History has left us no account of the vicissitudes of the struggle in which the Egyptians were engaged with the Nile, nor of the time expended in bringing it to a successful issue. Legend attributes the idea of the system and its partial working out to the god Osiris: then Menés, the first mortal king, is said to have made the dyke of Qosheish, on which depends the prosperity of the Delta and Middle Egypt, and the fabulous Mceris is supposed to have extended the blessings of the irrigation to the Fayûm. In reality, the regulation of the inundation and the making of cultivable land are the work of unrecorded generations who peopled the valley. The kings of the historic period had only to maintain and develop certain points of what had already been done, and Upper Egypt is to this day chequered by the network of waterways with which its earliest inhabitants covered it. The work must have begun simultaneously at several points, without previous agreement, and, as it were, instinctively. A dyke protecting a village, a canal draining or watering some small province, demanded the efforts of but few individuals; then the dykes would join one another, the canals would be prolonged till they met others, and the work undertaken by chance would be improved, and would spread with the concurrence of an ever-increasing population. What happened at the end of last century, shows us that the system grew and was developed at the expense of considerable quarrels and bloodshed. The inhabitants of each district carried out the part of the work most conducive to their own interest, seizing the supply of water, keeping it and discharging it at pleasure, without considering whether they were injuring their neighbours by depriving them of their supply or by flooding them; hence arose perpetual strife and fighting. It became imperative that the rights of the weaker should be respected, and that the system of distribution should be co-ordinated, for the country to accept a beginning at least of social organization analogous to that which it acquired later: the Nile thus determined the political as well as the physical constitution of Egypt.
1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Dûmichen,
Resultate, vol. ii. pl. vit
The country was divided among communities, whose members were supposed to be descended from the same seed (paît) and to belong to the same family (pâîtû): the chiefs of them were called ropâîtû, the guardians, or pastors of the family, and in later times their name became a title applicable to the nobility in general. Families combined and formed groups of various importance under the authority of a head chief—ropâîtû-hâ. They were, in fact, hereditary lords, dispensing justice, levying taxes in kind on their subordinates, reserving to themselves the redistribution of land, leading their men to, battle, and sacrificing to the gods.[*] The territories over which they exercised authority formed small states, whose boundaries even now, in some places, can be pointed out with certainty. The principality of the Terebinth[**] occupied the very heart of Egypt, where the valley is widest, and the course of the Nile most advantageously disposed by nature—a country well suited to be the cradle of an infant civilization. Siaût (Siût), the capital, is built almost at the foot of the Libyan range, on a strip of land barely a mile in width, which separates the river from the hills. A canal surrounds it on three sides, and makes, as it were, a natural ditch about its walls; during the inundation it is connected with the mainland only by narrow causeways—shaded with mimosas—and looking like a raft of verdure aground in the current.[***]
* These prerogatives were still exercised by the princes of
the nomes under the Middle and New Empires; they only
enjoyed them then by the good will of the reigning
sovereign.
** The Egyptian word for the tree which gives its name to
this principality is atf, iatf, iôtf: it is only by a
process of elimination that I have come to identify it with
the Pistacia Terebinthus, L., which furnished the
Egyptians with the scented resin snûtir.
*** Boudier's drawing, reproduced on p. 31, and taken from
a photograph by Beato, gives most faithfully the aspect
presented by the plain and the modern town of Siout during
the inundation.
The site is as happy as it is picturesque; not only does the town command the two arms of the river, opening or closing the waterway at will, but from time immemorial the most frequented of the routes into Central Africa has terminated at its gates, bringing to it the commerce of the Soudan. It held sway, at the outset, over both banks, from range to range, northward as far as Deyrût, where the true Bahr Yusuf leaves the Nile, and southward to the neighbourhood of Gebel Sheikh Haridi. The extent and original number of the other principalities is not so easily determined.
The most important, to the north of Siût, were those of the Hare and the Oleander. The principality of the Hare never reached the dimensions of that of its neighbour the Terebinth, but its chief town was Khmûnû, whose antiquity was so remote, that a universally accepted tradition made it the scene of the most important acts of creation.[*] That of the Oleander, on the contrary, was even larger than that of the Terebinth, and from Hininsû, its chief governor ruled alike over the marshes of the Fayûm and the plains of Beni-Suef.[**] To the south, Apû on the right bank governed a district so closely shut in between a bend of the Nile and two spurs of the range, that its limits have never varied much since ancient times. Its inhabitants were divided in their employment between weaving and the culture of cereals. From early times they possessed the privilege of furnishing clothing to a large part of Egypt, and their looms, at the present day, still make those checked or striped "melayahs" which the fellah women wear over their long blue tunics.[***]