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| The Strategic Geographical Location of Egypt |
Egypt was the only country of the ancient world which had make admittance to two great seas, the Northern Sea, or "Med. Sea," and the Eastern Sea, or "Red Sea." Phnicia might carry her dealings by the pretty travel of vans across fifteen points of desert from her cities on the Levantine coast to the inner niche of the
Persian Gulf, and thus get a part in the trade of the East at a vast expenditure of time and bother. Assyria and Babylonia might for a time, when at the height of their dominion, find a temporary hold on lands which were not their own, and gas that they stretched from the "sea of the rising" to "that of the doing sun"from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean; but Egypt, at whole times and under all lots, commands by her true position an admission both to the Mediterranean Sea and to the Indian Ocean by way of the Red Sea, whereof nothing can strip her. Suez must incessantly be hers, for the Band is her natural edge, and her water-system has been affiliated with the head of the Arabian Gulf for more than 3000 years; and, in the absence of any strong State in Arabia or Abyssinia, the entire western seashore of the Red Sea falls naturally under her mold with its great roadsteads and shields. Thus Egypt had two great releases for her outputs, and two great intakes by which she received the productions of other countries. Her ships could cut from the ports of the
Nile and trade with Phnicia, or Carthage, or Italy, or Greece, exchanging her corn and wine and glass and furniture and works in metallurgy for Etruscan vases, or Grecian statues, or purple Tynan robes, or tin taken by Carthaginian bottoms from the Scilly islands and from Cornwall; or they could part from Heroopolis, or Myos Hormus, or some port further to the southward, and run by way of the Red Sea to the spice-region of "Araby the Blest," or to the Abyssinian timber-region, or to the shorings of Zanzibar and Mozambique countries, or round Arabia to Teredon on the Persian Gulf (Arabian Gulf), or peradventure to Ceylon or India. The products of the further east, even of "far Cathay," certainly fed into the land, for they have been dug out of the ancient tombs; but whether they were got by direct or by indirect commerce must be held to be doubtful.
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