History of Egypt, by Maspero, Volume 1, Part A.

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.[**]

     ** This costume, to which Egyptologists have not given
     sufficient attention, is frequently represented on the
     monuments. Besides the two statues reproduced above, I may
     cite those of Uahibri and of Thoth-nofir in the Louvre, and
     the Lady Nofrit in the Gîzeh Museum. Thothotpû in his tomb
     wears this mantle. Khnumhotpû and several of his workmen are
     represented in it at Beni-Hasan, as also one of the princes
     of Elephantine in the recently discovered tombs, besides
     many Egyptians of all classes in the tombs of Thebes (a
     good example is in the tomb of Harmhabi).    The reason
     why it does not figure more often is, in the first place,
     that the Egyptian artists experienced actual difficulty in
     representing the folds of its drapery, although these were
     simple compared with the complicated arrangement of the
     Roman toga; finally, the wall-paintings mostly portray
     either interior scenes, or agricultural labour, or the work
     of various trades, or episodes of war, or religious
     ceremonies, in all of which the mantle plays no part. Every
     Egyptian peasant, however, possessed his own, and it was in
     constant use in his daily life.

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.[*]

     * Many draughtsmen, ignorant of what they had to represent,
     have made incorrect copies of the manner in which this cloak
     was worn; but examples of it are numerous, although until
     now attention has not been called to them. The following are
     a few instances taken at random of the way in which it was
     used: Pepi I., fighting against the nomads of Sinai, has the
     cloak, but with the two ends passed through the belt of his
     loin-cloth; at Zawyet el-Maiyitîn, Khunas, killing birds
     with the boomerang from his boat, wears it, but simply
     thrown over the left shoulder, with the two extremities
     hanging free. Khnumhotpû at Beni-Hasan, the Khrihdbi, the
     overseers, or the peasants, all have it rolled and slung
     round them; the Prince of el-Bersheh wears it like a mantle
     in folds over the two shoulders. If it is objected that the
     material could not be reduced to such small dimensions as
     those represented in these drawings of what I believe to be
     the Egyptian cloak, I way cite our cavalry capes, when
     rolled and slung, as an instance of what good packing will
     do in reducing volume.

1 Statue of Khiti in the Gîzeh Museum (XIIth and XIIIth
dynasties), drawn by Faucher-Gudin.

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.

     1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from one of the spinning-women at
     the Paris Exhibition of 1889. It was restored from the
     paintings in the tomb of Khnumhotpû at Beni-Hasan.

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.

     ** The burying-places of Abydos, especially the most
     ancient, have furnished us with millions of shells, pierced
     and threaded as necklaces; they all belong to the species of
     cowries used as money in Africa at the present day.

     *** Necklaces of seeds have been found in the tombs of
     Abydos, Thebes, and Gebelên.    Of these Schweinfurth
     has identified,   among others,   the Cassia absus, "a
     weed of the Soudan whose seeds are sold in the drug bazaar
     at Cairo and Alexandria under the name of shishn, as a
     remedy, which is in great request among the natives, for
     ophthalmia." For the necklaces of pebbles, cf. Maspeeo,
     Guide du visiteur, pp. 270, 271, No. 4129. A considerable
     number of these pebbles, particularly those of strange
     shape, or presenting a curious combination of colours, must
     have been regarded as amulets or fetishes by their Egyptian
     owners; analogous cases, among other peoples, have been
     pointed out by E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p.
     189.

     1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a portrait of Pharaoh Seti I.
     of the XIXth dynasty: the lower part of the necklace has
     been completed.

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]

     * In several museums, notably at Leyden, we find Egyptian
     axes of stone, particularly of serpentine, both rough and
     polished.

     ** In primitive times the bone of an animal served as a
     club.    This is proved by the shape of the object held in
     the hand in the sign and the hieroglyph which is the
     determinative in writing for all ideas   of violence or
     brute force, comes down to us from a time when the principal
     weapon was the club, or a bone serving as a club.

     *** For the two principal shapes of the bow, see Lepsius,
     Der Bogen in der Hieroglypliik (Zeitschrift, 1872, pp. 79-
     88). From the earliest times the sign m£ portrays the
     soldier equipped with the bow and bundle of arrows; the
     quiver was of Asiatic origin, and was not adopted until much
     later. In the contemporary texts of the first dynasties, the
     idea of weapons is conveyed by the bow, arrow, and club or
     axe.

     **** The boomerang is still used by certain tribes of the
     Nile valley.    It is portrayed in the most ancient tombs,
     and every museum possesses examples, varying in shape.
     Besides the ordinary boomerang, the Egyptians used one which
     ended in a knob, and another of semicircular shape: this
     latter, reproduced in miniature in cornelian or in red
     jasper, served as an amulet, and was placed on the mummy to
     furnish the deceased in the other world with a fighting or
     hunting weapon.

     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.

2 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a painting in the tomb of
Khnumhotpû at Beni-Hasan.

     3 The blade is of bronze, and is attached to the wooden
     handle by interlacing thongs of leather (Gizeh Museum).
     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-
     Bey.

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.

     ** Metals were introduced into Egypt in very ancient times,
     since the class of blacksmiths is associated with the
     worship of Horus of Edfû, and appears in the account of the
     mythical wars of that God. The earliest tools we possess, in
     copper or bronze, date from the IVth dynasty: pieces of iron
     have been found from time to time in the masonry of the
     Great Pyramid. Mons Montélius has again and again contested
     the authenticity of these discoveries, and he thinks that
     iron was not known in Egypt till a much later period.

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.

3 Bas-relief in the temple of Luxor, from a photograph
taken by Insinger in 1886.

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 wooden club most commonly represented is the usual
     insignia of a nobleman. Several kinds of clubs, somewhat
     difficult for us moderns to distinguish, yet bearing
     different names, formed a part of funereal furniture.

     ** The crook is the sceptre of a prince, a Pharaoh, or a
     god; the white mace has still the value apparently of a
     weapon in the hands of the king who brandishes it over a
     group of prisoners or over an ox which he is sacrificing to
     a divinity. Most museums possess specimens of the stone
     heads of these maces, but until lately their use was not
     known. I had several placed in the Boulak Museum. It already
     possessed a model of one entirely of wood.

     *** Cf. the description of these pools given by Geoffroy-
     Saint-Hilaire in speaking of the fahaka. Even at the present
     day the jackals come down from the mountains in the night,
     and regale themselves with the fish left on the ground by
     the gradual drying up of these ponds.

Other pools, however, remained till the returning inundation, as so many vivaria in which the fish were preserved for dwellers on the banks. Fishing with the harpoon, made either of stone or of metal, with the line, with a net or with traps, were all methods of fishing known and used by the Egyptians from early times. Where the ponds failed, the neighbouring Nile furnished them with inexhaustible supplies. Standing in light canoes, or rather supported by a plank on bundles of reeds bound together, they ventured into mid-stream, in spite of the danger arising from the ever-present hippopotamus; or they penetrated up the canals amid a thicket of aquatic plants, to bring down with the boomerang the birds which found covert there.

1 Tomb of Ti. Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Dûmichen,
Besultate, vol. ii. pl. x.

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.

     1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a painting by Beni-Hasan,
     Lepsius, Denhm., ii. 136.

     2 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bas-relief of Ptahhotpû.
     The dogs on the upper level are of hyenoid type, those on
     the lower are Abyssinian greyhounds.

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.

     1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bas-relief of Ptahhotpû.
     Above are seen two porcupines, the foremost of which,
     emerging from his hole, has seized a grasshopper.

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.[**]

     ** In the same way, before the advent of Europeans, the
     half-civilized tribes of North America used to keep about
     their huts whole flocks of different animals, which were
     tame, but not domesticated.

Efforts were therefore made to enlarge this flock, and the wish to procure animals without seriously injuring them, caused the Egyptians to use the net for birds and the lasso and the bola for quadrupeds,[*]—weapons less brutal than the arrow and the javelin. The bola was made by them of a single rounded stone, attached to a strap about five yards in length. The stone once thrown, the cord twisted round the legs, muzzle, or neck of the animal pursued, and by the attachment thus made the pursuer, using all his strength, was enabled to bring the beast down half strangled. The lasso has no stone attached to it, but a noose prepared beforehand, and the skill of the hunter consists in throwing it round the neck of his victim while running. They caught indifferently, without distinction of size or kind, all that chance brought within their reach. The daily chase kept up these half-tamed flocks of gazelles, wild goats, water-bucks, stocks, and ostriches, and their numbers are reckoned by hundreds on the monuments of the ancient empire.[**]

     * Hunting with the bola is constantly represented in the
     paintings both of the Memphite and Theban periods. Wilkinson
     has confounded it with lasso-hunting, and his mistake has
     been reproduced by other Egyptologists. Lasso-hunting is
     seen in Lepsius, Denhn., ii. 96, in Dùmichen, resultate,
     vol. i. pl. viii., and particularly in the numerous
     sacrificial scenes where the king is supposed to be
     capturing the bull of the north or south, previous to
     offering it to the god.

     ** As the tombs of the ancient empire show us numerous
     flocks of gazelles, antelopes, and storks, feeding under the
     care of shepherds, Fr. Lenormant concluded that the
     Egyptians of early times had succeeded in domesticating some
     species, nowadays rebels to restraint. It is my belief that
     the animals represented were tamed, but not domesticated,
     and were the result of great hunting expeditions in the
     desert. The facts which Lenormant brought forward to support
     his theory may be used against him. For instance, the fawn
     of the gazelle nourished by its mother does not prove that
     it was bred in captivity; the gazelle may have been caught
     before calving, or just after the birth of its young. The
     fashion of keeping flocks of animals taken from the desert
     died out between the XIIth and XVIIIth dynasties.    At the
     time of the new empire, they had only one or two solitary
     animals as pets for women or children, the mummies of which
     were sometimes buried by the side of their mistresses.

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.

2 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a painting in a Theban tomb
of the XVIIIth dynasty.

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.[***]

     * The hatred of the Egyptians for the pig (Herodotus, ii.
     47) is attributed to mythological motives. Lippert thinks
     this antipathy did not exist in Egypt in primitive times. At
     the outset the pig would have been the principal food of the
     people; then, like the dog in other regions, it must have
     been replaced at the table by animals of a higher order—
     gazelles, sheep, goats, oxen—and would have thus fallen
     into contempt. To the excellent reasons given by Lippert
     could be added others drawn from the study of the Egyptian
     myths, to prove that the pig has often been highly esteemed.
     Thus, Isis is represented, down to late times, under the
     form of a sow, and a sow, whether followed or not by her
     young is one of the amulets placed in the tomb with the
     deceased, to secure for him the protection of the goddess.

     *** Mariette, Abydos (vol. i. pl. 48 b, 53).    To prevent
     the animal from evading the lasso and escaping during the
     sacrifice, its right hind foot was fastened to its left
     horn.

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 fellahîn of the Saïd 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.[**]

     * I have often been obliged, from politeness, when dining
     with the native agents appointed by the European powers at
     Port Saïd, to eat salads and mayonnaise sauces flavoured
     with castor-oil; the taste was not so disagreeable as might
     be at first imagined.

     ** The four kinds of canonical wine, brought respectively
     from the north, south, east, and west of the country, formed
     part of the official repast and of the wine-cellar of the
     deceased from remote antiquity.

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

     * All these species have been found in the tombs and
     identified by savants in archaeological botany—Kunth,
     Unger, Schweinfurth (Loret, La Flore Pharaonique, pp. 17,
     40, 42, 43, Nos. 33, 97, 102, 104, 105, 106).

     ** The bamiâ, Hibiscus esculentus, L., is a plant of the
     family of the Malvaceae, having a fruit of five divisions,
     covered with prickly hairs, and pontaining round, white,
     soft seeds, slightly sweet, but astringent in taste, and
     very mucilaginous.    It figures on the monuments of
     Pharaonic times.

     *** The meloukhia, Corchorus Olitorius, L., is a plant
     belonging to the Tilliacese, which is chopped up and cooked
     much the same as endive is with us, but which few Europeans
     can eat with pleasure, owing to the mucilage it contains.
     Theophrastus says it was celebrated for its bitterness; it
     was used as food, however, in the Greek town of Alexandria.

4 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from the Description de
l'Egypte, Histoire Naturelle, pl. 61.

Two of the species of lotus which grew in the Nile, the white and the blue, have seed-vessels similar to those of the poppy: the capsules contain small grains of the size of millet-seed. The fruit of the pink lotus "grows on a different stalk from that of the flower, and springs directly from the root; it resembles a honeycomb in form," or, to take a more prosaic simile, the rose of a watering-pot. The upper part has twenty or thirty cavities, "each containing a seed as big as an olive stone, and pleasant to eat either fresh or dried." This is what the ancients called the bean of Egypt. "The yearly shoots of the papyrus are also gathered. After pulling them up in the marshes, the points are cut off and rejected, the part remaining being about a cubit in length. It is eaten as a delicacy and is sold in the markets, but those who are fastidious partake of it only after baking." Twenty different kinds of grain and fruits, prepared by crushing between two stones, are kneaded and baked to furnish cakes or bread; these are often mentioned in the texts as cakes of nabeca, date cakes, and cakes of figs. Lily loaves, made from the roots and seeds of the lotus, were the delight of the gourmand, and appear on the tables of the kings of the XIXth dynasty.[*]

     * Tiû, which is the most ancient word for bread, appears
     in early times to have been used for every kind of paste,
     whether made with fruits or grain; the more modern word âqû
     applies specially to bread made from cereals. The lily
     loaves are mentioned in the Papyrus Anastasi, No. 4, p. 14.
     1. 1.

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.

     * The position which wheat and barley occupy in the lists
     of offerings, proves the antiquity of their existence in
     Egypt. Mariette found specimens of barley in the tombs of
     the Ancient Empire at Saqqarah.

2 Bas-relief from the tomb of Ti; drawn by Faucher-Gudin,
from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-Bey.

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.[*]

     * This was the tradition of all the ancients. Herodotus
     related that, according to the Egyptians, the whole of
     Egypt, with the exception of the Theban nome, was a vast
     swamp previous to the time of Menés. Aristotle adds that the
     Red Sea, the Mediterranean, and the area now occupied by the
     Delta, formed one sea. Cf. pp. 3-5 of this volume, on the
     formation of the Delta.

2 Bas-relief from the tomb of Ti; drawn by Faucher-Gudin,
from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-Bey.

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.[**]

     * The whole description of the damage which can be done by
     the Nile in places where the inundation is not regulated, is
     borrowed from Linant de Bellefonds, Mémoire sur les
     principaux travaux d'utilité publique, p. 3.

     ** This physical configuration of the country explains the
     existence at a very early date of those gigantic serpents
     which I have already mentioned.

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.

1 Bas-relief from the tomb of Ti; drawn by Faucher-Gudin,
from a photograph by E. Brugsch-Bey.

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 Menés, 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 Fayûm. 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.

1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Dûmichen,
Resultate, vol. ii. pl. vit

The country was divided among communities, whose members were supposed to be descended from the same seed (paît) and to belong to the same family (pâîtû): the chiefs of them were called ropâîtû, the guardians, or pastors of the family, and in later times their name became a title applicable to the nobility in general. Families combined and formed groups of various importance under the authority of a head chief—ropâîtû-hâ. They were, in fact, hereditary lords, dispensing justice, levying taxes in kind on their subordinates, reserving to themselves the redistribution of land, leading their men to, battle, and sacrificing to the gods.[*] The territories over which they exercised authority formed small states, whose boundaries even now, in some places, can be pointed out with certainty. The principality of the Terebinth[**] occupied the very heart of Egypt, where the valley is widest, and the course of the Nile most advantageously disposed by nature—a country well suited to be the cradle of an infant civilization. Siaût (Siût), the capital, is built almost at the foot of the Libyan range, on a strip of land barely a mile in width, which separates the river from the hills. A canal surrounds it on three sides, and makes, as it were, a natural ditch about its walls; during the inundation it is connected with the mainland only by narrow causeways—shaded with mimosas—and looking like a raft of verdure aground in the current.[***]

     * These prerogatives were still exercised by the princes of
     the nomes under the Middle and New Empires; they only
     enjoyed them then by the good will of the reigning
     sovereign.

     ** The Egyptian word for the tree which gives its name to
     this principality is atf, iatf, iôtf: it is only by a
     process of elimination that I have come to identify it with
     the Pistacia Terebinthus, L., which furnished the
     Egyptians with the scented resin snûtir.

     *** Boudier's drawing, reproduced on p. 31, and taken from
     a photograph by Beato, gives most faithfully the aspect
     presented by the plain and the modern town of Siout during
     the inundation.

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 Deyrût, 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 Siût, 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 Khmûnû, 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 Hininsû, its chief governor ruled alike over the marshes of the Fayûm and the plains of Beni-Suef.[**] To the south, Apû 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.[***]