The long-necked camels would be able to reach up to the tops of small trees, and to the lower branches of the taller ones, and, together, it seems that the goats and camels made a great difference after a while in the number of the trees. When a country is much stripped of its trees, one of the results is that less rain falls there; so it is quite sure that this stripping of the trees by the goats and camels in Egypt caused the rainfall to be less than it had been before those creatures were brought in. The country had to depend more than ever, for its crops, on the overflow of the river. Of course the cutting down of the trees by carpenters with the stone or bronze axes would help to reduce the numbers, and we know that the ancient Egyptians understood the use of charcoal, which is made by burning wood. So it is easy to understand that, in a country which had no great supply of woodland to start with, what there was of it was soon almost destroyed.
But until that destruction happened there was woodland enough to give shelter to numbers of wild animals. Many of the animals which the early Egyptians hunted were of kinds that are able to live in sandy places where there is very little shelter, and, as it seems, very little grass for them to eat. We find, by the old carvings and written records, that they hunted the lion, leopard, jackal, wild boars, antelopes of many kinds, wild sheep and oxen, the hippopotamus in the river, and that they caught a variety of fish in the river and in the Lake Moeris, into which water was led from the river by a canal. The making of canals, to carry the water to places where it was required, was done in very early days, and at the season of the river's overflow water was led by a canal into this big lake which acted as a reservoir, or storing place, for the water, from which they could draw it off when wanted. The crocodiles, by which the Nile was infested, were looked on as sacred.
They understood the use of nets for fishing, and used nets also for surrounding four-footed animals and for catching birds. For the killing of the larger and dangerous animals they had spears of various make, and bows and arrows. It is doubtful whether they used the boomerang—that wooden, flat, curved weapon, used still by the natives of Australia, which returns to the thrower after going out to a distance of more than a hundred yards. There are carved figures which look as if they might be figures of boomerangs, but they might be "throwing sticks" such as some savage people still use to give greater length of "leverage"—if you know what that means—to increase the length and force of their throw of a spear. There were immense numbers of wild-fowl about the river and the marshes. So the ancient Egyptians must have had splendid sport.
Domestic animals
They seem to have kept, as domestic animals, ducks and geese, but it was not till several thousand years later than the date of those engravings in which we see the ostriches that our domestic fowls were introduced. Hairy-coated sheep are shown on some of the early carvings, but later a better sort of sheep, with woollier coat, and curved, instead of straight, horns appears. They had oxen, which drew their wooden ploughs and trod out the corn from the straw on the threshing-floors, and were also used to draw weights. They had, after a time, as we have seen, goats and camels, but the donkey was the most common beast of burden, both when they traversed the desert and when they were in their own fertile strip of country. Horses were only brought in at rather a late date in the story. At first they seem to have been used only for drawing chariots, and we find them thus harnessed a long while before we are shown a rider mounted on a horse, or, indeed, on any animal. They do not seem to have known either the elephant or the giraffe, which are perhaps the most remarkable creatures in all Africa. We know that they kept bees for their honey. They had dogs, of a variety of breeds, and used them for hunting, apparently not regarding them as the unclean creatures that most people in the East consider them now. They kept cats and monkeys as pets, and used the cats to catch birds.
But the great business of their lives was the cultivation of their crops. Egypt was a great corn-producing country. Make a note of that in your minds, for the corn supply of Egypt became of great importance in the later story of the Mediterranean and its shores.
The corn was principally of the kinds that we call wheat and barley. And they had vegetables, such as lettuce, beans, peas, onions, and so on. We may imagine a certain amount of sowing and hoeing, and weeding and harvesting going on at the right seasons; but a great deal of their time must have been taken up with the watering under the scorching Egyptian sun. When the big flood had ceased to come down from the rain-filled lakes in the south, and the river had gone back into its ordinary channel, they had, after a while, to refresh the ground again by raising water in buckets hung by a rope to a long pole. The pole worked on a hinge about three-quarters of the way down from the end to which the rope was fastened, so that the bucket could be let down or drawn up by a man working at the end of the pole. There are many pictures and carvings of this apparatus. Probably very little rain fell at any part of the year in Egypt itself after most of the trees had gone.
They had the palm trees on which the dates grow, and fig trees and pomegranates. The wood of the palm must have been useful to them for timber, in a country where timber trees were so scarce. And they had the flax, of which they made linen. In early days there does not seem to have been any cultivation of the vine, though the wine made in Egypt became quite important later. And they had the papyrus.
