Indianapolis Times, Volume 39, Number 168, Indianapolis, Marion County, 22 November 1927 — Page 10

PAGE 10

aaviu^rioN by DR.WILL DURANT

mN the Egyptian desert, west of Thebes, two colossi stand, giant statues of an ancient Pharaoh, Amenhotep 111. Centuries of sand and wind have worn them down, so that the lordly features of the King can hardly be discerned, and careless generations have battered them almost to fragments, leaving great" holes like wounds in the apparently impenetrable stone. On one of the figures may be read the scribbling of Greek tourists who came there some decades before the birth of Christ—already these monuments were gazed upon as relics of a distant past, ancient even to antiquity. Behind them lie two fragments of a massive “stela,” or slab, pockmarked where once it was encrusted with precious jewelry and gold, and bearing a proud inscription by Amenhotep the King, “My Majesty has done these things for millions of years, and I know that they will abide in the earth.” Yes, as we shall all abide in the earth. Those statues were built about 1400 B. C. The immense temple of which they formed one approach was destroyed 200 years later by Amenhotep’s descendants. To the Greeks the statues seemed very old, and yet they were nearer in time to those Greeks than to the

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great Pyramids which had inaugurated Egyptian history 3,000 years before. Can we ever realize that Cheops was as ancient to Pericles (who heard with wonder Herodotus’ account of Egypt) as Pericles is to us? How the centuries were buried, slowly and patiently, one after another by those wind-swept sands! Still today the sands are burying them, and while we write and read the Pyramids struggle to preserve themselves against the eddies of the desert. Greece flared up and died away in half a thousand years; Rome lived little more than a millennium; but the epic of Egypt begins with the introduction of the calendar in 4241 B. C. and does not end till the conquest by Rome in the generation thatLsaw the coming of Christ. , It is to the story of Greece what Homer’s “Odyssey” is to a Pindaric ode. Nowhere has a civilization lasted longer. ' . Could anything oe more ridiculous than an attempt to compress within a little hour those forty centuries of struggle, passion, labor and creation? tt tt tt A '""“"l S you enter Egypt at Alexandria you pass (now by dusty i__J train, once by weary foot and caravan) southward along one of the mouths of the Nile. Looking on either side you see the verdant basis of Egyptian civilization—the rich, dark soil made fertile by the periodic overflow of the most historic river in the world. On every side are irrigation canals, some of them as old as the Pyramids. Here and there water is being raised from its natural level as it was raised in the time of Cheops—with leathern buckets poised on poles and lifted by counterweights into the rivulets that feed the soil. Peasants run about, indifferently on land or through the streams. They are not much concerned for their clothing, since they make no concession to fashion beyond a loin cloth. They are called “fellaheen” now. Once they had another name, and before that another still, but immemorially they have been there. It is astonishing how long one must ride before reaching Cairo. One thought of it as near the coast, but it is a hundred miles to the south, at the lowest comer of that fertile triangle which the Greeks (from their letter D) called the Delta. Doubtless that triangle—which

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looks on the map like the leaves of a lofty palm held up by the slender Nile—was once a bay. Slowly the great river filled it with alluvial deposits from its endless bed, and it became the granary of Egypt. Even at Cairo the Nile has but begun. Steamers run from the capital six days upstream to Assuan, where the waters are dammed to regulate the overflow; and yea Assuan itself is far nearer to the riser’s mouth than its source. All in all the Nile winds through mountains, cataracts and sand for 4,000 patient miles. No wonder the Egyptians themselves never knew its origins, and waited for Alexander’s scientists to discover the melting snows of the distant Abyssinian peaks as the cause of that vernal flood which made civilization possible in Egypt. tt tt tt N either side the desert lay, where only barbarism could subsist; for the first requisite of civilization is water. Five miles (and often less) to left or right of the river one comes upon the sand; in flies up bitingly into the face, and only the veiled Bedouins can bear it. • From the mouth of the Nile to Thebes, where the ancient capital lay, habitable Egypt was a ribbon of river and soil. 750 miles in length, but in total area less than little Belgium. And yet in that narrow strip man felt himself favored and built many temples of gratitude to the gods; for nothing could have been so beneficent as that providential overflow. Herodotus described the inhabitants jealously; they “obtain the fruits of the field with less trouble than any other people in the world, since they have no need to break

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up the ground with tjhe plough, nor to use the hoe, nor to do any of the work which the rest of mankind find necessary if they are to get a crop. “But the husbandman waits till the river has- of its own accord spread over the fields and withdrawn again to its bed; then he sows his plot of ground and turns his swine into it freely. “The swine tread in the com, and the peasant need only await the harvest.” During the overflow “the country is converted into a sea; and nothing appears but the cities, which look then like the islands in the Aegean.” And even those cities were built of bricks from alluvial clay. So generous was the Nile. tt u a —■ HUS encouraged, Egypt made at an early date that passage from nomad herding to settled agriculture which is the beginning of civilized society. Men could live in one place now, building houses, churches, schools and states; they could put behind them the barbaric chase—nurse of cruelty and greed—and N give themselves to the pacifying quiet of the fields. Slowly, as the peasants toiled, an economic surplus grew, and food was laid aside for workers engaged in industry and trade. Some men found their way across Suez or the Peninsula of Sinai, and opened up great copper mines there. Within a century those mines had made Egypt master of the Mediterranean. First, of course (since already there were kings), the metal was

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used for war—bronze swords, helmets and shields gave the soldiers of Egypt an advantage over every foe. v Then came industrial tools wedges, rollers, wheels, levers, windlasses, pulleys, screws and lathes, drills ,t#iat could bore the toughest diorite and saws that could cut the massive lids of the sarcophagi. Egyptian workers made bricks, cement and plaster of Paris; they glazed pottery, blew glass and glorified it with color. They knew the arts of enamelling and varnishing, and developed chemistry for many industrial purposes. They made tissues of the finest weaving known in the history of textiles; specimens of linen woven by them four thousand years ago show to this day a “weave so fine that it requires a magnifying glass to distinguish it from silk; the best work of the modern machine loom is coarse in comparison with this fabric of the ancient Egyptian hand loom.” (Breasted). “If we compare the technical Inventory of the Egyptians with our own,” says Peschel, “it is evident that before the invention of the steam engine we excelled them in scarcely anything.” With these aids transport grew,

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and achieved marvels without precedent. Canals were dug between the impassable cataracts of the Nile, great vessels were built that could carry

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logs of cedar from Lebanon across the Mediterranean, blocks ok granite thirty feet in length and sixty tons in weight were borne over land and water for hundreds of miles.

NOV. 22, 1927 j

Everywhere along the Nile thS picture was one of lively industry} and trade. (Copyright, 1927, by Will Durant) 1 (To Be Continued)