Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/102

 river in the world which has during so long a course so few tributaries of any magnitude, it has, or rather had, several mouths, and these, with various canals, were the principal high roads for Egyptian traffic. The external character of the greatest of these canals (the Bahr-Jusuf, or "River of Joseph"), which runs parallel with the Nile on its western side from a little below Cairo for three hundred and fifty miles, though now no longer navigable, rendered it, up to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the most important work of the kind in Egypt. Nor were there wanting canals which received the surplus of the inundations of the great river.

The sailors of Egypt—a numerous class—were chiefly boatmen employed on the Nile and the canals—bargemen rather than seamen. So vast, however, was the trade on this river that, according to Herodotus, no fewer than seven hundred thousand sailors (persons, we must presume) assembled on board different vessels on the occasion of one of the principal festivals; while, then as now, during the periodical inundations, a large portion of the population were compelled to live in boats and barges, where fairs and markets were also held, giving fresh impulse to trade and navigation.

Herodotus has furnished an interesting description of how the Egyptian boats and barges were built. From the acantha tree the Egyptians cut planks*