Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography Volume I Part 1.djvu/52

 town to the ordinary place of embarkation. A great part of the town was destroyed by an earthquake in 1819, of which an account is given under. The principal remains of the ancient town have been lately discovered on a hill to the E. of Vostitza. There are also several fragments of architecture and sculpture, inserted in the walls of the houses at Vostitza. (Leake, Morea, vol. iii. p. 185, seq.; Curtius, Peloponnesos, vol. i. p. 459, seq.)

 AEGOSPOTAMI (, Aegos flumen. Pomp. Mel. ii. 2 ; Plin. ii. 59: Eth. ), i.e. the Goat-River, a stream in the Chersouesus, with, at one time, a town of the same name upon it. It was here that the famous defeat of the Athenian fleet by Lysander took place, B.C. 405, which put a close to the Peloponnesian war. There seems, however, to have been no town there at this time, for it is mentioned as a great error on the part of the Athenian generals, that they remained at a station where they had no town at hand to supply a market for provisions. (Plut. Alc. 36; Diod. xiii. 105; Strab. p. 287; comp. Grote, Hist. of Greece, vol. viii. p. 293.) In later times there must have been a town there, as the geographers especially mention it (Steph. Byz. s. v.), and there are coins of it extant.

 AEGO'STHENA (: Eth. : Ghermanó), a town in Megaris, on the Alcyonian or Corinthian gulf, at the foot of Mount Cithaeron, and on the borders of Boeotia. It possessed a temple of the seer Melampus. Between Aegosthena and Creusis, the port-town of Boeotia, there was no passage along the shore except a path on the mountain's side. The Lacedaemonians under Cleombrotus, in marching from Creusis to Aegosthena along this road in the winter of B.C. 379 — 378, were overtaken by a violent tempest; and such was the force of the wind, that the shields of the soldiers were wrested from their hands, and many of the asses that carried the burthens were blown over the precipices into the sea. It was by this road that the Lacedaemonians retreated after their defeat at Leuctra in 371. There was a sweet wine grown at Aegostheua. (Paus. i. 44. § 4, seq.; Xen. Hell. v. 4. §§ 16—18, vi. 4. §§ 25—26; Athen. p. 440.; Steph. B. s. v.; Leake, Northern Greece, vol. ii. p. 405.)

 AEGU'SA. [.]

 AEGYPSUS. [.]

 AEGYPTUS (: Eth., Aegyptius). I. Names and boundaries of Egypt. Egypt, properly so called, is that portion of the valley of the Nile which lies between lat. 24° 3' and lat. 31° 37' N., or between the islands of Philae and Elephantine, and the Mediterranean Sea. In the language of the earliest inhabitants it was entitled, or the Black Earth; by the Hebrews it was called ; by the Arabians (comp. , Joseph. Antiq. i. 1); by the Greeks ; and by the Copts , or inundated land. The boundaries of Egypt have in all ages been nearly the same, — to the S., Aethiopia; to the E., the Arabian Gulf, the Stony Arabia, Idumaea, and the southwestern frontier of Palestine; to the N., the Mediterranean Sea; and to the W., the Libyan desert. Homer (Od. iv. 477) calls the Nile itself ; nor is the appellation misapplied. For the Valley of Egypt is emphatically the "Gift of the Nile," without whose fertilising waters the tract from Syene to Cercasorum would only be a deep furrow in the sandy and gravelly desert running parallel with the Red Sea.

An account of the Nile is given elsewhere. [.] Here it is sufficient to remark that the valley which it irrigates is generally, except in the Delta or Lower Egypt, a narrow strip of alluvial deposit, occupying less than half the space between the Arabian mountains and the Libyan desert. The average breadth of this valley from one of these barriers to the other, as far as lat. 30° N., is about 7 miles; while that of the cultivable land, depending upon the overflow of the river, scarcely exceeds 5½ miles. Between Cairo in Lower and Edfoo (Apollinopolis Magna) in Upper Egypt the extreme breadth is about 11 miles: the narrowest part, including the river itself, is about 2 miles. But northward, between Edfoo and Assouan (Syene), the valley contracts so much that, in places, there is scarcely any soil on either side of the river, and the granite or limestone springs up from its banks a mural entrenchment. The whole area of the valley between Syene and the bifurcation of the Nile at Cercasorum contains about 2255 square miles, exclusive of the district of Fayoom (Ansinoe, Moeris), which comprises about 340. The Delta itself is estimated at 1976 square miles between the main branches of the river — the modern Damietta and Rosetta arms. But both E. and W. of this tract stretches a considerable level of irrigated land, which, including the Delta, embraces about 4500 square miles. The length of Egypt from Syene to the Mediterranean is about 526 miles. The total surface of modern Egypt is somewhat larger than that of the country in ancient times, since, in spite of a less regular system of irrigation, the inundations of the Nile have increased since the eras of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies.

Egypt, in its general configuration, is a long rock-bound valley, terminating in a deep bay, and resembling in form an inverted Greek upsilon [Υ]. Its geological structure is tripartite. The Nile-valley shelves down to the Mediterranean in a series of steps, consisting of sandy or gravelly plateaus, separated by granite or limestone ridges, which the river cuts diagonally. From Syene to Edfoo granite or red sandstone prevails: at Edfoo limestone succeeds; until in lat. 30° 10' the rocks diverge NE. and NW., and the alluvial Delta fills up an embayed triangle, whose apex is at Cercasorum, and whose base is the sea.

The political and physical divisions of Egypt so nearly coincide that we may treat of them under one head. From Syene to Cercasorum the whole of the Nile-valley was denominated Upper Egypt: with the fork of the river Lower Egypt began. This was indeed a natural division between the primitive and the alluvial regions: and the distinction was recognised from the earliest times by different monumental symbols — natural and 