About the beginning of the 4th century, in the emperor Julian’s reign[160], 15 cubits were a sufficient minimum to incur the payment of the tribute, and this is one of the terms that Herodotus fixes upon, as being sufficient to oblige the payment in his days; and the other is 16, or a cubit more; so that if the Nilometer proves any thing at all, it is this, that presumptively the Nile has never increased from Mæris to Petronius’s, or in 1400 years, and certainly that, if it has not diminished, it has not increased for 700 years from Herodotus to the emperor Julian.
Procopius, in his first book, I think, says, that 18 peeks was too full a Nile, and occasioned dearth by its quantity. But, in the middle of the 6th century, he tells[161] us it required 18 cubits for a minimum, by which Egypt was to pay the meery; so that in 100 years from Julian to Justinian, the minimum had increased three cubits, which was 4½ feet; not one foot in 100 years as the proposition bears; and this would prove too much, if it was true, but it is impossible.
Thus far, then, we are at liberty to say, that, as long as Egypt was a Greek kingdom, no visible alteration or increase of the soil can be fairly established from history or inspection.
CHAP. XVII.
The same Subject continued—Nilometer what. How divided and measured.
In the 7th century a revolution happened that stops our Grecian account from proceeding farther, Egypt was conquered by an ignorant and barbarous enemy, the Saracen, and Amru Ibn el Aas was governor of Egypt for Omar, the second Caliph after Mahomet. Omar was a foreigner, conqueror, bigot and a tyrant; he destroyed the Grecian Nilometer from motives of religion, the same which had before moved him to burn the library of Alexandria; and after, with the same degree of sound judgment, determined to establish his empire at Medina, in the middle of the peninsula of Arabia, a country without water, and surrounded on all sides with barren sands; but he was nevertheless desirous of feeding his famished Saracens with the wheat of Egypt, a province he had subdued; for this purpose he ordered Amru to begin a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea, to carry the wheat to the Arabian Gulf, and thence to Yambo, the port of Medina on that gulf.
The traitor Greeks, who had delivered the country to the Saracens, had probably informed him of the great plenty which constantly reigned in Egypt, and which every body had an opportunity of knowing by the cheapness of grain at the market.
Omar thought that a larger tribute was due to put the conquerors a little more upon a footing with the conquered; for Egypt, which had once 20,000 cities, had not then the tenth part of them. Having therefore a larger extent to cultivate, with the same quantity of water, it produced more grain, and at the same time having fewer people to eat it, nothing was less oppressive than that a part of the surplus of the produce should go in augmentation of the tribute. For this purpose, following the very weak lights of his own judgment, he introduced a different measure on the Nilometer, and the consequence of that measure, imposed by a conqueror, affected the people (not reflecting upon their decrease in population) so much, that they prepared to fly the country; from which it immediately would have followed, that all Egypt would have lain desolate and uncultivated, and all Arabia been starved.
Mikeas.
London Published Decr. 1st. 1789. by G. Robinson & Co.