Egypt is the eldest daughter of civilization. In undertaking to group the great nations of antiquity and to present them in their proper order, in attempting to assign to each its due share in the continuous and unremitting labour of progress until the birth of Christianity, we have no alternative but to commence with the country of the Pharaohs.
In studying the past of mankind, we have the choice of several points of view. We may attempt to determine the meaning and value of the religious conceptions which succeeded one another during that period, or we may give our attention rather to the literature, the arts and the sciences, to those inventions which in time have done so much to emancipate mankind from natural trammels and to make him master of his destiny. One writer will confine himself to a description of manners, and social and political institutions; another to the enumeration and explanation of the various changes brought on by internal revolutions, by wars and conquests; to what Bossuet calls "la suite des empires." Finally, he who has the highest ambition of all will attempt to unite all these various features into a single picture, so as to show, as a whole, the creative activity of a race and the onward movements of its genius in the continual search for "the best." But in any case the commencement must be made with Egypt. It is Egypt that has preserved the earliest attempts of man towards outward expression; it is in Egypt that those monuments exist which contain the first permanent manifestation of thought by written characters or plastic[36] forms; and it is in Egypt that the historian of antique art will find the earliest materials for study.
But, in the first place, we must give some account of the curious conditions under which the people lived who constructed and ornamented so many imposing monuments. We must begin, then, by describing the circumstances and the race characteristics under which this early civilization was developed.
§ 2. The Valley of the Nile and its Inhabitants.
The first traveller in Egypt of which we have any record is Herodotus; he sums up, in an often quoted phrase, the impression which that land of wonders made upon him: "Egypt," he says, "is a present from the Nile."[37] The truth could not be better expressed. "Had the equatorial rains not been compelled to win for themselves a passage to the Mediterranean, a passage upon which they deposited the mud which they had accumulated on their long journey, Egypt would not have existed. Egypt began by being the bed of a torrent; the soil was raised by slow degrees ... man appeared there when, by the slow accumulation of fertile earth, the country at last became equal to his support...."[38]
Other rivers do no more than afford humidity for their immediate borders, or, in very low-lying districts, for a certain narrow stretch of country on each hand. When they overflow their banks it is in a violent and irregular fashion, involving wide-spread ruin and destruction. Great floods are feared as public misfortunes. It is very different with the Nile. Every year, at a date which can be almost exactly foretold, it begins to rise slowly and to spread gently over the land. It rises by degrees until its surface is eight or nine metres above low-water mark;[39] it then begins to fall with the same tranquillity, but not until it has deposited, upon the lands over which it has flowed, a thick layer of fertile mud which can be turned over easily with the lightest plough, and in which every seed will germinate, every plant spring up with extraordinary vigour and rapidity.
Fig. 1.—During the Inundation of the Nile.
Thus nature has greatly facilitated the labour of the Egyptian agriculturist; the river takes upon itself the irrigation of the country for the whole width of its valley, and the preparation of the soil for the autumnal seed-time; it restores the virtue annually taken out of the ground by the crops. Each year it brings with it more fertility than can be exhausted in the twelve months, so that there is a constantly accumulating capital, on both banks of the river, of the richest vegetable earth.