37 6 AGRICULTURE. 



be prepared and cleared from plants ; and, secondly, that the 

 mixture of rich mould and sand would produce fertility. 



The invention of agricultural implements must have been 

 coeval with the invention of cultivation ; and, accordingly, they 

 are supposed to have originated in Egypt. Antiquarians are 

 agreed that the primeval implement used in cultivating the soil 

 must have been the pick. A medal of the greatest antiquity, 

 dug up at Syracuse, contained an impression of such an instru- 

 ment ; and its progress till it became a plow has been recognized 

 in a cameo, published by Menestrier, on which a pick-like plow 

 is drawn by two serpents. It may also be seen on a medal from 

 the village of Enna, in Sicily, in a figure given as found on an 

 antique tomb, in an Etruscan plow copied from a fragment in 

 the Roman college at Rome, by Lasteyrie. This plow, there 

 can be little doubt, was used in war as well as in agriculture, 

 and seems to have been of that kind with which the Israelites 

 fought against their enemies, the Philistines. 



Whether the culture of grains was invented in Egypt or not, 

 all testimonies concur that cultivation was carried to a higher 

 degree of perfection there than in any other country of antiq- 

 uity. The canals and banks which still remain in Lower Egypt, 

 and especially in the Delta, are evidences of the extent to which 

 embanking, irrigation, and drainage have been carried. 



Landed property, in ancient Egypt, it would appear, was 

 the absolute right of the owners, till, by the procurement of 

 Joseph, in the eighteenth century B.C., the paramount or allodial 

 property of the whole was transferred to the government. The 

 king, however, made no other use of that right than to place 

 the former occupiers in the situation of tenants, bound to pay a 

 rent or land tax of one-fifth of the produce. This, Moses says, 

 continued to be the law of Egypt down to his time ; and the 

 same thing is confirmed by the testimony of Herodotus. The 

 soil of Egypt is compared by Pliny to that of the Leontines, 

 formerly regarded as the most fertile in Sicily. There, he says, 

 grain yields a hundred for one ; but Cicero has proved this to be 

 an exaggeration, and that the ordinary increase in that part of 

 Sicily is eight to one. Granger, who paid much attention to the 

 subject, says that the lands nearest the Nile, which during 

 the inundation were covered with water forty days, did not, 



