If the Egyptian farmer of the olden time could get no help, except
at the rarest intervals, from the official or sacerdotal calendar,
he must have been compelled to observe for himself those natural
signals which marked the times for the various operations of
husbandry. In all ages of which we possess any records the Egyptians
have been an agricultural people, dependent for their subsistence on
the growth of the corn. The cereals which they cultivated were
wheat, barley, and apparently sorghum (_Holcus sorghum,_ Linnaeus),
the _doora_ of the modern fellaheen. Then as now the whole country,
with the exception of a fringe on the coast of the Mediterranean,
was almost rainless, and owed its immense fertility entirely to the
annual inundation of the Nile, which, regulated by an elaborate
system of dams and canals, was distributed over the fields, renewing
the soil year by year with a fresh deposit of mud washed down from
the great equatorial lakes and the mountains of Abyssinia. Hence the
rise of the river has always been watched by the inhabitants with
the utmost anxiety; for if it either falls short of or exceeds a
certain height, dearth and famine are the inevitable consequences.
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