as permanently a little country.  The conditions which we found here we took to be permanent conditions.  They were not.  We arrived when the country was in a most unnatural state as regards its foreign relations; and we were obliged to regard that state as chronic.  This, though wise, was absolutely incorrect.  Egypt in the past never has been for more than a short period a single country; and all history goes to show that she will not always be single in the future.

With the temporary loss of the Syrian province Egypt’s need for a navy ceased to exist; and the fact that she is really a naval power has now passed from men’s memory.  Yet it was not much more than a century ago that Muhammed Ali fought a great naval battle with the Turks, and utterly defeated them.  In ancient history the Egyptian navy was the terror of the Mediterranean, and her ships policed the east coast of Africa.  In prehistoric times the Nile boats were built, it would seem, upon a seafaring plan:  a fact that has led some scholars to suppose that the land was entered and colonised from across the waters.  We talk of Englishmen as being born to the sea, as having a natural and inherited tendency towards “business upon great waters”; and yet the English navy dates from the days of Queen Elizabeth.  It is true that the Plantagenet wars with France checked what was perhaps already a nautical bias, and that had it not been for the Norman conquest, England, perchance would have become a sea power at an earlier date.  But at best the tendency is only a thousand years old.  In Egypt it is seven or eight thousand years old at the lowest computation.  It makes one smile to think of Egypt as a naval power.  It is the business of the historian to refrain from smiling, and to remark only that, absurd as it may sound, Egypt’s future is largely upon the water as her past has been.  It must be remembered that she was fighting great battles in huge warships three or four hundred feet in length at a time when Britons were paddling about in canoes.

One of the ships built by the Pharaoh Ptolemy Philopator was four hundred and twenty feet long, and had several banks of oars.  It was rowed by four thousand sailors, while four hundred others managed the sails.  Three thousand soldiers were also carried upon its decks.  The royal dahabiyeh which this Pharaoh used upon the Nile was three hundred and thirty feet long, and was fitted with state rooms and private rooms of considerable size.  Another vessel contained, besides the ordinary cabins, large bath-rooms, a library, and an astronomical observatory.  It had eight towers, in which there were machines capable of hurling stones weighing three hundred pounds or more, and arrows eighteen feet in length.  These huge vessels were built some two centuries before Caesar landed in Britain.[1]

    [Footnote 1:  Athenaeus, v. 8.]