If Egypt had been a new, late, and extraordinary creation, the gift of the Nile in these latter times, as some modern philosophers have pretended, the least thing we could have expected would have been to find some new and extraordinary plants accompany it, very different in figure and parts from those of ancient times, made by the old unphilosophical way, the fiat of the Creator of the universe. But just the contrary has happened. Egypt hath no trees, shrubs, or plants peculiar to it. All are brought thither from Syria, Arabia, Africa, and India; and these are so far from being the gift of the Nile, as scarcely to accustom themselves to suffer the quantity of water that for five months covers the land of Egypt by the inundation of that river.
Even many of those that the necessities of particular times have brought thither to supply wants with which they could not dispense, and those which curious hands have brought from foreign countries are not planted at random; for they would not grow in Egypt, but in chosen places formerly artificially raised above level, for gardens, and pleasure ground, where they are at this day watered by machinery; or upon banks above the calishes, which though near the water, are yet above the level of its annual inundation. Such is the garden of Mattareah, sometimes filled with exotic plants from all the countries around, from the veneration or superstition, pilgrims and dervishies, the only travellers of the east, have for that spot, the supposed abode of the Virgin Mary when she fled into Egypt, sometimes, as at present, so neglected as to have scarce one foreign or curious plant in it.
The first kind of these adventitious productions, and the oldest inhabitant of Egypt brought there for use, is the sycamore, called Giumez[1] by the Arabs, which from its size, the facility with which it is sawn into the thinnest planks, and the largeness of these planks corresponding to the immense size of the tree, was most usefully adapted to the great demand they then had for mummy-chests, or coffins, which are made of this tree only: in order to add to its value, we may mention another supposed quality, its incorruptibility, very capable of giving it a preference, as coinciding with the ideas which led the Egyptians to those fantastic attempts of making the body eternal.
This last property, I suppose, is purely imaginary, for though it be true, tradition says, that all the mummy-chests, which have been found from former ages, were made of sycamore, though the same is the persuasion of latter times, and the fact is so far proven by all the mummy-chests now found being of that wood, yet I will not take upon me to vouch, that incorruptibility is a quality of this particular tree. I believe that seasoned elm, oak, or ash, perhaps even fir, laid in the dry sands of Egypt perfectly screened from moisture, and defended from the outward air, as all mummy-chests are, would likewise appear incorruptible; and my reason is, that having got made, while at Cairo, a case for a telescope of sycamore plank, I buried it in my garden after I came home from my travels, so as to leave it covered by half a foot of earth; in less than four years it was entirely putrid and rotten. And another telescope case of the cedar of Lebanon appeared much less decayed, though even in this last there were evident signs of corruption. But even suppose it true, that these planks have been found incorruptible, a doubt may still arise, whether they do not owe this quality to a kind of varnish of resinous materials with which I have seen almost all the mummy-chests covered, and to which materials the preservation of the mummy itself is in part certainly owing. The sycamore is a native of that low warm stripe of country between the Red Sea and mountains of Abyssinia; we saw a number of very fine ones before we came to Taranta; they are also in Syria about Sidon, but inferior in size to the former; they do not seem to thrive in Arabia, for want of moisture.
All the other vegetable productions of Egypt have been in a fluctuating state from one year to another. We find them in Prosper Alpinus, and by his authority we seek for them in that country. In Egypt we find them no more; through neglect, they are rotten and gone, but we meet them flourishing in Nubia, Abyssinia, and Arabia Felix, and these are the countries whence the curious first brought them, and from which, by some accident similar to the first, they may again appear in Egypt.
Prosper Alpinus’s work then, so far from being a collection of plants and trees of Egypt, may be said to be a treatise of plants that are not in Egypt, but by accident; they are gleanings of natural history from Syria, Arabia, Nubia, Abyssinia, Persia, Malabar, and Indostan, of which, as far as I could discern or discover, seven species only remained when I was in Egypt, mostly trees of such a growth as to be out of the power of every thing but the ax.
The plant that I shall now speak of, the Papyrus, is a strong proof of this, and is a remarkable instance of the violent changes these subjects have undergone in a few ages. It was at the first the repository of learning and of record; it was the vehicle of knowledge from one nation to another; its uses were so extended, that it came to be even the food of man, and yet we are now disputing what this plant was, and what was its figure, and whether or not it is to be found in Egypt.
A gentleman[2] at the head of the literary world, who from his early years has dedicated himself to the study of the theory of this science, and at a riper age has travelled through the world in the more agreeable pursuit of the practical part of it, hath assured me, that, unless from bad drawings, he never had an idea of what this plant was till I first gave him a very fine specimen. The Count de Caylus says, that having heard there was a specimen of this plant in Paris, he used his utmost endeavours to find it, but when brought to him, it appeared to be a cyperus of a very common, well-known kind. With my own hands, not without some labour and risk, I collected specimens from Syria, from the river Jordan, from two different places in Upper and Lower Egypt, from the lakes Tzana and Gooderoo in Abyssinia; and it was with the utmost pleasure I found they were in every particular intrinsically the same, without any variation or difference, from what this plant has been described by the ancients; only I thought that those of Egypt, the middle of the two extremes, were stronger, fairer, and fully a foot taller than those in Syria and Abyssinia.
Papyrus