CHAP. III. DELTA AND ALLUVIAL PLAIN OF THE NILE. CHAPTER III. FOSSIL HUMAN REMAINS AND WORKS OF ART OF THE Continued. DELTA AND ALLUVIAL PLAIN OF THE NILE BURNT BRICKS IN EGYPT BEFORE THE ROMAN ERA BORINGS IN 1851-54 ANCIENT MOUNDS SOME Delta and Alluvial Plain of the Nile. (OME new facts of high interest illustrating the geology of the alluvial land of Egypt were brought to light between the years 1851 and 1854, in consequence of investigations suggested to the Royal Society by Mr. Leonard Horner, and which were partly carried out at the expense of the Society. The practical part of the undertaking was entrusted by Mr. Horner to an Armenian officer of engineers, Hekekyan Bey, who had for many years pursued his scientific studies in England, and was in every way highly qualified for the task. It was soon found that to obtain the required information respecting the nature, depth, and contents of the Nile mud in various parts of the valley, a larger outlay was called for than had been originally contemplated. This expense the late viceroy, Abbas Pacha, munificently undertook to defray D 34 DELTA AND ALLUVIAL PLAIN OF THE NILE. CHAP. III. out of his treasury, and his successor, after his death, continued the operations with the same princely liberality. Several engineers and a body of sixty workmen were employed under the superintendence of Hekekyan Bey, men inured to the climate, and able to carry on the sinking of shafts and borings during the hot months, after the waters of the Nile had subsided, and in a season which would have been fatal to Europeans. The results of chief importance arising out of this enquiry were obtained from two sets of shafts and borings sunk at intervals in lines crossing the great valley from east to west. One of these consisted of no fewer than fifty-one pits and artesian perforations, made where the valley is sixteen miles wide from side to side between the Arabian and Lybian deserts, in the latitude of Heliopolis, about eight miles above the apex of the delta. The other line of borings and pits, twenty-seven in number, was in the parallel of Memphis, where the valley is only five miles broad. Everywhere in these sections the sediment passed through was similar in composition to the ordinary Nile mud of the present day, except near the margin of the valley, where thin layers of quartzose sand, such as is sometimes blown from the adjacent desert by violent winds, was observed to alternate with the loam. A remarkable absence of lamination and stratification was observed almost universally in the sediment brought up from all points except where the sandy layers above alluded to occurred, the mud agreeing closely in character with the ancient loam of the Rhine, called loess. Mr. Horner attributes this want of all indication of successive deposition to the extreme thinness of the film of matter which is thrown down annually on the great alluvial plain during the season of inundation. The tenuity of this layer must indeed be extreme, if the French engineers are tolerably correct in their estimate CHAP. III. DELTA AND ALLUVIAL PLAIN OF THE NILE. 35 of the amount of sediment formed in a century, which they suppose not to exceed on the average five inches. When the waters subside, this thin layer of new soil, exposed to a hot sun, dries rapidly, and clouds of dust are raised by the winds. The superficial deposit, moreover, is disturbed almost everywhere by agricultural labours, and even were this not the case, the action of worms, insects, and the roots of plants would suffice to confound together the deposits of two successive years. All the remains of organic bodies, such as land-shells, and the bones of quadrupeds, found during the excavations belonged to living species. Bones of the ox, hog, dog, dromedary, and ass were not uncommon, but no vestiges of extinct mammalia. No marine shells were anywhere detected; but this was to be expected, as the borings, though they sometimes reached as low as the level of the Mediterranean, were never carried down below it,-a circumstance much to be regretted, since where artesian perforations have been made in deltas, as in those of the Po and Ganges, to the depth of several hundred feet below the sea level, it has been found, contrary to expectation, that the deposits passed through were fluviatile throughout, implying, probably, that a general subsidence of those deltas and alluvial formations has taken place. Whether there has been in like manner a sinking of the land in Egypt, we have as yet no means of proving; but Sir Gardner Wilkinson infers it from the position in the delta on the shore near Alexandria of the tombs commonly called Cleopatra's Baths, which cannot, he says, have been originally built so as to be exposed to the sea which now fills them, but must have stood on land above the level of the Mediterranean. The same author adduces, as additional signs of subsidence, some ruined towns, now half under water, in the Lake Menzaleh, and channels of ancient arms of the Nile submerged with their banks beneath the waters of that same lagoon. In some instances, the excavations made under the super 36 BORINGS IN EGYPT IN 1851-1858. CHAP. III, intendence of Hekekyan Bey were on a large scale for the first sixteen or twenty-four feet, in which cases jars, vases, pots, and a small human figure in burnt clay, a copper knife, and other entire articles were dug up; but when water soaking through from the Nile was reached, the boring instrument used was too small to allow of more than fragments of works of art being brought up. Pieces of burnt brick and pottery were extracted almost everywhere, and from all depths, even where they sank sixty feet below the surface towards the central parts of the valley. In none of these cases did they get to the bottom of the alluvial soil. It has been objected, among other criticisms, that the Arabs can always find whatever their employers desire to obtain. Even those who are too well acquainted with the sagacity and energy of Hekekyan Bey to suspect him of having been deceived, have suggested that the artificial objects might have fallen into old wells which had been filled up. This notion is inadmissible for many reasons. Of the ninetyfive shafts and borings, seventy or more were made far from the sites of towns or villages; and allowing that every field may once have had its well, there would be but small chance of the borings striking upon the site even of a small number of them in seventy experiments. Others have suggested that the Nile may have wandered over the whole valley, undermining its banks on one side and filling up old channels on the other. It has also been asked whether the delta with the numerous shifting arms of the river may not once have been at every point where the auger pierced. To all these objections there are two obvious answers:-First, in historical times the Nile has on the whole been very stationary, and has not shifted its position in the valley; secondly, if the mud pierced through had been thrown down by the river in ancient channels, it would have *For a detailed account of these sections, see Mr. Horner's paper in the Philosophical Transactions for 1855 1858. CHAP. III. BORINGS IN EGYPT IN 1851-1858. 37 been stratified, and would not have corresponded so closely with inundation mud. We learn from Captain Newbold that he observed in some excavations in the great plain alternations of sand and clay, such as are seen in the modern banks of the Nile; but in the borings made by Hekekyan Bey, such stratification seems scarcely in any case to have been detected. The great aim of the criticisms above enumerated has been to get rid of the supposed anomaly of finding burnt brick and pottery at depths and places which would give them claim to an antiquity far exceeding that of the Roman domination in Egypt. For until the time of the Romans, it is said, no clay was burnt into bricks in the valley of the Nile. But a distinguished antiquary, Mr. S. Birch, assures me that this notion is altogether erroneous, and that he has under his charge in the British Museum, first, a small rectangular baked brick, which came from a Theban tomb, which bears the name of Thothmes, a superintendent of the granaries of the god Amen Ra, the style of art, inscription, and name, showing that it is as old as the 18th dynasty (about 1450 B.C.); secondly, a brick bearing an inscription, partly obliterated, but ending with the words of the temple of Amen Ra.' This brick, decidedly long anterior to the Roman dominion, is referred conjecturally, by Mr. Birch, to the 19th dynasty, or 1300 B.C. Sir Gardner Wilkinson has also in his possession pieces of mortar, which he took from each of the three great pyramids, in which bits of broken pottery and of burnt clay or brick are imbedded. M. Girard, of the French expedition to Egypt, supposed the average rate of the increase of Nile mud on the plain between Asouan and Cairo to be five English inches in a century. This conclusion, according to Mr. Horner, is very vague, and founded on insufficient data; the amount of matter thrown down by the waters in different parts of the plain varying so much, that to strike an average with any approach to accuracy must be most difficult. Were we to |