Read Ebook: History Of Egypt Chaldæa Syria Babylonia and Assyria Volume 1 (of 12) by Maspero G Gaston Sayce A H Archibald Henry Editor McClure M L Translator

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As the successive floods grow stronger and are more heavily charged with mud, the whole mass of water becomes turbid and changes colour. In eight or ten days it has turned from greyish blue to dark red, occasionally of so intense a colour as to look like newly shed blood. The "Red Nile" is not unwholesome like the "Green Nile," and the suspended mud to which it owes its suspicious appearance deprives the water of none of its freshness and lightness. It reaches its full height towards the 15th of July; but the dykes which confine it, and the barriers constructed across the mouths of canals, still prevent it from overflowing. The Nile must be considered high enough to submerge the land adequately before it is set free. The ancient Egyptians measured its height by cubits of twenty-one and a quarter inches. At fourteen cubits, they pronounced it an excellent Nile; below thirteen, or above fifteen, it was accounted insufficient or excessive, and in either case meant famine, and perhaps pestilence at hand. To this day the natives watch its advance with the same anxious eagerness; and from the 3rd of July, public criers, walking the streets of Cairo, announce each morning what progress it has made since evening. More or less authentic traditions assert that the prelude to the opening of the canals, in the time of the Pharaohs, was the solemn casting to the waters of a young girl decked as for her bridal--the "Bride of the Nile." Even after the Arab conquest, the irruption of the river into the bosom of the land was still considered as an actual marriage; the contract was drawn up by a cadi, and witnesses confirmed its consummation with the most fantastic formalities of Oriental ceremonial. It is generally between the 1st and 16th of July that it is decided to break through the dykes. When that proceeding has been solemnly accomplished in state, the flood still takes several days to fill the canals, and afterwards spreads over the low lands, advancing little by little to the very edge of the desert. Egypt is then one sheet of turbid water spreading between two lines of rock and sand, flecked with green and black spots where there are towns or where the ground rises, and divided into irregular compartments by raised roads connecting the villages. In Nubia the river attains its greatest height towards the end of August; at Cairo and in the Delta not until three weeks or a month later. For about eight days it remains stationary, and then begins to fall imperceptibly. Sometimes there is a new freshet in October, and the river again increases in height. But the rise is unsustained; once more it falls as rapidly as it rose, and by December the river has completely retired to the limits of its bed. One after another, the streams which fed it fail or dwindle. The Tacazze is lost among the sands before rejoining it, and the Blue Nile, well-nigh deprived of tributaries, is but scantily maintained by Abyssinian snows. The White Nile is indebted to the Great Lakes for the greater persistence of its waters, which feed the river as far as the Mediterranean, and save the valley from utter drought in winter. But, even with this resource, the level of the water falls daily, and its volume is diminished. Long-hidden sandbanks reappear, and are again linked into continuous line. Islands expand by the rise of shingly beaches, which gradually reconnect them with each other and with the shore. Smaller branches of the river cease to flow, and form a mere network of stagnant pools and muddy ponds, which fast dry up. The main channel itself is only intermittently navigable; after March boats run aground in it, and are forced to await the return of the inundation for their release. From the middle of April to the middle of June, Egypt is only half alive, awaiting the new Nile.

Those ruddy and heavily charged waters, rising and retiring with almost mathematical regularity, bring and leave the spoils of the countries they have traversed: sand from Nubia, whitish clay from the regions of the Lakes, ferruginous mud, and the various rock-formations of Abyssinia. These materials are not uniformly disseminated in the deposits; their precipitation being regulated both by their specific gravity and the velocity of the current. Flattened stones and rounded pebbles are left behind at the cataract between Syene and Keneh, while coarser particles of sand are suspended in the undercurrents and serve to raise the bed of the river, or are carried out to sea and form the sandbanks which are slowly rising at the Damietta and Rosetta mouths of the Nile. The mud and finer particles rise towards the surface, and are deposited upon the land after the opening of the dykes. Soil which is entirely dependent on the deposit of a river, and periodically invaded by it, necessarily maintains but a scanty flora; and though it is well known that, as a general rule, a flora is rich in proportion to its distance from the poles and its approach to the equator, it is also admitted that Egypt offers an exception to this rule. At the most, she has not more than a thousand species, while, with equal area, England, for instance, possesses more than fifteen hundred; and of this thousand, the greater number are not indigenous. Many of them have been brought From Central Africa by the river: birds and winds have continued the work, and man himself has contributed his part in making it more complete. From Asia he has at different times brought wheat barley the olive, the apple, the white or pink almond, and some twenty other species now acclimatized on the banks of the Nile. Marsh plants predominate in the Delta; but the papyrus, and the three varieties of blue, white, and pink lotus which once flourished there, being no longer cultivated, have now almost entirely disappeared, and reverted to their original habitats.

The sycamore and the date-palm, both importations from Central Africa, have better adapted themselves to their exile, and are now fully naturalized on Egyptian soil.

The sycamore grows in sand on the edge of the desert as vigorously as in the midst of a well-watered country. Its roots go deep in search of water, which infiltrates as far as the gorges of the hills, and they absorb it freely, even where drought seems to reign supreme. The heavy, squat, gnarled trunk occasionally attains to colossal dimensions, without ever growing very high. Its rounded masses of compact foliage are so wide-spreading that a single tree in the distance may give the impression of several grouped together; and its shade is dense, and impenetrable to the sun. A striking contrast to the sycamore is presented by the date-palm. Its round and slender stem rises uninterruptedly to a height of thirteen to sixteen yards; its head is crowned with a cluster of flexible leaves arranged in two or three tiers, but so scanty, so pitilessly slit, that they fail to keep off the light, and cast but a slight and unrefreshing shadow. Few trees have so elegant an appearance, yet few are so monotonously elegant. There are palm trees to be seen on every hand; isolated, clustered by twos and threes at the mouths of ravines and about the villages, planted in regular file along the banks of the river like rows of columns, symmetrically arranged in plantations,--these are the invariable background against which other trees are grouped, diversifying the landscape. The feathery tamarisk and the nabk, the moringa, the carob, or locust tree several varieties of acacia and mimosa-the sont, the mimosa habbas, the white acacia, the Acacia Parnesxana--and the pomegranate tree, increase in number with the distance from the Mediterranean.

The dry air of the valley is marvellously suited to them, but makes the tissue of their foliage hard and fibrous, imparting an aerial aspect, and such faded tints as are unknown to their growth in other climates. The greater number of these trees do not reproduce themselves spontaneously, and tend to disappear when neglected. The Acacia Seyal, formerly abundant by the banks of the river, is now almost entirely confined to certain valleys of the Theban desert, along with a variety of the kernelled d?m-palm, of which a poetical description has come down to us from the Ancient Egyptians. The common d?m-palm bifurcates at eight or ten yards from the ground; these branches are subdivided, and terminate in bunches of twenty to thirty palmate and fibrous leaves, six to eight feet long. At the beginning of this century the tree was common in Upper Egypt, but it is now becoming scarce, and we are within measurable distance of the time when its presence will be an exception north of the first cataract. Willows are decreasing in number, and the persea, one of the sacred trees of Ancient Egypt, is now only to be found in gardens. None of the remaining tree species are common enough to grow in large clusters; and Egypt, reduced to her lofty groves of date-palms, presents the singular spectacle of a country where there is no lack of trees, but an almost entire absence of shade.

If Egypt is a land of imported flora, it is also a land of imported fauna, and all its animal species have been brought from neighbouring countries. Some of these--as, for example, the horse and the camel--were only introduced at a comparatively recent period, two thousand to eighteen hundred years before our era; the camel still later. The animals--such as the long and short-horned oxen, together with varieties of goats and dogs--are, like the plants, generally of African origin, and the ass of Egypt preserves an original purity of form and a vigour to which the European donkey has long been a stranger. The pig and the wild boar, the long-eared hare, the hedgehog, the ichneumon, the moufflon, or maned sheep, innumerable gazelles, including the Egyptian gazelles, and antelopes with lyre-shaped horns, are as much West Asian as African, like the carnivors of all sizes, whose prey they are--the wild cat, the wolf, the jackal, the striped and spotted hyenas, the leopard, the panther, the hunting leopard, and the lion.

On the other hand, most of the serpents, large and small, are indigenous. Some are harmless, like the colubers; others are venomous, such as the soy tale, the cerastes, the haje viper, and the asp. The asp was worshipped by the Egyptians under the name of uraeus. It occasionally attains to a length of six and a half feet, and when approached will erect its head and inflate its throat in readiness for darting forward. The bite is fatal, like that of the cerastes; birds are literally struck down by the strength of the poison, while the great mammals, and man himself, almost invariably succumb to it after a longer or shorter death-struggle. The uraeus is rarely found except in the desert or in the fields; the scorpion crawls everywhere, in desert and city alike, and if its sting is not always followed by death, it invariably causes terrible pain. Probably there were once several kinds of gigantic serpent in Egypt, analogous to the pythons of equatorial Africa. They are still to be seen in representations of funerary scenes, but not elsewhere; for, like the elephant, the giraffe, and other animals which now only thrive far south, they had disappeared at the beginning of historic times. The hippopotamus long maintained its ground before returning to those equatorial regions whence it had been brought by the Nile. Common under the first dynasties, but afterwards withdrawing to the marshes of the Delta, it there continued to flourish up to the thirteenth century of our era. The crocodile, which came with it, has, like it also, been compelled to beat a retreat. Lord of the river throughout all ancient times, worshipped and protected in some provinces, execrated and proscribed in others, it might still be seen in the neighbourhood of Cairo towards the beginning of our century. In 1840, it no longer passed beyond the neighbourhood of Gebel et-T?r, nor beyond that of Manfal?t in Thirty years later, Mariette asserted that it was steadily retreating before the guns of tourists, and the disturbance which the regular passing of steamboats produced in the deep waters. To-day, no one knows of a single crocodile existing below Aswan, but it continues to infest Nubia, and the rocks of the first cataract: one of them is occasionally carried down by the current into Egypt where it is speedily despatched by the fell?hin, or by some traveller in quest of adventure. The fertility of the soil, and the vastness of the lakes and marshes, attract many migratory birds; passerinae and palmipedes flock thither from all parts of the Mediterranean. Our European swallows, our quails, our geese and wild ducks, our herons--to mention only the most familiar--come here to winter, sheltered from cold and inclement weather.

Even the non-migratory birds are really, for the most part, strangers acclimatized by long sojourn. Some of them--the turtledove, the magpie, the kingfisher, the partridge, and the sparrow-may be classed with our European species, while others betray their equatorial origin in the brightness of their colours. White and black ibises, red flamingoes, pelicans, and cormorants enliven the waters of the river, and animate the reedy swamps of the Delta in infinite variety. They are to be seen ranged in long files upon the sand-banks, fishing and basking in the sun; suddenly the flock is seized with panic, rises heavily, and settles away further off. In hollows of the hills, eagle and falcon, the merlin, the bald-headed vulture, the kestrel, the golden sparrow-hawk, find inaccessible retreats, whence they descend upon the plains like so many pillaging and well-armed barons. A thousand little chattering birds come at eventide to perch in flocks upon the frail boughs of tamarisk and acacia.

Many sea-fish make their way upstream to swim in fresh waters-shad, mullet, perch, and labrus--and carry their excursions far into the Sa?d. Those species which are not Mediterranean came originally, still come annually, from the heart of Ethiopia with the of the Nile, including two kinds of Alestes, the elled turtle, the Bagrus docmac, and the mormyrus. Some attain to a gigantic size, the Bagrus bayad and the turtle to about one yard, the latus to three and a half yards in length, while others, such as the sihlrus , are noted for their electric properties. Nature seems to have made the fah?ka in a fit of playfulness. It is a long fish from beyond the cataracts, and it is carried by the Nile the more easily on account of the faculty it has of filling itself with air, and inflating its body at will.

When swelled out immoderately, the fah?ka overbalances, and drifts along upside down, its belly to the wind, covered with spikes so that it looks like a hedgehog. During the inundation, it floats with the current from one canal to another, and is cast by the retreating waters upon the muddy fields, where it becomes the prey of birds or of jackals, or serves as a plaything for children.

Everything is dependent upon the river:--the soil, the produce of the soil, the species of animals it bears, the birds which it feeds: and hence it was the Egyptians placed the river among their gods. They personified it as a man with regular features, and a vigorous and portly body, such as befits the rich of high lineage. His breasts, fully developed like those of a woman, though less firm, hang heavily upon a wide bosom where the fat lies in folds. A narrow girdle, whose ends fall free about the thighs, supports his spacious abdomen, and his attire is completed by sandals, and a close-fitting head-dress, generally surmounted with a crown of water-plants. Sometimes water springs from his breast; sometimes he presents a frog, or libation vases; or holds a bundle of the cruces ansato, as symbols of life; or bears a flat tray, full of offerings--bunches of flowers, ears of corn, heaps of fish, and geese tied together by the feet. The inscriptions call him, "H?pi, father of the gods, lord of sustenance, who maketh food to be, and covereth the two lands of Egypt with his products; who giveth life, banisheth want, and filleth the granaries to overflowing." He is evolved into two personages, one being sometimes coloured red, and the other blue. The former, who wears a cluster of lotus-flowers upon his head, presides over the Egypt of the south; the latter has a bunch of papyrus for his head-dress, and watches over the Delta.

Wilkinson was the first who suggested that this god, when painted red was the Red Nile and when painted blue, was to be identified with the Low Nile. This opinion has since been generally adopted; but to me it does not appear so incontrovertible as it has been considered. Here, as in other cases, the difference in colour is only a means of making the distinction between two personages obvious to sight.

Two goddesses, corresponding to the two H?pis--Mirit Qim?it for Upper, and Mirit M?hit for Lower Egypt--personified the banks of the river. They are often represented as standing with outstretched arms, as though begging for the water which should make them fertile. The Nile-god had his chapel in every province, and priests whose right it was to bury all bodies of men or beasts cast up by the river; for the god had claimed them, and to his servants they belonged.

Several towns were dedicated to him: H?th?pi, N?it-H?pi, Nilo-polis. It was told in the Theba?d how the god dwelt within a grotto, or shrine , in the island of Biggeh, whence he issued at the inundation. This tradition dates from a time when the cataract was believed to be at the end of the world, and to bring down the heavenly river upon earth. Two yawning gulfs , at the foot of the two granite cliffs between which it ran, gave access to this mysterious retreat. A bas-relief from Philae represents blocks of stone piled one above another, the vulture of the south and the hawk of the north, each perched on a summit, wearing a panther skin, with both arms upheld in adoration. The statue is mutilated: the end of the nose, the beard, and part of the tray have disappeared, but are restored in the illustration. The two little birds hanging alongside the geese, together with a bunch of ears of corn, are fat quails, and the circular chamber wherein H?pi crouches concealed, clasping a libation vase in either hand. A single coil of a serpent outlines the contour of this chamber, and leaves a narrow passage between its overlapping head and tail through which the rising waters may overflow at the time appointed, bringing to Egypt "all things good, and sweet, and pure," whereby gods and men are fed. Towards the summer solstice, at the very moment when the sacred water from the gulfs of Syene reached Silsileh, the priests of the place, sometimes the reigning sovereign, or one of his sons, sacrificed a bull and geese, and then cast into the waters a sealed roll of papyrus. This was a written order to do all that might insure to Egypt the benefits of a normal inundation. When Pharaoh himself deigned to officiate, the memory of the event was preserved by a stela engraved upon the rocks. Even in his absence, the festivals of the Nile were among the most solemn and joyous of the land. According to a tradition transmitted from age to age, the prosperity or adversity of the year was dependent upon the splendour and fervour with which they were celebrated. Had the faithful shown the slightest lukewarmness, the Nile might have refused to obey the command and failed to spread freely over the surface of the country. Peasants from a distance, each bringing his own provisions, ate their meals together for days, and lived in a state of brutal intoxication as long as this kind of fair lasted. On the great day itself, the priests came forth in procession from the sanctuary, bearing the statue of the god along the banks, to the sound of instruments and the chanting of hymns.

The word Nile is of uncertain origin. We have it from the Greeks, and they took it from a people foreign to Egypt, either from the Phoenicians, the Kh?ti, the Libyans, or from people of Asia Minor. When the Egyptians themselves did not care to treat their river as the god H?pi, they called it the sea, or the great river. They had twenty terms or more by which to designate the different phases which it assumed according to the seasons, but they would not have understood what was meant had one spoken to them of the Nile. The name Egypt also is part of the Hellenic tradition; perhaps it was taken from the temple-name of Memphis, H?ik?phtah, which barbarian coast tribes of the Mediterranean must long have had ringing in their ears as that of the most important and wealthiest town to be found upon the shores of their sea. The Egyptians called themselves Bomit?, Bot?, and their country Q?mit, the black land. Whence came they? How far off in time are we to carry back the date of their arrival? The oldest monuments hitherto known scarcely transport us further than six thousand years, yet they are of an art so fine, so well determined in its main outlines, and reveal so ingeniously combined a system of administration, government, and religion, that we infer a long past of accumulated centuries behind them. It must always be difficult to estimate exactly the length of time needful for a race as gifted as were the Ancient Egyptians to rise from barbarism into a high degree of culture. Nevertheless, I do not think that we shall be misled in granting them forty or fifty centuries wherein to bring so complicated an achievement to a successful issue, and in placing their first appearance at eight or ten thousand years before our era. Their earliest horizon was a very limited one. Their gaze might wander westward over the ravine-furrowed plains of the Libyan desert without reaching that fabled land of Manu where the sun set every evening; but looking eastward from the valley, they could see the peak of B?kh?, which marked the limit of regions accessible to man.

Beyond these regions lay the beginnings of To-n?tri, the land of the gods, and the breezes passing over it were laden with its perfumes, and sometimes wafted them to mortals lost in the desert.

Northward, the world came to an end towards the lagoons of the Delta, whose inaccessible islands were believed to be the sojourning-place of souls after death. As regards the south, precise knowledge of it scarcely went beyond the defiles of Gebel Sil-sileh, where the last remains of the granite threshold had perhaps not altogether disappeared. The district beyond Gebel Silsileh, the province of Kon?sit, was still a foreign and almost mythic country, directly connected with heaven by means of the cataract. Long after the Egyptians had broken through this restricted circle, the names of those places which had as it were marked out their frontiers, continued to be associated in their minds with the idea of the four cardinal points. B?kh? and Manu were still the most frequent expressions for the extreme East and West. Nekhabit and B?to, the most populous towns in the neighbourhoods of Gebel Silsileh and the ponds of the Delta, were set over against each other to designate South and North. It was within these narrow limits that Egyptian civilization struck root and ripened, as in a closed vessel. What were the people by whom it was developed, the country whence they came, the races to which they belonged, is to-day unknown. The majority would place their cradle-land in Asia, but cannot agree in determining the route which was followed in the emigration to Africa.

Some think that the people took the shortest road across the Isthmus of Suez, others give them longer peregrinations and a more complicated itinerary. They would have them cross the Straits of Bab el-Mandeb, and then the Abyssinian mountains, and, spreading northward and keeping along the Nile, finally settle in the Egypt of to-day. A more minute examination compels us to recognize that the hypothesis of an Asiatic origin, however attractive it may seem, is somewhat difficult to maintain. The bulk of the Egyptian population presents the characteristics of those white races which have been found established from all antiquity on the Mediterranean slope of the Libyan continent; this population is of African origin, and came to Egypt from the West or South-West. In the valley, perhaps, it may have met with a black race which it drove back or destroyed; and there, perhaps, too, it afterwards received an accretion of Asiatic elements, introduced by way of the isthmus and the marshes of the Delta. But whatever may be the origin of the ancestors of the Egyptians, they were scarcely settled upon the banks of the Nile before the country conquered, and assimilated them to itself, as it has never ceased to do in the case of strangers who have occupied it. At the time when their history begins for us, all the inhabitants had long formed but one people, with but one language.

This language seems to be connected with the Semitic tongues by many of its roots. It forms its personal pronouns, whether isolated or suffixed, in a similar way. One of the tenses of the conjugation, and that the simplest and most archaic, is formed with identical affixes. Without insisting upon resemblances which are open to doubt, it may be almost affirmed that most of the grammatical processes used in Semitic languages are to be found in a rudimentary condition in Egyptian. One would say that the language of the people of Egypt and the languages of the Semitic races, having once belonged to the same group, had separated very early, at a time when the vocabulary and the grammatical system of the group had not as yet taken definite shape. Subject to different influences, the two families would treat in diverse fashion the elements common to both. The Semitic dialects continued to develop for centuries, while the Egyptian language, although earlier cultivated, stopped short in its growth. "If it is obvious that there was an original connexion between the language of Egypt and that of Asia, this connexion is nevertheless sufficiently remote to leave to the Egyptian race a distinct physiognomy." We recognize it in sculptured and painted portraits, as well as in thousands of mummied bodies out of subterranean tombs. The highest type of Egyptian was tall and slender, with a proud and imperious air in the carriage of his head and in his whole bearing. He had wide and full shoulders, well-marked and vigorous pectoral muscles, muscular arms, a long, fine hand, slightly developed hips, and sinewy legs. The detail of the knee-joint and the muscles of the calf are strongly marked beneath the skin; the long, thin, and low-arched feet are flattened out at the extremities owing to the custom of going barefoot. The head is rather short, the face oval, the forehead somewhat retreating. The eyes are wide and fully opened, the cheekbones not too marked, the nose fairly prominent, and either straight or aquiline. The mouth is long, the lips full, and lightly ridged along their outline; the teeth small, even, well-set, and remarkably sound; the ears are set high on the head. At birth the skin is white, but darkens in proportion to its exposure to the sun. Men are generally painted red in the pictures, though, as a matter of fact, there must already have been all the shades which we see among the present population^ from a most delicate, rose-tinted complexion to that of a smoke-coloured bronze. Women, who were less exposed to the sun, are generally painted yellow, the tint paler in proportion as they rise in the social scale. The hair was inclined to be wavy, and even to curl into little ringlets, but without ever turning into the wool of the negro.

Until quite recently nothing, or all but nothing, had been discovered which could be attributed to the primitive races of Egypt: even the flint weapons and implements which had been found in various places could not be ascribed to them with any degree of certainty, for the Egyptians continued to use stone long after metal was known to them. They made stone arrowheads, hammers, and knives, not only in the time of the Pharaohs, but under the Romans, and during the whole period of the Middle Ages, and the manufacture of them has not yet entirely died out.

These objects, and the workshops where they were made, might therefore be less ancient than the greater part of the inscribed monuments. But if so far we had found no examples of any work belonging to the first ages, we met in historic times with certain customs which were out of harmony with the general civilization of the period. A comparison of these customs with analogous practices of barbarous nations threw light upon the former, completed their meaning, and showed us at the same time the successive stages through which the Egyptian people had to pass before reaching their highest civilization. We knew, for example, that even as late as the Caesars, girls belonging to noble families at Thebes were consecrated to the service of Amon, and were thus licensed to a life of immorality, which, however, did not prevent them from making rich marriages when age obliged them to retire from office. Theban women were not the only people in the world to whom such licence was granted or imposed upon them by law; wherever in a civilized country we see a similar practice, we may recognize in it an ancient custom which in the course of centuries has degenerated into a religious observance. The institution of the women of Amon is a legacy from a time when the practice of polyandry obtained, and marriage did not yet exist. Age and maternity relieved them from this obligation, and preserved them from those incestuous connections of which we find examples in other races. A union of father and daughter, however, was perhaps not wholly forbidden, and that of brother and sister seems to have been regarded as perfectly right and natural; the words brother and sister possessing in Egyptian love-songs the same significance as lover and mistress with us.

Paternity was necessarily doubtful in a community of this kind, and hence the tie between fathers and children was slight; there being no family, in the sense in which we understand the word, except as it centred around the mother.

We had, therefore, good grounds for supposing that the first Egyptians were semi-savages, like those still living in Africa and America, having an analogous organization, and similar weapons and tools. A few lived in the desert, in the oasis of Libya, or in the deep valleys of the Red Land--Doshirit, To Doshiru--between the Nile and the sea; the poverty of the country fostering their native savagery. Others, settled on the Black Land, gradually became civilized, and we have found of late considerable remains of those of their generations who, if not anterior to the times of written records, were at least contemporary with the earliest kings of the first historical dynasty.

Their houses were like those of the fellahs of to-day, low huts of wattle daubed with puddled clay, or of bricks dried in the sun. They contained one room, either oblong or square, the door being the only aperture. Those of the richer class only were large enough to make it needful to support the roof by means of one or more trunks of trees, which did duty for columns. Earthen pots, turned by hand, flint knives and other implements, mats of reeds or plaited straw, two flat stones for grinding corn, a few pieces of wooden furniture, stools, and head-rests for use at night, comprised all the contents. Their ordinary pottery is heavy and almost devoid of ornament, but some of the finer kinds have been moulded and baked in wickerwork baskets, which have left a quaint trellis-like impression on the surface of the clay. In many cases the vases are bicolour, the body being of a fine smooth red, polished with a stone, while the neck and base are of an intense black, the surface of which is even more shining than that of the red part. Sometimes they are ornamented with patterns in white of flowers, palms, ostriches, gazelles, boats with undulated or broken lines, or geometrical figures of a very simple nature. More often the ground is coloured a fine yellow, and the decoration has been traced in red lines. Jars, saucers, double vases, flat plates, large cups, supports for amphorae, trays raised on a foot--in short, every kind of form is found in use at that remote period. The men went about nearly naked, except the nobles, who wore a panther's skin, sometimes thrown over the shoulders, sometimes drawn round the waist, and covering the lower part of the body, the animal's tail touching the heels behind, as we see later in several representations of the negroes of the Upper Nile. They smeared their limbs with grease or oil, and they tattooed their faces and bodies, at least in part; but in later times this practice was retained by the lower classes only. On the other hand, the custom of painting the face was never given up. To complete their toilet, it was necessary to accentuate the arch of the eyebrow with a line of kohl . A similar black line surrounded and prolonged the oval of the eye to the middle of the temple, a layer of green coloured the under lid, and ochre and carmine enlivened the tints of the cheeks and lips. The hair, plaited, curled, oiled, and plastered with grease, formed an erection which was as complicated in the case of the man as in that of the woman.

Should the hair be too short, a black or blue wig, dressed with much skill, was substituted for it; ostrich feathers waved on the heads of warriors, and a large lock, flattened behind the right ear, distinguished the military or religious chiefs from their subordinates. When the art of weaving became common, a belt and loin-cloth of white linen replaced the leathern garment. Fastened round the waist, but so low as to leave the navel uncovered, the loin-cloth frequently reached to the knee; the hinder part was frequently drawn between the legs and attached in front to the belt, thus forming a kind of drawers. Tails of animals and wild beast's skin were henceforth only the insignia of authority with which priests and princes adorned themselves on great days and at religious ceremonies. The skin was sometimes carelessly thrown over the left shoulder and swayed with the movement of the body; sometimes it was carefully adjusted over one shoulder and under the other, so as to bring the curve of the chest into prominence. The head of the animal, skilfully prepared and enlivened by large eyes of enamel, rested on the shoulder or fell just below the waist of the wearer; the paws, with the claws attached, hung down over the thighs; the spots of the skin were manipulated so as to form five-pointed stars. On going out-of-doors, a large wrap was thrown over all; this covering was either smooth or hairy, similar to that in which the Nubians and Abyssinians of the present day envelop themselves. It could be draped in various ways; transversely over the left shoulder like the fringed shawl of the Chaldeans, or hanging straight from both shoulders like a mantle.

In fact, it did duty as a cloak, sheltering the wearer from the sun or from the rain, from the heat or from the cold. They never sought to transform it into a luxurious garment of state, as was the case in later times with the Roman toga, whose amplitude secured a certain dignity of carriage, and whose folds, carefully adjusted beforehand, fell around the body with studied grace. The Egyptian mantle when not required was thrown aside and folded up. The material being fine and soft it occupied but a small space and was reduced to a long thin roll; the ends being then fastened together, it was slung over the shoulder and round the body like a cavalry cloak.

Travellers, shepherds, all those whose occupations called them to the fields, carried it as a bundle at the ends of their sticks; once arrived at the scene of their work, they deposited it in a corner with their provisions until they required it. The women were at first contented with a loin-cloth like that of the men; it was enlarged and lengthened till it reached the ankle below and the bosom above, and became a tightly fitting garment, with two bands over the shoulders, like braces, to keep it in place. The feet were not always covered; on certain occasions, however, sandals of coarse leather, plaited straw, split reed, or even painted wood, adorned those shapely Egyptian feet, which, to suit our taste, should be a little shorter.

Both men and women loved ornaments, and covered their necks, breasts, arms, wrists, and ankles with many rows of necklaces and bracelets. The bracelets were made of elephant ivory, mother-of-pearl, or even flint, very cleverly perforated. The necklaces were composed of strings of pierced shells, interspersed with seeds and little pebbles, either sparkling or of unusual shapes. Subsequently imitations in terra-cotta replaced the natural shells, and precious stones were substituted for pebbles, as were also beads of enamel, either round, pear-shaped, or cylindrical: the necklaces were terminated and a uniform distance maintained between the rows of beads, by several slips of wood, bone, ivory, porcelain, or terra-cotta, pierced with holes, through which ran the threads.

Weapons, at least among the nobility, were an indispensable part of costume. Most of them were for hand-to-hand fighting: sticks, clubs, lances furnished with a sharpened bone or stone point, axes and daggers of flint, sabres and clubs of bone or wood variously shaped, pointed or rounded at the end, with blunt or sharp blades,--inoffensive enough to look at, but, wielded by a vigorous hand, sufficient to break an arm, crush in the ribs, or smash a skull with all desirable precision. The plain or triple curved bow was the favourite weapon for attack at a distance, but in addition to this there were the sling, the javelin, and a missile almost forgotten nowadays, the boomerang, we have no proof however, that the Egyptians handled the boomerang with the skill of the Australians, or that they knew how to throw it so as to bring it back to its point of departure.

v The Australian boomerang is much larger than the Egyptian one; it is about a yard in length, two inches in width, and three sixteenths of an inch in thickness. For the manner of handling it, and what can be done with it, see Lubbock, Prehistoric Man, pp. 402, 403.

Such was approximately the most ancient equipment as far as we can ascertain; but at a very early date copper and iron were known in Egypt. Long before historic times, the majority of the weapons in wood were replaced by those of metal,--daggers, sabres, hatchets, which preserved, however, the shape of the old wooden instruments.

Those wooden weapons which were retained, were used for hunting, or were only brought out on solemn occasions when tradition had to be respected. The war-baton became the commander's wand of authority, and at last degenerated into the walking-stick of the rich or noble.

The club at length represented merely the rank of a chieftain, while the crook and the wooden-handled mace, with its head of ivory, diorite, granite, or white stone, the favourite weapons of princes, continued to the last the most revered insignia of royalty.

Life was passed in comparative ease and pleasure. Of the ponds left in the open country by the river at its fall, some dried up more or less quickly during the winter, leaving on the soil an immense quantity of fish, the possession of which birds and wild beasts disputed with man.

The fowl and fish which could not be eaten fresh, were dried, salted, or smoked, and kept for a rainy day. Like the river, the desert had its perils and its resources. Only too frequently, the lion, the leopard, the panther, and other large felidse were met with there.

The nobles, like the Pharaohs of later times, deemed it as their privilege or duty to stalk and destroy these animals, pursuing them even to their dens. The common people preferred attacking the gazelle, the oryx, the mouflon sheep, the ibex, the wild ox, and the ostrich, but did not disdain more humble game, such as the porcupine and long-eared hare: nondescript packs, in which the jackal and the hyena ran side by side with the wolf-dog and the lithe Abyssinian greyhound, scented and retrieved for their master the prey which he had pierced with his arrows. At times a hunter, returning with the dead body of the mother, would be followed by one of her young; or a gazelle, but slightly wounded, would be taken to the village and healed of its hurt.

Such animals by daily contact with man, were gradually tamed, and formed about his dwelling a motley flock, kept partly for his pleasure and mostly for his profit, and becoming in case of necessity a ready stock of provisions.

Experience alone taught the hunter to distinguish between those species from which he could draw profit, and others whose wildness made them impossible to domesticate. The subjection of the most useful kinds had not been finished when the historic period opened.

The ass, the sheep, and the goat were already domesticated, but the pig was still out in the marshes in a semi-wild state, under the care of special herdsmen, and the religious rites preserved the remembrance of the times in which the ox was so little tamed, that in order to capture while grazing the animals needed for sacrifice or for slaughter, it was necessary to use the lasso.

Europeans are astonished to meet nowadays whole peoples who make use of herbs and plants whose flavour and properties are nauseating to us: these are mostly so many legacies from a remote past; for example, castor-oil, with which the Berbers rub their limbs, and with which the fellah?n of the Sa?d flavour their bread and vegetables, was preferred before all others by the Egyptians of the Pharaonic age for anointing the body and for culinary use. They had begun by eating indiscriminately every kind of fruit which the country produced. Many of these, when their therapeutic virtues had been learned by experience, were gradually banished as articles of food, and their use restricted to medicine; others fell into disuse, and only reappeared at sacrifices, or at funeral feasts; several varieties continue to be eaten to the present time--the acid fruits of the nabeca and of the carob tree, the astringent figs of the sycamore, the insipid pulp of the dam-palm, besides those which are pleasant to our Western palates, such as the common fig and the date. The vine flourished, at least in Middle and Lower Egypt; from time immemorial the art of making wine from it was known, and even the most ancient monuments enumerate half a dozen famous brands, red or white.

Vetches, lupins, beans, chick-peas, lentils, onions, fenugreek, the bami?, the meloukhia, the arum colocasia, all grew wild in the fields, and the river itself supplied its quota of nourishing plants.

Bread and cakes made of cereals formed the habitual food of the people. Durrah is of African origin; it is the "grain of the South" of the inscriptions. On the other hand, it is supposed that wheat and six-rowed barley came from the region of the Euphrates. Egypt was among the first to procure and cultivate them. The soil there is so kind to man, that in many places no agricultural toil is required.

As soon as the water of the Nile retires, the ground is sown without previous preparation, and the grain, falling straight into the mud, grows as vigorously as in the best-ploughed furrows. Where the earth is hard it is necessary to break it up, but the extreme simplicity of the instruments with which this was done shows what a feeble resistance it offered. For a long time the hoe sufficed. It was composed either of a large stone tied to a wooden handle, or was made of two pieces of wood of unequal length, united at one of their extremities, and held together towards the middle by a slack cord: the plough, when first invented was but a slightly enlarged hoe, drawn by oxen. The cultivation of cereals, once established on the banks of the Nile, developed, from earliest times, to such a degree as to supplant all else: hunting, fishing, the rearing of cattle, occupied but a secondary place compared with agriculture, and Egypt became, that which she still remains, a vast granary of wheat. The part of the valley first cultivated was from Gebel Silsileh to the apex of the Delta.

Between the Libyan and Arabian ranges it presents a slightly convex surface, furrowed lengthways by a depression, in the bottom of which the Nile is gathered and enclosed when the inundation is over. In the summer, as soon as the river had risen higher than the top of its banks, the water rushed by the force of gravity towards the lower lands, hollowing in its course long channels, some of which never completely dried up, even when the Nile reached its lowest level. Cultivation was easy in the neighbourhood of these natural reservoirs, but everywhere else the movements of the river were rather injurious than advantageous to man. The inundation scarcely ever covered the higher ground in the valley, which therefore remained unproductive; it flowed rapidly over the lands of medium elevation, and moved so sluggishly in the hollows that they became weedy and stagnant pools.

In any year the portion not watered by the river was invaded by the sand: from the lush vegetation of a hot country, there was but one step to absolute aridity. At the present day an ingeniously established system of irrigation allows the agriculturist to direct and distribute the overflow according to his needs. From Gebel Ain to the sea, the Nile and its principal branches are bordered by long dykes, which closely follow the windings of the river and furnish sufficiently stable embankments. Numerous canals lead off to right and left, directed more or less obliquely towards the confines of the valley; they are divided at intervals by fresh dykes, starting at the one side from the river, and ending on the other either at the Bahr Yusuf or at the rising of the desert. Some of these dykes protect one district only, and consist merely of a bank of earth; others command a large extent of territory, and a breach in them would entail the ruin of an entire province. These latter are sometimes like real ramparts, made of crude brick carefully cemented; a few, as at Qosheish, have a core of hewn stones, which later generations have covered with masses of brickwork, and strengthened with constantly renewed buttresses of earth. They wind across the plain with many unexpected and apparently aimless turns; on closer examination, however, it may be seen that this irregularity is not to be attributed to ignorance or caprice. Experience had taught the Egyptians the art of picking out, upon the almost imperceptible relief of the soil, the easiest lines to use against the inundation: of these they have followed carefully the sinuosities, and if the course of the dykes appears singular, it is to be ascribed to the natural configuration of the ground. Subsidiary embankments thrown up between the principal ones, and parallel to the Nile, separate the higher ground bordering the river from the low lands on the confines of the valley; they divide the larger basins into smaller divisions of varying area, in which the irrigation is regulated by means of special trenches. As long as the Nile is falling, the dwellers on its banks leave their canals in free communication with it; but they dam them up towards the end of the winter, just before the return of the inundation, and do not reopen them till early in August, when the new flood is at its height. The waters then flowing in by the trenches are arrested by the nearest transverse dyke and spread over the fields. When they have stood there long enough to saturate the ground, the dyke is pierced, and they pour into the next basin until they are stopped by a second dyke, which in its turn forces them again to spread out on either side. This operation is renewed from dyke to dyke, till the valley soon becomes a series of artificial ponds, ranged one above another, and flowing one into another from Grebel Silsileh to the apex of the Delta. In autumn, the mouth of each ditch is dammed up anew, in order to prevent the mass of water from flowing back into the stream. The transverse dykes, which have been cut in various places, are also repaired, and the basins become completely landlocked, separated by narrow causeways. In some places, the water thus imprisoned is so shallow that it is soon absorbed by the soil; in others, it is so deep, that after it has been kept in for several weeks, it is necessary to let it run off into a neighbouring depression, or straight into the river itself.

History has left us no account of the vicissitudes of the struggle in which the Egyptians were engaged with the Nile, nor of the time expended in bringing it to a successful issue. Legend attributes the idea of the system and its partial working out to the god Osiris: then Men?s, the first mortal king, is said to have made the dyke of Qosheish, on which depends the prosperity of the Delta and Middle Egypt, and the fabulous Mceris is supposed to have extended the blessings of the irrigation to the Fay?m. In reality, the regulation of the inundation and the making of cultivable land are the work of unrecorded generations who peopled the valley. The kings of the historic period had only to maintain and develop certain points of what had already been done, and Upper Egypt is to this day chequered by the network of waterways with which its earliest inhabitants covered it. The work must have begun simultaneously at several points, without previous agreement, and, as it were, instinctively. A dyke protecting a village, a canal draining or watering some small province, demanded the efforts of but few individuals; then the dykes would join one another, the canals would be prolonged till they met others, and the work undertaken by chance would be improved, and would spread with the concurrence of an ever-increasing population. What happened at the end of last century, shows us that the system grew and was developed at the expense of considerable quarrels and bloodshed. The inhabitants of each district carried out the part of the work most conducive to their own interest, seizing the supply of water, keeping it and discharging it at pleasure, without considering whether they were injuring their neighbours by depriving them of their supply or by flooding them; hence arose perpetual strife and fighting. It became imperative that the rights of the weaker should be respected, and that the system of distribution should be co-ordinated, for the country to accept a beginning at least of social organization analogous to that which it acquired later: the Nile thus determined the political as well as the physical constitution of Egypt.

The site is as happy as it is picturesque; not only does the town command the two arms of the river, opening or closing the waterway at will, but from time immemorial the most frequented of the routes into Central Africa has terminated at its gates, bringing to it the commerce of the Soudan. It held sway, at the outset, over both banks, from range to range, northward as far as Deyr?t, where the true Bahr Yusuf leaves the Nile, and southward to the neighbourhood of Gebel Sheikh Haridi. The extent and original number of the other principalities is not so easily determined.

The most important, to the north of Si?t, were those of the Hare and the Oleander. The principality of the Hare never reached the dimensions of that of its neighbour the Terebinth, but its chief town was Khm?n?, whose antiquity was so remote, that a universally accepted tradition made it the scene of the most important acts of creation. That of the Oleander, on the contrary, was even larger than that of the Terebinth, and from Hinins?, its chief governor ruled alike over the marshes of the Fay?m and the plains of Beni-Suef. To the south, Ap? on the right bank governed a district so closely shut in between a bend of the Nile and two spurs of the range, that its limits have never varied much since ancient times. Its inhabitants were divided in their employment between weaving and the culture of cereals. From early times they possessed the privilege of furnishing clothing to a large part of Egypt, and their looms, at the present day, still make those checked or striped "melayahs" which the fellah women wear over their long blue tunics.

Beyond Ap?, Thinis, the Girgeh of the Arabs, situate on both banks of the river, rivalled Khm?n? in antiquity and Si?t in wealth: its plains still produce the richest harvests and feed the most numerous herds of sheep and oxen in the Said.

As we approach the cataract, information becomes scarcer. Q?bti and A?n? of the South, the Coptos and Hermonthis of the Greeks, shared peaceably the plain occupied later on by Thebes and its temples, and Nekhab?t and Zob? watched over the safety of Egypt. Nekhab?t soon lost its position as a frontier town, and that portion of Nubia lying between Gebel Silsileh and the rapids of Syene formed a kind of border province, of which Nub?t-Ombos was the principal sanctuary and Abu-Elephantine the fortress: beyond this were the barbarians, and those inaccessible regions whence the Nile descended upon our earth.

The organization of the Delta, it would appear, was more slowly brought about. It must have greatly resembled that of the lowlands of Equatorial Africa, towards the confluence of the Bahr el Abiad and the Bahr el Ghaz?l. Great tracts of mud, difficult to describe as either solid or liquid, marshes dotted here and there with sandy islets, bristling with papyrus reeds, water-lilies, and enormous plants through which the arms of the Nile sluggishly pushed their ever-shifting course, low-lying wastes intersected with streams and pools, unfit for cultivation and scarcely available for pasturing cattle. The population of such districts, engaged in a ceaseless struggle with nature, always preserved relatively ruder manners, and a more rugged and savage character, impatient of all authority. The conquest of this region began from the outer edge only. A few principalities were established at the apex of the Delta in localities where the soil had earliest been won from the river. It appears that one of these divisions embraced the country south of and between the bifurcation of the Nile: A?n? of the North, the Heliopolis of the Greeks, was its capital. In very early times the principality was divided, and formed three new states, independent of each other. Those of A?n? and the Haunch were opposite to each other, the first on the Arabian, the latter on the Libyan bank of the Nile. The district of the White Wall marched with that of the Haunch on the north, and on the south touched the territory of the Oleander. Further down the river, between the more important branches, the governors of Sai's and of Bubastis, of Athribis and of Busiris, shared among themselves the primitive Delta. Two frontier provinces of unequal size, the Arabian on the east in the Wady Tumilat, and the Libyan on the west to the south of Lake Mareotis, defended the approaches of the country from the attacks of Asiatic Bed?wins and of African nomads. The marshes of the interior and the dunes of the littoral, were not conducive to the development of any great industry or civilization. They only comprised tracts of thinly populated country, like the principalities of the Harpoon and of the Cow, and others whose limits varied from century to century with the changing course of the river. The work of rendering the marshes salubrious and of digging canals, which had been so successful in the Nile Valley, was less efficacious in the Delta, and proceeded more slowly. Here the embankments were not supported by a mountain chain: they were continued at random across the marshes, cut at every turn to admit the waters of a canal or of an arm of the river. The waters left their usual bed at the least disturbing influence, and made a fresh course for themselves across country. If the inundation were delayed, the soft and badly drained soil again became a slough: should it last but a few weeks longer than usual, the work of several generations was for a long time undone. The Delta of one epoch rarely presented the same aspect as that of previous periods, and Northern Egypt never became as fully mistress of her soil as the Egypt of the south.

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