DIKES OF THE NILE. 499 



large part of the population. Tlie Egyptians then perceived that 

 they were struggling against nature in vain, and they resolved to 

 remove the dikes, and permit the river to expand itself laterally 

 and raise by its deposits the surface of the fields which border its 

 channel." * 



The original texts of the passages cited by Mengotti, from 

 Latin translations of Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch and from 

 Pliny the Elder, do not by any means confirm this statement, 

 though the most important of them, that from Diodorus Siculus, 

 is, perhaps, not irreconcilable with it. ]^ot one of them speaks 

 of the removal of the dikes, and I understand them all as 

 relating to the mixed system of embankments, reservoirs and 

 canals which has been employed in Egypt through the whole 

 period concerning which we have clear information. I suppose 

 that the disastrous inundations, referred to by the authors in 

 question, were simply extraordinary floods of the same character 

 as those which have been frequent at later periods of Egyptian 

 history, and I find nothing in support of the proposition that con- 

 tinuous embankments along the banks of the JSTile ever existed 

 until such were constructed by Mehemet Ah.f 



The ■ object of the dikes of the Po, and, with few ^exceptions, 

 of those of other European rivers, has always been to confine 

 the waters of floods and the solid material transported by them 

 within as narrow a channel as possible, and entirely to prevent 

 them from flowing over the adjacent plains. The object of the 

 Egyptian dikes and canals is the reverse, namely, to diffuse the 

 swelling waters and their sediment over as wide a surface as pos- 

 sible, to store them up until the soil they cover has been thor- 



* Idraulica Fisica e Sperimentale. 2d edizione, vol. i., pp. 131, 133. 



t The gradual elevation of the bed of the Nile from sedimentary deposit, 

 from the prolongation of the Delta and consequent reduction of the inclination 

 of the river-bed. or, as has been supposed by some, though without probability, 

 from a secular rise of the coast, rendered necessary some change in the 

 hydraulic arrangements of Egypt. Mehemet Ali was advised to adopt a sys- 

 tem of longitudinal levees, and he embanked the river from Jebel Silsileh to 

 the sea with dikes six or seven feet high and twenty feet thick. Similar em- 

 bankments were made around the Delta. These dikes are provided with 

 transverse embankments, with sluices for admitting and canals for distributing 

 the water, and they serve rather to retain the water and control its flow than 

 to exclude it. — Clot Bey, Aperru sur I'Egypte, ii., 437. 



