58 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



which the French Academy, in 1799, determined to be the 

 entire amount of variation of these faces from the true 

 astronomical direction. 1 Accidental mechanical imperfec- 

 tions in pivoting the needle, or in the shape of the latter, 

 might easily result in far greater error. The assumption 

 that an instrument free from fault existed in such remote 

 antiquity is, of course, untenable. 2 



The spirit of maritime enterprise which animated the 

 Phoenicians and Carthaginians, and even the Greeks, was 

 never rife among the Egyptians of early eras, and, at later 

 epochs, they were content to await the importation of goods 

 by the foreign merchants, and to do their bartering on 

 their own territory. They had no timber for ship-building, 

 and dreaded the sea. It was only after the ports were 

 opened and commerce was forced upon her that Hgpyt 

 became a maritime state, and obtained her timber from 

 Syria, and then Necho (610 B. C.) built his navy, part in 

 the Mediterranean and part in the Red Sea, and expended 

 120,000 lives in trying to cut a canal which would enable 

 him to unite his fleets. This failing, he sent the Red Sea 

 squadron to discover a route around the African continent, 

 which it did, rounding the Cape of Good Hope and enter- 

 ing the Mediterranean; but, as the ships sailed from point 

 to point along the coast, they expended three years in 

 making the trip, and so the king decided the undertaking 

 of no value. 3 It is hardly necessary to add that a mari- 



1 C. Piazzi Smyth : Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid, 3rd Ed., 

 Loud., 1877, 67. 



2 It has been argued that the Egyptian bda-n-pe, celestial iron, signifies 

 magnetic iron : and that the expression res-mehit-ba, south-north iron, 

 in the inscription of the pyramid of Unas (last Pharaoh of the 5th 

 dynasty), if correctly read, would indicate an Egyptian knowledge of 

 polarity. This, however, seems to be unsupported conjecture. De 

 Lacouperie : Chinese Civilization, cit sup. Deveria : Le Fer et I'Aitnant 

 dans 1'ancienne Egypte, 1870. 



8 Rawlinson : Ancient Monarchies, ii ; History of Egypt. Draper: 

 Intell. Dev. of Europe, i., 78 et seq. Kenrick: Anc. Egypt under the 

 Pharaohs, N. Y., 1853, vol. u, 36. Plutarch: Isis and Osiris, 363, c. 32. 



