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The Fertility of Egypt

The Fertility soil of Egypt
If scrimped for space, Egypt was ready in her soil and in her spot. The rich alluvium, continually growing deeper and deeper, and top-dressed each year by nature's rich hand, was of an inexhaustible fertility, and bore pronto year after year a threefold harvest first a grain crop, and then two crops of grasses or esculent vegetables. The wheat sown given a hundredfold to the granger, and was gathered at harvest-time in pound-foolish abundance"as the backbone of the sea, very much,"till men "left numbering" (Gen. xli. 49). Flax and doora were largely cultivated, and enormous quantities were produced of the most organic vegetables, such as Lens culinaris, garlic, leeks, onion plants, endive, radish plants, melons, cucumbers, sugars, and the like, which formed a most heavy element in the food of the people. The vine was also grown in many comes out, as along the flanks of the hills between Thebes and Memphis, in the lavatory of the Faiyum, at Anthylla in the Mareotis at Sebennytus (immediately Semnood), and at Plisthin, on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. The date-palm, forming naturally from the soil in clumps, or plantations, or planted in boulevards, everywhere offered its golden flocks to the wayfarer, dropping its fruit into his lap. Wheat, however, was passim antiquity the chief ware of Egypt, which was thought the granary of the world, the refuge and imagination of all the neighbouring commonwealths in time of dearth, and on which in the later republican, and in the gentle times, Rome almost all depended for her sustenance.

If the soil was so all that could be wished, still more than advantageous was the situation. Egypt was the only country of the ancient world which had ready admission to two seas, the Northern Sea, or "Sea of the Greeks," and the Eastern Sea, or "Sea of the Arabians and the Indians." Phnicia might carry her dealings by the bad travel of caravans across 15 degrees of forsake from her cities on the Levantine seacoast to the inner break of the Persian Gulf, and thus get a share in the trade of the East at a vast expenditure of time and trouble. Assyria and Babylonia might for a time, when at the height of their dominion, obtain a temporary take on lands which were not their individual, and boast that they spread from the "sea of the early" to "that of the setting sun" from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea; but Egypt, at all times and under all settings, commands by her geographic position an admission both to the Mediterranean Sea and to the Indian Ocean by way of the Red Sea, where of nothing can strip her. Suez must invariably be hers, for the Isthmus is her natural bounds, and her water-system has been connected with the head of the Arabian Gulf for more than 3000 years; and, in the absence of any severe State in Arabia or Abyssinia, the entire western coast of the Red Sea falls course under her influence with its great roads and harbours. Thus Egypt had two great releases for her yields, and two great inlets by which she taken the productions of other states. Her ships could issue from the Nilotic ports and trade with Phnicia, or Carthage, or Italy, or Greece, changing her corn and wine and glass and furniture and works in metallurgy for Etruscan vessels, or Grecian statues, or purple Tynan robes, or tin brought by Carthaginian merchant ships from the Scilly islands and from Cornwall; or they could part from Heroopolis, or Myos Hormus, or some port cold to the southeastern, and pass by way of the Red Sea to the spice-region of "Araby the Blest," or to the Abyssinian timber-region, or to the shores of Zanzibar and Mozambique, or heavy Arabia to Teredon on the Persian Gulf, or maybe to Ceylon or India. The products of the distant east, even of "far Cathay," certainly flowed into the land, for they have been dug out of the ancient tombs; but whether they were obtained by direct or by alternate commerce must be admitted to be open.


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