Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1867 edition. Excerpt: ...Memphis;" and his expression "fuit" seems to imply that it no longer existed in his time. From Strabo s mentioning 2 mouths of the canal that communicated with the lake, one of which was used, during the low Nile, for letting off the water wanted for irrigation, it is evident he had in view the artificial lake, not the Birket el Korn: and in his account of 2 mouths of the canals, wliich ran. by the Heracleopolito nomo on the rt., towards Libya (i.e. on the western side of it), to the Arsinoite, so that the canal had a double mouth, and enclosed between its 2 channels a portion of the island in which tho Heracleopolito nome stood, Strabo evidently alludes to 2 channels or canals from the Nile, that took the water into the Arsinoito nome to feed the hike. One of them, I imagine, left the Nile some distance to the 8., and ran diagonally along the Libyan hills, where the Bnhr Yoosef still flows; and the other left it much lower down to the eastward of the Fyoom,--as an auxiliary canal still does, in the neighbourhood of Benisoopf. It was probably at the union of these 2 branches that the sluices for irrigating the Arsinoite nome were fixed; and the northern was the only one oponed during the low Nile. The account of the water returning from the lake to the Nile on the retiring of the inundation is totally inapplicable to the Birket el Korn, the level of its surface being about 100 ft. lower than the. bank of the river at Benisooef; which, making every allowance for the rise of the bed of tho Nile, and the proportionate elevation of its banks, could never have been on a level, even in Herodotus"s time, with that lake; and consequently no return of the water could have takeu place from it to the Nile. And that the surface of the...