so they said, the valley under water. The sea came in almost as far as the Fayum, and, excepting the province of Thebes, the whole country was a pestilential swamp. Hence, the necessary period for the physical formation of Egypt would cover some centuries after Menes. This is no longer considered a sufficient length of time, and some modern geologists declare that the Nile must have worked at the formation of its own estuary for at least seventy-four thousand years.[**]

* Elie de Beaumont, "The great distinction of the Nile Delta lies in the almost uniform persistence of its coast-line.... The present sea-coast of Egypt is little altered from that of three thousand years ago." The latest observations prove it to be sinking and shrinking near Alexandria to rise in the neighbourhood of Port Said.

** Others, as for example Schweinfurth, are more moderate in their views, and think "that it must have taken about twenty thousand years for that alluvial deposit which now forms the arable soil of Egypt to have attained to its present depth and fertility."

This figure is certainly exaggerated, for the alluvium would gain on the shallows of the ancient gulf far more rapidly than it gains upon the depths of the Mediterranean. But even though we reduce the period, we must still admit that the Egyptians little suspected the true age of their country. Not only did the Delta long precede the coming of Menes, but its plan was entirely completed before the first arrival of the Egyptians. The Greeks, full of the mysterious virtues which they attributed to numbers, discovered that there were seven principal branches, and seven mouths of the Nile, and that, as compared with these, the rest were but false mouths.

As a matter of fact, there were only three chief outlets. The Canopic branch flowed westward, and fell into the Mediterranean near Cape Abukir, at the western extremity of the arc described by the coast-line. The Pelusiac branch followed the length of the Arabian chain, and flowed forth at the other extremity; and the Sebennytic stream almost bisected the triangle contained between the Canopic and Pelusiac channels. Two thousand years ago, these branches separated from the main river at the city of Cerkasoros, nearly four miles north of the site where Cairo now stands. But after the Pelusiac branch had ceased to exist, the fork of the river gradually wore away the land from age to age, and is now some nine miles lower down.[*] These three great waterways are united by a network of artificial rivers and canals, and by ditches--some natural, others dug by the hand of man, but all ceaselessly shifting. They silt up, close, open again, replace each other, and ramify in innumerable branches over the surface of the soil, spreading life and fertility on all sides. As the land rises towards the south, this web contracts and is less confused, while black mould and cultivation alike dwindle, and the fawn-coloured line of the desert comes into sight. The Libyan and Arabian hills appear above the plain, draw nearer to each other, and gradually shut in the horizon until it seems as though they would unite. And there the Delta ends, and Egypt proper has begun.

It is only a strip of vegetable mould stretching north and south between regions of drought and desolation, a prolonged oasis on the banks of the river, made by the Nile, and sustained by the Nile. The whole length of the land is shut in between two ranges of hills, roughly parallel at a mean distance of about twelve miles.[**]

* By the end of the Byzantine period, the fork of the river lay at some distance south of Shetnufi, the present Shatanuf, which is the spot where it now is. The Arab geographers call the head of the Delta Batn-el-Bagaraji, the Cow's Belly. Ampere, in his Voyage en Egypte et en Nubie, p. 120, says,--"May it not be that this name, denoting the place where the most fertile part of Egypt begins, is a reminiscence of the Cow Goddess, of Isis, the symbol of fecundity, and the personification of Egypt?"

**De Roziere estimated the mean breadth as being only a little over nine miles.

During the earlier ages, the river filled all this intermediate space, and the sides of the hills, polished, worn, blackened to their very summits, still bear unmistakable traces of its action. Wasted, and shrunken within the deeps of its ancient bed, the stream now makes a way through its own thick deposits of mud. The bulk of its waters keeps to the east, and constitutes the true Nile, the "Great River" of the hieroglyphic inscriptions. A second arm flows close to the Libyan desert, here and there formed into canals, elsewhere left to follow its own course. From the head of the Delta to the village of Demt it is called the Bahr-Yusuf; beyond Derut--up to Gebel Silsileh--it is the Ibrahimiyeh, the Sohagiyeh, the Raian. But the ancient names are unknown to us. This Western Nile dries up in winter throughout all its upper courses: where it continues to flow, it is by scanty accessions from the main Nile. It also divides north of Henassieh, and by the gorge of Illahun sends out a branch which passes beyond the hills into the basin of the Fayurn. The true Nile, the Eastern Nile, is less a river than a sinuous lake encumbered with islets and sandbanks, and its navigable channel winds capriciously between them, flowing with a strong and steady current below the steep, black banks cut sheer through the alluvial earth.

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