CRISTO RAUL.ORG

READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

ANCIENT EGYPT : THE  LAND

THE roots of modern civilization are planted deeply in the highly elaborate life of those nations which rose into power over six thousand years ago, in the basin of the eastern Mediterranean, and the adjacent regions on the east of it. Had the Euphrates finally found its way into the Mediterranean, toward which, indeed, it seems to have started, both the early civilizations, to which we refer, might then have been included in the Mediterranean basin. As it is, the scene of early oriental history does not fall entirely within that basin, but must be designated as the eastern Mediterranean region. It lies in the midst of the vast desert plateau, which, beginning at the Atlantic, extends eastward across the entire northern end of Africa, and continuing beyond the depression of the Red Sea, passes northeastward, with some interruptions, far into the heart of Asia. Approaching it, the one from the south and the other from the north, two great river valleys traverse this desert; in Asia, the Tigro-Euphrates valley; in Africa that of the Nile. It is in these two valleys that the career of man may be traced from the rise of European civilization back to a remoter age than anywhere else on earth; and it is from these two cradles of the human race that the influences which emanated from their highly developed but differing cultures, can now be more and more clearly traced as we discern them converging upon the early civilization of Asia Minor and southern Europe.

The Nile, which created the valley home of the early Egyptians, rises three degrees south of the equator, and flowing into the Mediterranean at over thirty one and a half degrees north latitude, it attains a length of some four thousand miles, and vies with the greatest rivers of the world in length, if not in volume. In its upper course the river, emerging from the lakes of equatorial Africa, is known as the White Nile. Just south of north latitude sixteen at Khartum, about thirteen hundred and fifty miles from the sea, it receives from the east an affluent known as the Blue Nile, which is a considerable mountain torrent, rising in the lofty highlands of Abyssinia. One hundred and forty miles below the union of the two Niles the stream is joined by its only other tributary, the Atbara, which is a freshet not unlike the Blue Nile. It is at Khartum, or just below it, that the river enters the table land of Nubian sandstone, underlying the Great Sahara. Here it winds on its tortuous course between the desert hills, where it returns upon itself, often flowing due south, until after it has finally pushed through to the north, its course describes a vast S.

In six different places throughout this region the current has hitherto failed to erode a perfect channel through the stubborn stone, and these extended interruptions, where the rocks are piled in scattered and irregular masses in the stream, are known as the cataracts of the Nile; although there is no great and sudden fall such as that of our cataract at Niagara. These rocks interfere with navigation most seriously in the region of the first, second and fourth cataracts; otherwise the river is navigable almost throughout its entire course. At Elephantine it passes the granite barrier which there thrusts up its rough shoulder, forming the first cataract, and thence emerges upon an unobstructed course to the sea.

It is the valley below the first cataract which constituted Egypt proper. The reason for the change which here gives the river a free course is the disappearance of the sandstone, sixty eight miles below the cataract, at Edfu, where the nummulitic limestone which forms the northern desert plateau, offers the stream an easier task in the erosion of its bed. It has thus produced a vast canon or trench, cut across the eastern end of the Sahara to the northern sea. From cliff to cliff, the valley varies in width, from ten or twelve, to some thirty one miles. The floor of the canon is covered with black, alluvial deposits, through which the river winds northward. It cuts a deep channel through the alluvium, flowing with a speed of about three miles an hour; in width it only twice attains a maximum of eleven hundred yards. On the west the Bahr Yusuf, a second, minor channel some two hundred miles long, leaves the main stream near Siut and flows into the Fayum. In antiquity it flowed thence into a canal known as the "North", which passed northward west of Memphis and reached the sea by the site of later Alexandria. A little over a hundred miles from the sea the main stream enters the broad triangle, with apex at the south, which the Greeks so graphically called the "Delta." This is of course a bay of prehistoric ages, which has been gradually filled up by the river. The stream once divided at this point and reached the sea through seven mouths, but in modern times there are but two main branches, straggling through the Delta and piercing the coast-line on either side of the middle. The western branch is called the Rosetta mouth; the eastern that of Damietta.

The deposits which have formed the Delta, are very deep, and have slowly risen over the sites of the many ancient cities which once flourished there. The old swamps which must once have rendered the regions of the northern Delta a vast morass, have been gradually filled up, and the fringe of marshes pushed further out. They undoubtedly occupied in antiquity a much larger proportion of the Delta than they do now. In the valley above the depth of the soil varies from thirty three to thirty eight feet, and sometimes reaches a maximum of ten miles in width. The cultivable area thus formed, between the cataract and the sea, is less than ten thousand square miles in extent, being roughly equal to the area of the state of Maryland, or about ten per cent less than that of Belgium. The cliffs on either hand are usually but a few hundred feet in height, but here and there they rise into almost mountains of a thousand feet. They are of course flanked by the deserts through which the Nile has cut its way. On the west the Libyan Desert or the Great Sahara rolls in illimitable, desolate hills of sand, gravel and rock, from six hundred and fifty to a thousand feet above the Nile. Its otherwise waterless expanse is broken only by an irregular line of oases, or watered depressions, roughly parallel with the river, and doubtless owing their springs and wells to infiltration of the Nile waters. The largest of these depressions is situated so close to the valley that the rock wall which once separated them has broken down, producing the fertile Fayum, watered by the Bahr Yusuf. Otherwise the western desert held no economic resources for the use of the early Nile-dwellers.

The eastern or Arabian Desert is somewhat less inhospitable, and capable of yielding a scanty subsistence to wandering tribes of Ababdeh. A range of granite mountains parallel with the coast of the Red Sea contains gold-bearing quartz veins, and here and there other gold-producing mountains lie between the Nile and the Red Sea. Deposits of alabaster and extensive masses of various fine, hard igneous rocks led to the exploitation of quarries here also, while the Red Sea harbors could of course be reached only by traversing this desert, through which established routes thither were early traced. Further north similar mineral resources led to an acquaintance with the peninsula of Sinai and its desert regions, at a very remote date.

The situation afforded by this narrow valley was one of unusual isolation; on either hand vast desert wastes, on the north the harbourless coast-line of the Delta, and on the south the rocky barriers of successive cataracts, preventing fusion with the peoples of inner Africa. It was chiefly at the two northern corners of the Delta, that outside influences and foreign elements, which were always sifting into the Nile valley, gained access to the country.

Through the eastern corner it was the prehistoric Semitic population of neighboring Asia, who forced their way in across the dangerous intervening deserts; while the Libyan races, of possibly European origin, found entrance at the western corner.

The products of the south also, in spite of the cataracts, filtered in ever increasing volume into the regions of the lower river and the lower end of the first cataract became a trading post, ever after known as "Suan" (Assuan) or "market", where the negro traders of the south met those of Egypt.

The upper Nile thus gradually became a regular avenue of commerce with the Sudan. The natural boundaries of Egypt, however, always presented sufficiently effective barriers to would-be invaders, to enable the natives slowly to assimilate the new comers, without being displaced.

It will be evident that the remarkable shape of the country must powerfully influence its political development. Except in the Delta it was but a narrow line, some seven hundred and fifty miles long. Straggling its slender length along the river, and sprawling out into the Delta, it totally lacked the compactness necessary to stable political organization. A given locality has neighbors on only two sides, north and south, and these their shortest boundaries; local feeling was strong, local differences were persistent, and a man of the Delta could hardly understand the speech of a man of the first cataract region. It was only the ease of communication afforded by the river which in any degree neutralized the effect of the country's remarkable length.

The wealth of commerce which the river served to carry, it was equally instrumental in producing. While the climate of the country is not rainless, yet the rare showers of the south, often separated by intervals of years, and even the more frequent rains of the Delta, are totally insufficient to maintain the processes of agriculture. The marvelous productivity of the Egyptian soil is due to the annual inundation of the river, which is caused by the melting of the snows, and by the spring rains at the sources of the Blue Nile. Freighted with the rich loam of the Abyssinian highlands, the rushing waters of the spring freshet hurry down the Nubian valley, and a slight rise is discernible at the first cataract in the early part of June. The flood swells rapidly and steadily, and although the increase is usually interrupted for nearly a month from the end of September on, it is usually resumed again, and the maximum level continues until the end of October or into November.

The waters in the region of the first cataract are then nearly fifty feet higher than at low water; while at Cairo the rise is about half that at the cataract. A vast and elaborate system of irrigation canals and reservoirs first receives the flood, which is then allowed to escape into the fields as needed. Here it rests long enough to deposit its burden of rich, black earth from the upper reaches of the Blue Nile. At such times the appearance of the country is picturesque in the extreme, the glistening surface of the waters being dotted here and there by the vivid green of the waving palm groves, which mark the villages, now accessible only along the dykes belonging to the irrigation system.

Thus year by year, the soil which would otherwise become impoverished in the elements necessary to the production of such prodigious harvests, is invariably replenished with fresh resources. As the river sinks below the level of the fields again, it is necessary to raise the water from the canals by artificial means, in order to carry on the constant irrigation of the growing crops in the outlying fields, which are too high to be longer refreshed by absorption from the river. Thus a genial and generous, but exacting soil, demanded for its cultivation the development of a high degree of skill in the manipulation of the life-giving waters, and at a very early day the men of the Nile valley had attained a surprising command of the complicated problems involved in the proper utilization of the river.

If Egypt became the mother of the mechanical arts, the river will have been one of the chief natural forces to which this fact was due. With such natural assets as these, an ever replenished soil, and almost unfailing waters for its refreshment, the wealth of Egypt could not but be chiefly agricultural, a fact to which we shall often recur. Such opulent fertility of course supported a large population—in Roman times some seven million souls—while in our own day (early XXth Century) it maintains over nine million, a density of population far surpassing that to be found anywhere in Europe. The other natural resources of the valley we shall be better able to trace as we follow their exploitation in the course of the historical development.

In climate Egypt is a veritable paradise, drawing to its shores at the present day an ever increasing number of winter guests. The air of Egypt is essentially that of the deserts within which it lies, and such is its purity and dryness, that even an excessive degree of heat occasions but slight discomfort, owing to the fact that the moisture of the body is dried up almost as fast as it is exhaled. The mean temperature of the Delta in winter is 56° Fahrenheit, and in the valley above it is ten degrees higher. In summer the mean in the Delta is 83°; and although the summer temperature in the valley is sometimes as high as 122°, the air is far from the oppressiveness accompanying the same degree of heat in other lands.

The nights even in summer are always cool, and the vast expanses of vegetation appreciably reduce the temperature. In winter just before dawn the extreme cold is surprising, as contrasted with the genial warmth of midday at the same season. To the absence of rain we have already adverted. The rare showers of upper Egypt occur only when cyclonic disturbances in the southern Mediterranean or northern Sahara force undischarged clouds into the Nile valley from the west; from the east they cannot reach the valley, owing to the high mountain ridge along the Red Sea, which forces them upward and discharges them. The lower Delta, however, falls within the zone of the northern rainy season. In spite of the wide extent of marshy ground, left stagnating by the inundation, the dry airs of the desert, blowing constantly across the valley, quickly dry the soil, and there is never any malarial infection in Upper Egypt. Even in the vast morass of the Delta, malaria is practically unknown. Thus, lying just outside of the tropics, Egypt enjoyed a mild climate of unsurpassed salubrity, devoid of the harshness of a northern winter, but at the same time sufficiently cool to escape those enervating influences inherent in tropical conditions.

The prospect of this contracted valley spread out before the Nile dweller, was in antiquity, as it is today, somewhat monotonous. The level Nile bottoms, the gift of the river, clad in rich green, shut in on either hand by the yellow cliffs, are unrelieved by any elevations or by any forests, save the occasional groves of graceful palms, which fringe the river banks or shade the villages of sombre mud huts, with now and then a sycamore, a tamarisk or an acacia. A network of irrigation canals traverses the country in every direction like a vast arterial system.

The sands of the desolate wastes which lie behind the canon walls, drift in athwart the cliffs, and often invade the green fields so that one may stand with one foot in the verdure of the valley, and the other in the desert sand.

Thus sharply defined was the Egyptian's world: a deep and narrow valley of unparalleled fertility, winding between lifeless deserts, furnishing a remarkable environment, not to be found elsewhere in all the world.

Such surroundings reacted powerfully upon the mind and thought of the Egyptian, conditioning and determining his idea of the world and his notion of the mysterious powers which ruled it. The river, the dominant feature of his valley, determined his notion of direction: his words for north and south were "down-stream" and "up-stream"; and when he broke through the barriers which separated him from Asia, and reached the Euphrates, he called it'' that inverted water which goes down stream in going up stream" (southward). For him the world consisted of the "Black Land" and the "Red Land," the black soil of the Nile valley and the reddish surface of the desert; or again of the ''plain'' and the "highlands," meaning the level Nile "bottoms" and the high desert plateau. ''Highlander'' was synonymous with foreigner, to "go up" was to leave the valley, while to ''descend'' was the customary term for returning home from abroad. The illimitable solitudes of the desert, which thrust itself thus insistently upon his vision and his whole economy of life, and formed his horizon toward both suns, tinctured with sombreness his views of the great gods who ruled such a world.

Such was in brief the scene in which developed the people of the Nile, whose culture dominated the basin of the eastern Mediterranean in the age when Europe was emerging into the secondary stages of civilization, and coming into intimate contact with the culture of the early east. Nowhere on earth have the witnesses of a great, but now extinct civilization, been so plentifully preserved as along the banks of the Nile. Even in the Delta, where the storms of war beat more fiercely than in the valley above, and where the slow accumulations from the yearly flood have gradually entombed them, the splendid cities of the Pharaohs have left great stretches, cumbered with enormous blocks of granite, limestone and sandstone, shattered obelisks, and massive pylon bases, to proclaim the wealth and power of forgotten ages; while an ever growing multitude of modern visitors are drawn to the upper valley by the colossal ruins that greet the wondering traveler almost at every bend in the stream.

Nowhere else in the ancient world were such massive stone buildings erected, and nowhere else has a dry atmosphere, coupled with an almost complete absence of rain, permitted the survival of such a wealth of the best and highest in the life of an ancient people, in so far as that life found expression in material form. In the plenitude of its splendor, much of it thus survived into the classic age of European civilization, and hence it was, that as Egypt was gradually overpowered and absorbed by the western world, the currents of life from west and east commingled here, as they have never done elsewhere. Both in the Nile valley and beyond it, the west thus felt the full impact of Egyptian civilization for many centuries, and gained from it all that its manifold culture had to contribute. The career which made Egypt so rich a heritage of alien peoples, and a legacy so valuable to all later ages, we shall endeavor to trace in the ensuing chapters.

JAMES HENRY BREASTED--HISTORY OF EGYPT

The

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF KINGS.