History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) eBook

Gaston Maspero
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 355 pages of information about History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12).

History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) eBook

Gaston Maspero
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 355 pages of information about History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12).
eve of a campaign against Ethiopia; the galiots of the negroes there awaited permission to sail below the rapids, and to enter Egypt with their cargoes.  At once a military station and a river custom-house, Semneh was the necessary bulwark of the new Egypt, and Usirtasen III. emphatically proclaimed the fact, in two decrees, which he set up there for the edification of posterity.  “Here is,” so runs the first, “the southern boundary fixed in the year VIII. under his Holiness of Khakeri, Usirtasen, who gives life always and for ever, in order that none of the black peoples may cross it from above, except only for the transport of animals, oxen, goats, and sheep belonging to them.”  The edict of the year XVI. reiterates the prohibition of the year VIII., and adds that “His Majesty caused his own statue to be erected at the landmarks which he himself had set up.”  The beds of the first and second cataracts were then less worn away than they are now; they are therefore more efficacious in keeping back the water and forcing it to rise to a higher level above.  The cataracts acted as indicators of the inundation, and if their daily rise and fall were studied, it was possible to announce to the dwellers on the banks lower down the river the progress and probable results of the flood.

[Illustration:  353.jpg THE CHANNEL OF THE NILE BETWEEN THE TWO FORTRESSES OF SEMNEH AND KUMMEH]

     Reproduction by Faucher-Gudin of a sketch published by
     Cailliaud, Voyage a Meroe, Atlas, vol. ii. pl. xxx.

As long as the dominion of the Pharaohs reached no further than Philae, observations of the Nile were always taken at the first cataract; and it was from Elephantine that Egypt received the news of the first appearance and progress of the inundation.  Amenemhait III. set up a new nilometer at the new frontier, and gave orders to his officers to observe the course of the flood.  They obeyed him scrupulously, and every time that the inundation appeared to them to differ from the average of ordinary years, they marked its height on the rocks of Semneh and Kummeh, engraving side by side with the figure the name of the king and the date of the year.  The custom was continued there under the XIIIth dynasty; afterwards, when the frontier was pushed further south, the nilometer accompanied it.

The country beyond Semneh was virgin territory, almost untouched and quite uninjured by previous wars.  Its name now appears for the first time upon the monuments, in the form of Kaushu—­the humbled Kush.  It comprised the districts situated to the south within the immense loop described by the river between Dongola and Khartoum, those vast plains intersected by the windings of the White and Blue Niles, known as the regions of Kordofan and Darfur; it was bounded by the mountains of Abyssinia, the marshes of Lake Nu, and all those semi-fabulous countries to which were relegated the “Isles of the Manes” and the “Lands of Spirits.”  It was separated from the

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History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.