EXTINCT NATIONS OF THE PAST
The Spell of Egypt: Ancient and Modern
For hoary antiquity, for the massive and sublime, for the quaintly picturesque, Egypt stands unrivalled in the world,—the region where the Pharaohs reigned, where Moses grew from birth to manhood, where Joseph came forth from a dungeon to rule in wisdom at the king’s right hand, and whence the chosen people of God went out into the wilderness towards the promised land.
The Beginnings of the Oldest Civilization
When the Egyptians first appear on the page of history they are already possessed of a marvelously advanced civilization, extending back thousands of years before the even remote period of the pyramid builders. Long before the chosen people, the Hebrews, came into possession of the promised land of Canaan, Egypt had kings, priests, cities, armies; laws, temples, learning; arts and sciences and books. Egypt is, beyond all other lands, the land of ruins, surpassing all in gigantic and stately monumental remains, the result of immense human labor.
Homeland of the Egyptians
Egypt proper occupies little more than twelve thousand square miles. Including the oases in the Libyan Desert, the region between the Nile and the Red Sea, and El-Arish in Syria, but excluding the Sudan, the area is about four hundred thousand square miles.
In ancient as in modern times Egypt was always divided into the Upper and Lower, or the Southern and the Northern country; and at a very early period it was further sub-divided into a number of nomes, or departments, varying in different ages. It is practically confined to the bed of the flooded Nile, a groove formed by its waters in the desert; and the bordering desert and the southern provinces of Nubia, Khartum and others, toward the equator form no part of the Egypt of nature or of history, though from time to time they have been politically joined to it. Without the Nile Egypt would never have existed; and therefore a brief account of this wonderful river is very important.
The Life Giving River Nile
Though the longest river in Africa, the Nile has little historic interest above Khartum, where the White Nile and Blue Nile unite their waters. Below Khartum navigation is rendered extremely dangerous by the cataracts which obstruct the bed of the river, the sixth occurring not far north of Khartum, the first near Assuan, in Egypt. The Nile enters the Mediterranean by a delta which separates into two main channels, the Rosetta and the Damietta, which are intersected with canals. The valley of Upper Egypt is narrow, and the fringe of mountains on either side are of no great height, so that the landscape varies but little and might appear to be monotonous but for the rich and wondrous coloring of all the scenery, the vivid green of the fields, the rich red-brown of the river, the bright yellow of the rocks, with overhead a deep blue sky and brilliant sunshine. The river flows into Egypt proper north of the second cataract, a little south of Wadi-Halfa. The Blue Nile joins the river at Khartum; this stream brings down an immense quantity of red mud. The cataracts are six in number.
The Nile’s Annual Overflow
The important feature of the river is its annual inundation. At the end of May the river is at its lowest level, it rises gradually in June and continues rising until the middle of September; it then remains stationary from two to three weeks, rising again until the end of October; it is then at its highest level and begins gradually to fall, until by May it is once more at its lowest. The river rises from twenty-one to twenty-eight feet; when it did not reach this level the crops failed, and when it exceeded it, the land was overflowed and ruin faced the people. Nowhere in the world is there such a large population depending solely on the produce of the soil.
The Rise of Irrigation Begins with the Nile
As the climate is exceedingly dry, irrigation became as early as the second dynasty (about 4514 B. C.) an object of national importance. All through the ages can be marked the tireless persistence and mechanical ingenuity employed in the problems of irrigation. During the nineteenth century, Mehemet Ali Pasha began a gigantic system of canals and locks and weirs. A French engineer of great ability, Mougel Bey, was employed to carry out this difficult task; his great barrage across the Nile, at the apex of the delta, is still a very impressive work; unfortunately the system was a failure. Later British engineers undertook the management of irrigation, and in 1902 the Nile dam, at the head of the first cataract above Assuan, was completed. The dam is such a height that the beautiful temples on the islet of Philæ are partially submerged; and during several months of the year the ruins are no longer visible.
Egyptian Lakes, Climate and Oases
The chief lakes of Egypt, from west to east are Mareotis, Edku, Burlus, and Menzala; these lie only a few miles from the coast and are shallow and brackish. The seven famous natron lakes lie in a valley in the desert, eighty miles from Cairo. In the province of the Fayum is the Birket-el-Kerum, thirty miles long and five miles wide, forming the remains of the ancient Lake Moeris, which Herodotus believed to have been artificially constructed.
The climate is extremely dry. Egypt lies in an almost rainless area. The days are warm and the nights are cool. January is the coolest month. On the coast rain falls during the winter months, but snow is unknown. In Sinai, snow occasionally falls during the winter, and heavy storms of rain occur, which occasionally flood the rocky ravines. One interesting feature of the climate is the continuous north wind, which blows throughout the year, and the sailing boats are thus able to ascend the Nile against the strong current. During the spring the Kamsin occurs, a hot, dry south wind laden with sand, forming a yellow stifling fog almost obscuring the sun; it lasts from one to three days.
There are five large oases or fertile places in the western desert—Siwa, Baharia, Kharga, Dakla, and Farafra. These have been occupied since 1600 B. C. Kharga possesses a temple of Ammon, built by the Persian conqueror, Darius I., and also other interesting ruins of the time of the Ptolemies. Siwa contains the oracle temple of Jupiter Ammon, consulted by Alexander the Great. The town is built on the rocks and has the appearance of a fortress.
Ancient Population of Egypt
The population of the country must have been large at the earliest period, as one hundred thousand men were employed in the construction of the Great Pyramid alone during the fourth dynasty, nearly 3600 years B. C. It has been placed at seven million under the Pharaohs, distributed in eighteen hundred towns, which had increased to two thousand under Amasis (525 B. C.), and upwards of three thousand under the Ptolemies. In the reign of Nero it amounted to seven million eight hundred thousand. In 1707 it was eleven million, one hundred and forty thousand in Egypt proper, or, including Nubia and other dependencies nearly twenty millions.
TITANIC IRRIGATION DAMS OF MODERN EGYPT
THE BARRAGE AT ASSIOUT ACROSS THE NILE
This dam, though not so large as that of Assuan, is still a gigantic structure. It is over half a mile in length and its massive wall is pierced by one hundred and ten bays or sluices, each over sixteen feet in width.
This is a view of the great dam at Assuan, across the Nile in upper Egypt, showing the ruins of the beautiful Temple of Philæ partially submerged. The Assuan dam was the largest in the world until the completion of the Elephant Butte dam, New Mexico, in May, 1916.
How We Know the History of Egypt
Until the last century, what we knew about ancient Egypt was mainly obtained from Greek and Roman historians. At the present time our knowledge of the “land of pyramids and priests” has been greatly increased by the deciphering of the inscriptions on the monuments, and by extended observation of the countless sculptures in which the olden Egyptians have recorded their ways of life, their arts, arms, sciences, religion and customs. In carving or in painting, the obelisks, the temple walls, and temple columns, the inner walls of tombs, the coffins of the dead, artistic objects—all are covered with the strange characters known as hieroglyphics.
The Story of the Hieroglyphics
This word, of Greek extraction, means “sacred carvings,” given to the sculptures in the supposition that all such characters were of religious import, and known only to the priests of ancient Egypt. The meaning of the characters had been lost for hundreds of years, and the word “hieroglyphics” had long become proverbial for mysteries and undecipherable puzzles, when a keen-eyed Frenchman put into the hands of scholars the clew to their translation.
Discovery of the Rosetta Stone
An artillery officer of Napoleon’s army in Egypt, named Bouchart, discovered near Rosetta, in 1799, an oblong slab of stone engraved with three inscriptions, one under the other. The upper one (half of which was broken off) was in hieroglyphics, the lowest one was in Greek, and the middle one was stated in the Greek to be in the written characters of the country. The Greek inscription told scholars that all three inscriptions expressed a decree of the Egyptian priests, sitting in synod at Memphis, in honor of King Ptolemy V.
Hieroglyphs are representations on stone, wood, or papyrus, of objects or parts of objects, including heavenly bodies, human beings in various attitudes, parts of the human body, quadrupeds and parts of quadrupeds, birds and parts of birds, fishes, reptiles, etc., geometric and fantastic forms, amounting in all to about a thousand different symbols.
More than six hundred are ideographic (idea-writing); i. e., the engraved or painted figure, either directly or figuratively conveys an idea which we express by a word composed of alphabetic signs. Thus, directly, the figure of a man means “man;” figuratively the same figure means “power.”
Phonetic Hieroglyphics
About one hundred and thirty of the hieroglyphs are phonetic (sound-conveying); i. e., represent words (which are nothing but sound with a meaning attached thereto) of which the first letter is to be taken as an alphabetic sign, and thus phonetic hieroglyphs answer the same end as our letters of the alphabet. For example: in ideographic writing, a bird, a mason, a nest, mean “birds build nests;” in phonetic hieroglyphic the figures of a bull, imp, rope, door and ship would give the word “birds,” and the words “build” and “nests” would be expressed in the same round-about and clumsy fashion.