Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/326

 310 HISTORY OF GREECE. the Euphrates in Assyria, partly from their more uniform rectm rence both in time and quantity, partly from the rich silt which it brings down and deposits, whereas the Euphrates served only as a moisture. The patience of the Egyptians had excavated, in middle Egypt, the vast reservoir partly, it seems, natural and preexisting called the lake of Mccris : and in the Delta, a network of numerous canals ; yet on the whole the hand of man had been less tasked than in Babylonia ; whilst the soil annually enriched, yielded its abundant produce without either plough or spade to assist the seed cast in by the husbandman. 1 That under matter, and requires correction. See Grosskurd's note on Strabo, ii, p. 6t (note 3, p. 101), and xvii, p. 186 (note 9, p. 332). Pliny gives the distance at one hundred and seventy miles (H. N. v, 9). 1 Herod, i, 193. Hapayiverai b oiro? (in Babylonia) or, KaruTrep iv u, ai'Tov TOV noTafj.ov uvapaivovTot; ef -uf upoi'paf, ci/l/la #ep<Tf re nal ' i} yap Bapv^MViT] X^M Trutra, Karuvrfp rj A/p. 1 "///, f, etc. Herodotus was informed that the canals in Egypt had been dug by tho labor of that host of prisoners whom the victorious Sesostris brought homo from his conquests (ii, 108). The canals in Egypt served the purpose partly of communication between the different cities, partly of a constant supply of water to those towns which were not immediately on the Nile : " that vast river, so constantly at work," (to use the language of Herodotus i~o TOGOVTOV TE iroTctpov /cat oSrwf IpyaTiKov, ii, 11), spared the Egyptians all the toil of irrigation which the Assyrian cultivator underwent (ii, 14). Lower Egypt, as Herodotus saw it, though a continued flat, was unfit either for horse or car, from the number of intersecting canals, uvnnroe Kdl uvafiu^evTOf (ii, 108). But lower Egypt, as Volney saw it, was among the countries in the world best suited to the action of cavalry, so that he pro- nounces the native population of the country to have no chance of contend . ing against the Mamelukes (Volney, Travels in Egypt and Syria, vol. i, ch. 12, sect. 2, p. 199). The country has reverted to the state in which it was (iiriraaifi.?! KOI a[j.a^evofj.Kvri iraaa) before the canals "were made, one of the many striking illustrations of the difference between the Egypt which a modern traveller visits, and that which Herodotus and even Strabo saw, M.rjv ir7*UTiiv diupvyuv enl fiiwpv!-i Tfiydeiauv (Strabo, xvii, p. 788). Considering the early age of Herodotus, his remarks on the geological character of Egypt as a deposit of the accumulated mud by the Nile, appear to me most remarkable (ii, 8-14). Having no fixed number of years included in his religions belief as measuring the past existence of the earth, he car- ries his mind back without difficulty to what may have been effected by this river in ten or twenty thousand years, or " in the whole space of time elapsed before I was born," (ii, 11.) About the lake of Mceris. see a note a little farther on.