24 PERRY, Terraced Cultivation and Irrigation. 



we can only suppose to have been caused by foreign 

 influence, and for this foreign influence we must look to 

 countries already acquainted with the use of metal, and 

 practising that mode of architecture, and those religious 

 rites which they would seem to have introduced among 

 the Firbolgs, whose name Warner translates as " creeping 

 or cave men" although Keating ("History of Ireland") 

 gives a legend that they were the descendants of the first 

 Greek colonists .... and he derives the term Firbolg 

 from Fir, signifying men, and Bolg, a bag, from the 

 leathern bags they had been compelled to wear, to carry 

 clay dug from pits to the top of hills, to make a soil upon 

 the rocks for cultivation. I do not know what traces of 

 the terraced cultivation, so much in use in Southern 

 Europe, are to be found in Ireland/' 



This is surely a remarkable confirmation of an asso- 

 ciation of practices at which Mr. Perry had arrived 

 inductively from other evidence derived from the Far 

 East. 



He has not attempted to discuss the origin of terraced- 

 irrigation. 



From time immemorial a system of cultivation and 

 irrigation, which presents man)- striking analogies to 

 the terraced-method, was in practice in Babylonia and 

 Egypt ; but we have no certain knowledge as to which 

 people was the inventor of it. 



There can be little doubt that terraced-cultivation and 

 irrigation originated, probably in Southern Arabia, as a 

 modification of the more ancient Egyptian and Sumerian 

 method of cultivating and irrigating the banks of their 

 respective rivers. 



The ancient Egyptian records contain the earliest 

 references to terraced-cultivation ; for in the account 

 inscribed in Queen Hatshepsut's temple at Deir el Bahari 



