Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Kedivé

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. EGYPT THE JAPAN OF THE OLD WORLD. Nec vero terrae ferre omnes omnia possunt. Virgil. Egypt was the Japan of the old world. While Nature had separated it from other countries, she had given it within its own borders the means for satisfying all the wants felt by its inhabitants. They acted on...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. EGYPT THE JAPAN OF THE OLD WORLD. Nec vero terrae ferre omnes omnia possunt. Virgil. Egypt was the Japan of the old world. While Nature had separated it from other countries, she had given it within its own borders the means for satisfying all the wants felt by its inhabitants. They acted on the hint. Their general policy was to seclude themselves, to which, however, their history contains some conspicuous exceptions, and to exclude foreigners. They carried the mechanical arts and all that ministers to material well-being to a high degree of perfection. Like the Japanese, they did this with what they could win from Nature within the boundaries of their own country, and under what we are disposed to regard as very crippling disadvantages. Their moral sentiments, and their social and domestic life, were their own: the results of the working of their own ideas. This is what makes them so full of originality and so interesting a study of human development. All their customs and all that they did were devised by themselves to meet their own especial wants. They were self-contained and confident in themselves that they would always be able to find out both what would be best for them to do, and what would be the best way of doing it. Their success justified this self-reliance. All theordinary, and many of the more refined wants of man, were supplied so abundantly, and in so regular and well-ordered a fashion among them, that a modern traveller would find no discomfort, and much to wonder at and admire, in a year or two spent in such a country as was the Egypt of Rameses the Great. He would, indeed, be a very great gainer if he could find the Egypt of to-day just what Egypt was three thousand years ago. There are no other moderately-sized countries in the world ...