That Egypt is the gift of the Nile is a remark we owe to the Father of History, who referred not only to the fertilising influence of the stream, but to the fact that the presence of the Nile, and its phenomena, are the conditions upon which the habitability of Egypt altogether depends. That the Egyptian year and that part of Egyptian archæology and myth which chiefly interests astronomers are also the gift of the Nile, is equally true.
The heliacal rising of Sirius and other stars at the time of the commencement of the inundation each year; all the myths which grew out of the various symbols of the stars so used; are so many evidences of the large share the river, with its various water-levels at different times, had in the national life. It was, in fact, the true and unique basis of the national life.
In this the Nile had a compeer or even compeers. What the Nile was to Egypt the Euphrates and Tigris were to a large region of Western Asia, where also we find the annual flood a source of fertility, a spectacle which inspired poets, and an event with which astronomers largely occupied themselves.
HĀPI, THE GOD OF THE NILE.
What more natural than that Euphrates, Tigris, and Nile were looked upon as deities; that the gods of the Nile valley on the one hand, and of the region watered by the Euphrates and Tigris, on the other, were gods to swear by; that they were worshipped in order that their benign influences might be secured, and that they had their local shrines and special cults?
The god sacred to the Euphrates and Tigris was called Ea.
The god sacred to the Nile was called Hāpi. The name is the same as that of the bull Apis, the worship of which was attributed to Mena.[64] Certainly Mena, Mini, or Menes, as he is variously called, was fully justified in founding the cult of the river-god, for he first among men appears to have had just ideas of irrigation, and I have heard the distinguished officers who have lately been responsible for the irrigation system of to-day speaking with admiration of the ideas and works of Mena. Whether the Tigris had a Mena in an equally early time is a point on which history is silent; but, according to the accounts of travellers, the Tigris in flood is even more majestic than the Nile, and yet the latter river in flood is a sight to see—a whole fertile plain turned, as it were, into an arm of the sea, with here and there an island, which, on inspection, turns out to be a village, the mud houses of which too often are undermined by the lapping of the waves in the strong north wind.
There is no doubt that the dates of the rise of these rivers not only influenced the national life, but even the religions of the dwellers on their banks. The Euphrates and Tigris rise at the Spring Equinox—the religion was equinoxial, the temples were directed to the east. The Nile rises at a solstice—the religion was solstitial and the solar temples were directed no longer to the east. To the Egyptians the coming of the river to the parched land was as the sunrise chasing the darkness of the night; the sun-god of day conquering the star-gods of night; or again the victorious king of the land slaughtering his enemies.
Egypt, in the words of Amru, first appears like a dusty plain, then as a fresh sea, and finally as a bed of flowers.