was harnessed, “there is not in nature a more exhilarating sight, or one more strongly exciting to confidence in God than the rise of the Nile. ... The moment the sand becomes moistened by the approach of the fertilizing waters, it is literally alive with insects innumerable. ... Turn the course of the Nile and not one blade of vegetation would ever arise in Egypt.”[1]
The Red Nile appears to have been regarded as identical with the flood of ochre-coloured beer provided for Hathor, as Sekhmet, who slew the enemies of Ra. Professor Elliot Smith, in his The Evolution of the Dragon,[2] has shown that the red substance introduced into the beer was a surrogate of blood; it was an animating, a life-giving substance. Nilotic phenomena evidently prompted the Egyptians to enquire into the problem of the colours in water; the substances that coloured the waters were to them obviously life-giving substances. The Nile was the source and nourisher of life in Egypt.
As blood was “the life thereof,” it is not surprising to find that to the Osirian cult the Red Nile was the blood of the slain Osiris.
A similar belief obtained among the Byblians who informed Lucian that “the river of Adonis, flowing from Mount Libanus, was tinged with blood.” During the Byblian days of mourning “Adonis is wounded” and “the river's nature is changed by the blood which flows into its water”; the river “takes its name from the blood.”[3]
The whitish muddy Nile may have been identified with milk. It is of significance to find, in this connection, the Nile waters flowing from the breasts of the Nile god Hapi, and that there were human breasts in the cavern source of
