"Gardens are frequently represented in the tombs of Thebes and other parts of Egypt, many of which are remarkable for their extent." (Wilkinson.)
To better understand an ancient Egyptian garden, we will first look at their dwellings. In some few cities where the size and something like a plan can be distinguished, the streets are seen, some of them wide, but more very narrow. Their houses, garden-walls, public places, all but the temples, were of brick. The plan of the houses was similar to what now prevails in warm climates; the principal apartments were ranged round a courtyard, with chambers above them. In this court were a few trees, some boxes of flowering-plants, and a reservoir of water. Their houses were generally three stories in height.
"Besides these town-houses, the wealthy Egyptians had extensive villas, containing spacious gardens, watered by canals communicating with the Nile. They had also tanks of water in different parts of this garden, which served for ornament, and also for irrigation when the Nile was low. On these the master of the place amused himself and friends by excursions in a pleasure-boat."
Such a scene is represented in an old painting. The company are seated in the boat under a canopy; while slaves, or at least menials, walk along the bank and drag it after them, in a way similar to our canal navigation.
"So fond were the Egyptians of trees and flowers, and of gracing their gardens with all the profusion that could be obtained, that they exacted a tribute of rare productions from the nations tributary to them; foreigners from distant countries are represented as bearing plants, among other presents, to the Egyptian kings."[58]
To ancient Egypt we are doubtless indebted for the invention of artificial flowers, now so prominent in female attire. They were made there first from the papyrus, the plant of which paper was made. Some old writer relates that, when Agesilaus was in Egypt, he was so charmed with a kind of crowns and chaplets which he saw in use there, formed to resemble flowers, that he carried many of them home with him to Sparta. They were perhaps imitated in Greece and became universal, yet retained the name of the inventors; for Pliny says:
"Sic coronis e floribus receptis paulo mox sabiere quæ vocantur Ægyptiæ, ac deinde hibernæ, quum terra flores negat, ramento e comibus tincto."—Plin. xxi. 3.
Everything that pictures the domestic life of this people has such great interest that it is difficult to avoid digression. Every record of it expresses wealth and their peculiar tastes. Walls are profusely covered with various designs, doors are stuccoed to imitate costly wood, and their carved chairs have furnished symmetrical copies to modern art. Interspersed with these things, we have these traces of their flowers and gardens—a story of their rural pleasures in that day of glory, when they built the pyramids—that day which has no date! The hieroglyphics carved in stone, on which they doubtless securely relied for fame and a name to the end of time, yet cover the walls still standing of their superb temples; they are traced on tombs—on urns—on the rocks which surround cities—on the sarcophagi of the dead, even on the very linen which envelopes them—but they speak in a lost language! We comprehend only one brief epitaph—that a numerous and opulent people have entirely disappeared.
In the middle ages, Egypt was still noted for flowers and valuable aromatic shrubs and herbs. Cyrene in the north part was remarkable for the beauty of its adjacent country, which even then, says a writer, bore traces of having been in former times a perfect flower-garden.
In the time of Julius Cæsar, roses must have received particular attention and extensive cultivation, for we read that a ship-load of the most fragrant was sent as a gift to Cæsar. He received them, however, with the graceless remark that he could show finer ones in Rome.