Harper's Young People, August 22, 1882 / An Illustrated Weekly

THE LITTLE SISTERS.
Egypt is the most interesting of countries, because it is probably the oldest. We borrow from it nearly all our arts and sciences, and have only improved upon what the Egyptians taught us. Our alphabet and the art of writing came from the banks of the Nile. It was carried to Phœnicia, then to Greece and Rome, and then to Europe and America. The Egyptians invented the lever, by which all engines are moved, and electricity and steam made useful. Egyptian glass-makers, goldsmiths, painters, weavers, builders and stone-cutters, miners, gardeners, and even poets and historians, have taught their arts to all the Western nations; Moses studied in the Egyptian colleges, and Joseph and his father looked upon its Pyramids and temples with wonder.
The land of Egypt is a deposit of mud brought down by the floods of the Nile from the mountains of Middle Africa. Every year the river overflows its banks, and renews the fertility of the soil by a new deposit, and these regular inundations have been so provided for by embankments and canals as to be seldom dangerous. The Nile scarcely ever sweeps away the flocks and harvests of the farmers, like the Mississippi. It would be well if the Mississippi could be made as useful as the Nile.
This flat land of mud rests on rocks and sand. On each side of it is a desert, bare, hot, and stifling. A desert divides it from Asia. It is isolated from the world, and here for several thousand years the Egyptian Pharaohs ruled over an obedient people, and their people invented and practiced those useful arts which they were afterward to teach to others. The first King of Egypt is supposed to have been Menes; he reigned about 3000 b.c. Thirty-one dynasties or families of Kings follow Menes, and the Egyptian kingdom had lasted more than two thousand five hundred years when it was conquered by Alexander the Great. The Assyrians, Persians, and even the Ethiopians had conquered it before, but had been driven out by the rising of the people. For two thousand years the Egyptians were free and united. The oldest modern kingdom counts scarcely eight hundred years, and our own government nearly one hundred.