History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 1 — 01 - Vol. 01, Ch. 01: The Nile and Egypt, pt. 1

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° N.

, and terminated in Cape Abûkîr. 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 Abûkîr. 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, Menés, the first of their mortal kings, had found, so they said, the valley under water.

The sea came in almost as far as the Fayûm, 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 Menés. 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.

[**] * Élie 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 Menés, 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.

[Illustration: 006. jpg THE MOUTH OF THE NILE PREVIOUS TO THE FORMATION OF THE DELTA.

] As a matter of fact, there were only three chief outlets.

The Canopic branch flowed westward, and fell into the Mediterranean near Cape Abûkîr, 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 Shetnûfi, the present Shatanûf, which is the spot where it now is.

The Arab geographers call the head of the Delta Batn-el-Bagaraji, the Cow's Belly.

Ampère, 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 Rozière 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-Yûsuf; beyond Derût--up to Gebel Silsileh--it is the Ibrâhimîyeh, the Sohâgîyeh, the Raiân. 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 Illahûn sends out a branch which passes beyond the hills into the basin of the Fayûrn.

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.

[Illustration: 009. jpg A LINE OF LADEN CAMELS EMERGES FROM A HOLLOW OF THE UNDULATING ROAD.

1] 1 From a drawing by Boudier, after a photograph by Insinger, taken in 1884. There are light groves of the date-palm, groups of acacia trees and sycamores, square patches of barley or of wheat, fields of beans or of bersîm,[*] and here and there a long bank of sand which the least breeze raises into whirling clouds.

And over all there broods a great silence, scarcely broken by the cry of birds, or the song of rowers in a passing boat.

* Bersîm is a kind of trefoil, the _Trifolium Alexandrinum_ of LINNÆUS.

It is very common in Egypt, and the only plant of the kind generally cultivated for fodder.

Something of human life may stir on the banks, but it is softened into poetry by distance.

A half-veiled woman, bearing a bundle of herbs upon her head, is driving her goats before her.

An irregular line of asses or of laden camels emerges from one hollow of the undulating road only to disappear within another.

A group of peasants, crouched upon the shore, in the ancient posture of knees to chin, patiently awaits the return of the ferry-boat.

[Illustration: 010. jpg] 1 From a drawing by Boudier, after a photograph by Insinger, taken in 1886. A dainty village looks forth smiling from beneath its palm trees.

Near at hand it is all naked filth and ugliness: a cluster of low grey huts built of mud and laths; two or three taller houses, whitewashed;

an enclosed square shaded by sycamores; a few old men, each seated peacefully at his own door; a confusion of fowls, children, goats, and sheep; half a dozen boats made fast ashore.

But, as we pass on, the wretchedness all fades away; meanness of detail is lost in light, and long before it disappears at a bend of the river, the village is again clothed with gaiety and serene beauty.

Day by day, the landscape repeats itself.

The same groups of trees alternate with the same fields, growing green or dusty in the sunlight according to the season of the year.

With the same measured flow, the Nile winds beneath its steep banks and about its scattered islands.

[Illustration: 011. jpg PART OF GEBEL SHÊKH HERÎDI.

1] 1 From a drawing by Boudier, after a photograph by Insinger, taken in 1882. One village succeeds another, each alike smiling and sordid under its crown of foliage.

The terraces of the Libyan hills, away beyond the Western Nile, scarcely rise above the horizon, and lie like a white edging between the green of the plain and the blue of the sky.

The Arabian hills do not form one unbroken line, but a series of mountain masses with their spurs, now approaching the river, and now withdrawing to the desert at almost regular intervals.

At the entrance to the valley, rise Gebel Mokattam and Gebel el-Ahmar.

Gebel Hemûr-Shemûl and Gebel Shêkh Embârak next stretch in echelon from north to south, and are succeeded by Gebel et-Ter, where, according to an old legend, all the birds of the world are annually assembled.

[*] * In Makrizi's _Description of Egypt_ we read: "Every year, upon a certain day, all the herons (Boukîr, _Ardea bubulcus_ of Cuvier) assemble at this mountain.

One after another, each puts his beak into a cleft of the hill until the cleft closes upon one of them.

And then forthwith all the others fly away But the bird which has been caught struggles until he dies, and there his body remains until it has fallen into dust."

The same tale is told by other Arab writers, of which a list may be seen in Etienne Quatremère, _Mémoires historiques et géographiques sur l'Egypte et quelques contrées voisines_, vol. i.

pp. 31-33. It faintly recalls that ancient tradition of the Cleft at Abydos, whereby souls must pass, as human-headed birds, in order to reach the other world.

[Illustration: 12. jpg THE HILL OF KASR ES-SAYYAD.

2] 2 From a drawing by Boudier, after a photograph by insinger, taken in 1882. Then follows Gebel Abûfêda, dreaded by the sailors for its sudden gusts.

Limestone predominates throughout, white or yellowish, broken by veins of alabaster, or of red and grey sandstones.

Its horizontal strata are so symmetrically laid one above another as to seem more like the walls of a town than the side of a mountain.

But time has often dismantled their summits and loosened their foundations.

Man has broken into their façades to cut his quarries and his tombs; while the current is secretly undermining the base, wherein it has made many a breach.

As soon as any margin of mud has collected between cliffs and river, halfah and wild plants take hold upon it, and date-palms grow there--whence their seed, no one knows.

Presently a hamlet rises at the mouth of the ravine, among clusters of trees and fields in miniature.

Beyond Siût, the light becomes more glowing, the air drier and more vibrating, and the green of cultivation loses its brightness.

The angular outline of the dom-palni mingles more and more with that of the common palm and of the heavy sycamore, and the castor-oil plant increasingly abounds.

But all these changes come about so gradually that they are effected before we notice them.

The plain continues to contract.

At Thebes it is still ten miles wide; at the gorge of Gebelên it has almost disappeared, and at Gebel Silsileh it has completely vanished.

There, it was crossed by a natural dyke of sandstone, through which the waters have with difficulty scooped for themselves a passage.

From this point, Egypt is nothing but the bed of the Nile lying between two escarpments of naked rock.

Further on the cultivable land reappears, but narrowed, and changed almost beyond recognition.

Hills, hewn out of solid sandstone, succeed each other at distances of about two miles, low, crushed, sombre, and formless.

Presently a forest of palm trees, the last on that side, announces Aswan and Nubia.

Five banks of granite, ranged in lines between latitude 24° and 18° N. , cross Nubia from east to west, and from north-east to south-west, like so many ramparts thrown up between the Mediterranean and the heart of Africa.

The Nile has attacked them from behind, and made its way over them one after another in rapids which have been glorified by the name of cataracts.

[Illustration: 014. jpg ENTRANCE TO THE FIRST CATARACT.

1] 1 View taken from the hills opposite Elephantine, by Insinger, in 1884. Classic writers were pleased to describe the river as hurled into the gulfs of Syne with so great a roar that the people of the neighbourhood were deafened by it.

Even a colony of Persians, sent thither by Cambyses, could not bear the noise of the falls, and went forth to seek a quieter situation.

The first cataract is a kind of sloping and sinuous passage six and a quarter miles in length, descending from the island of Philae to the port of Aswan, the aspect of its approach relieved and brightened by the ever green groves of Elephantine.

Beyond Elephantine are cliffs and sandy beaches, chains of blackened "roches moutonnées" marking out the beds of the currents, and fantastic reefs, sometimes bare and sometimes veiled by long grasses and climbing plants, in which thousands of birds have made their nests.

There are islets too, occasionally large enough to have once supported something of a population, such as Amerade, Salûg, Sehêl. The granite threshold of Nubia, is broken beyond Sehêl, but its débris, massed m disorder against the right bank, still seem to dispute the passage of the waters, dashing turbulently and roaring as they flow along through tortuous channels, where every streamlet is broken up into small cascades, ihe channel running by the left bank is always navigable.

[Illustration: 015. jpg ENTRANCE TO NUBIA.

] During the inundation, the rocks and sandbanks of the right side are completely under water, and their presence is only betrayed by eddies.

But on the river's reaching its lowest point a fall of some six feet is established, and there big boats, hugging the shore, are hauled up by means of ropes, or easily drift down with the current.

[Illustration: 016. jpg LEAGUE BEYOND LEAGUE, THE HILLS STKETCH ON IN LOW IGNOBLE OUTLINE.

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