These were the calamities, we may suppose, under which the arts in Egypt fell; for, as to the foreign conquests of Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonians, they affected cities and the persons of individuals only. They were temporary, never intended to have lasting consequences; their beginning and end were prophesied at the same time. That of the Assyrians was a plundering expedition only, as we are told by scripture itself, intended to last but forty years[269], half the life of man, given, for a particular purpose, for the indemnification of the king Nebuchadnezzar, for the hardships he sustained at the siege of Tyre, where the obstinacy of the inhabitants, in destroying their wealth, deprived the conqueror of his expected booty. The Babylonians were a people the most polished after the Egyptians. Egypt under them suffered by rapacity, but not by ignorance, as it did in all the conquests of the Shepherds.
After Thebes was destroyed by the first Shepherds, commerce, and it is probable the arts with it, fled for a time from Egypt, and centered in Edom, a city and territory, tho’ we know little of its history, at that period the richest in the world. David, in the very neighbourhood of Tyre and Sidon, calls Edom the strong city; “Who will bring me into the strong city? Who will lead me into Edom[270]?” David, from an old quarrel, and probably from the recent instigations of the Tyrians his friends, invaded Edom[271], destroyed the city, and dispersed the people. He was the great military power then upon the continent; Tyre and Edom were rivals; and his conquest of that last great and trading state, which he united to his empire, would yet have lost him the trade he sought to cultivate, by the very means he used to obtain it, had not Tyre been in a capacity to succeed to Edom, and to collect its mariners and artificers, scattered abroad by the conquest.
David took possession of two ports, Eloth and Ezion-gaber[272], from which he carried on the trade to Ophir and Tarshish, to a very great extent, to the day of his death. We are struck with astonishment when we reflect upon the sum that Prince received in so short a time from these mines of Ophir. For what is said to be given by King David[273] and his Princes for the building of the Temple of Jerusalem, exceeds in value eight hundred millions of our money, if the talent there spoken of is a Hebrew talent[274], and not a weight of the same denomination, the value of which was less, and peculiarly reserved for and used in the traffic of these precious metals, gold and silver. It was, probably, an African or Indian weight, proper to the same mines, whence was gotten the gold appropriated to fine commodities only, as is the case with our ounce Troy different from the Averdupoise.
Solomon, who succeeded David in his kingdom, was his successor likewise in the friendship of Hiram king of Tyre. Solomon visited Eloth and Ezion-gaber[275] in person, and fortified them. He collected a number of pilots, shipwrights, and mariners, dispersed by his father’s conquest of Edom, most of whom had taken refuge in Tyre and Sidon, the commercial states in the Mediterranean. Hiram supplied him with sailors in abundance; but the sailors so furnished from Tyre were not capable of performing the service which Solomon required, without the direction of pilots and mariners used to the navigation of the Arabian Gulf and Indian Ocean. Such were those mariners who formerly lived in Edom, whom Solomon had now collected in Eloth and Ezion-gaber.
This last-mentioned navigation was very different in all respects from that of the Mediterranean, which, in respect to the former, might be compared to a pond, every side being confined with shores little distant the one from the other; even that small extent of sea was so full of islands, that there was much greater art required in the pilot to avoid land than to reach it. It was, besides, subject to variable winds, being to the northward of 30° of latitude, the limits to which Providence hath confined those winds all over the globe; whereas the navigation of the Indian Ocean was governed by laws more convenient and regular, though altogether different from those that obtained in the Mediterranean. Before I proceed, it will be necessary to explain this phænomenon.
It is known to all those who are ever so little versant in the history of Egypt, that the wind from the north prevails in that valley all the summer months, and is called the Etesian winds; it sweeps the valley from north to south, that being the direction of Egypt, and of the Nile, which runs through the midst of it. The two chains of mountains, which confine Egypt on the east and on the west, constrain the wind to take this precise direction.
It is natural to suppose the same would be the case in the Arabian Gulf, had that narrow sea been in a direction parallel to the land of Egypt, or due north and south. The Arabian Gulf, however, or what we call the Red Sea, lies from nearly north-west to south-east, from Suez to Mocha. It then turns nearly east and west till it joins the Indian Ocean at the Straits of Babelmandeb, as we have already said, and may be further seen by consulting the map. Now, the Etesian winds, which are due north in Egypt, here take the direction of the Gulf, and blow in that direction steadily all the season, while it continues north in the valley of Egypt; that is, from April to October the wind blows north-west up the Arabian Gulf towards the Straits; and, from November till March, directly contrary, down the Arabian Gulf, from the Straits of Babelmandeb to Suez and the isthmus.
These winds are by some corruptly called the trade-winds; but this name given to them is a very erroneous one, and apt to confound narratives, and make them unintelligible. A trade-wind is a wind which, all the year through, blows, and has ever blown, from the same point of the horizon; such is the south-west, south of the Line, in the Indian and Pacific Ocean. On the contrary, these winds, of which we have now spoken, are called monsoons; each year they blow six months from the northward, and the other six months from the southward, in the Arabian Gulf: While in the Indian Ocean, without the Straits of Babelmandeb, they blow just the contrary at the same seasons; that is, in summer from the southward, and in winter from the northward, subject to a small inflexion to the east and to the west.
The reader will observe, then, that, a vessel sailing from Suez or the Elanitic Gulf, in any of the summer months, will find a steady wind at north-west, which will carry it in the direction of the Gulf to Mocha. At Mocha, the coast is east and west to the Straits of Babelmandeb, so that the vessel from Mocha will have variable winds for a short space, but mostly westerly, and these will carry her on to the Straits. She is then done with the monsoon in the Gulf, which was from the north, and, being in the Indian Ocean, is taken up by the monsoon which blows in the summer months there, and is directly contrary to what obtains in the Gulf. This is a south-wester, which carries the vessel with a flowing sail to any part in India, without delay or impediment.
The same happens upon her return home. She sails in the winter months by the monsoon proper to that sea, that is, with a north-east, which carries her through the Straits of Babelmandeb. She finds, within the Gulf, a wind at south-east, directly contrary to what was in the ocean; but then her course is contrary likewise, so that a south-easter, answering to the direction of the Gulf, carries her directly to Suez, or the Elanitic Gulf, to whichever way she proposes going. Hitherto all is plain, simple, and easy to be understood; and this was the reason why, in the earliest ages, the India trade was carried on without difficulty.