Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/30

CHAPTER II EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION I. BEGINNINGS OF A HIGHER CIVILIZATION 11. Peculiarities of Egypt. Egypt is a very strange country. It comprises the northern end of the valley which the river Nile has slowly cut for itself across the eastern part of the great desert of Sahara. Egypt includes the triangular Delta, a very fertile region to the north of Cairo, and then the long, narrow valley winding some seven hundred and fifty miles to the First Cataract, where the river flows rapidly among great rocks. The valley is usually twenty-five or thirty miles wide, lying between bare cliffs, over which the sands of the desert blow. On each side of the river is a narrow strip of cultivated land between the cliffs and the stream. 12. The Rise and Fall of the Nile. It almost never rains in Egypt, and the sun shines every day, summer and winter, so that the farmers have had to rely for water entirely on the river. But far up the Nile and its tributaries there is plenty of rain in the spring, which yearly floods the valley in which Egypt lies and raises the level of the river from twenty-five to thirty feet between Cairo and Aswan. This overflow of the Nile covers the fields each year and deposits a thin layer of fresh, fertile soil as the muddy waters subside. For thousands of years the Egyptians have been accustomed to store up the waters at their flood and to raise water from the Nile itself to irrigate their fields during the period when the river was low. (See Ancient Times, 46-47.) 13. Long History of Ancient Egypt. The first Egyptian king who governed all Egypt indeed one of the very first human beings whose name has come down to us was Menes, who lived about 3400 B.C. The earliest capital of Egypt was Memphis, a vast