IRRIGATION IN EGYPT. 455 
garden, but has unquestionably produced extensive climatic 
change.* 
The fields of Egypt are more regularly watered than those of 
any other country bordering on the Mediterranean, except the 
rice-grounds in Italy, and perhaps the marcite or winter mea- 
dows of Lombardy ; but irrigation is more or less employed 
throughout almost the entire basin of that sea, and is every- 
* Ritter supposes Egypt to have been a sandy desert when it was first 
occupied by man. ‘‘ The first inhabitant of the sandy valley of the Nile was 
a desert-dweller, as his neighbors right and left, the Libyan, the nomade 
Arab, still are. But the civilized people of Egypt transformed, by canals, 
he waste into the richest granary of the world; they liberated themselves 
from the shackles of the rock and sand desert, in the midst of which, by a 
wise distribution of the fluid through the solid geographical form, by izri- 
gation in short, they created a region of culture most rich in historical monu- 
ments.”"—Hinleitung zur allgemeinen vergieichenden Geograuphie, pp. 165, 165. 
This view seems to me highly improbable ; for great rivers, in warm climates, 
are never bordered by sandy plains. A small stream may be swallowed up 
by sands, but if the volume of water is too large to be carried off by evapora- 
tion or drank up by absorption, it saturates its banks with moisture, and 
unless resisted by art, converts them into marshes covered with aquatic 
vegetation. By canals and embankments, man has done much to modify the 
natural distribution of the waters of the Nile; yet the annual inundation is not 
his work, and the river must have overflowed its banks and carried spontaneous 
vegetation with its waters, as well before as since Egypt was first occupied by 
the human family. There is, indeed, some reason to suppose that man lived 
upon the banks of the Nile when its channel was much lower, and the spread 
of its inundations much narrower, than at present; but wherever its flood 
reached, there the forest would propagate itself, and its shores would certainly 
have been morasses rather than sands. 
The opinions of Ritter on this subject are not only improbable, but they are 
contradictory to the little historical testimony we possess. Herodotus informs 
us in Huterpe that except the province of Thebes, all Egypt, that is to say, the 
whole of the Delta and of middle Egypt extending to Hemopolis Magna in N. 
L. 27° 45’, was originally amorass. This morass was doubtless in great part 
covered with trees, and hence, in the most ancient hieroglyphical records, a 
tree is the sign for the cultivated land between the desert and the channel of 
the Nile. In all probability, the real change effected by human art in the 
superficial geography of Egypt, isthe conversion of pools and marshes into dry 
land, by a system of transverse dikes, which compelled the flood-water to 
deposit its sediment on the banks of the river instead of carrying it to the sea. 
The colmate of modern Italy were thus anticipated in ancient Egypt. 
