of Yemen, Arabia Felix, constituted a commercial state, happy, prosperous, and powerful, rather from its industry and maritime enterprise, than from the balms and fragrant odours which perfumed the land. Their ships sailed to the mouths of the Ganges, and transported the products of India and Ceylon to the ports of the Erythræan Sea, the emporia of a traffic to be thence diffused along the Nile and among the dwellers on the Mediterranean coasts. In time they, too, must march forth as an invading nation to the limits, where Carthage was afterwards built on the north-west, and, in alliance perhaps with the King of Nineveh, to the frontiers of Persia, Turkestan; or India on the east. Then they called their capital Saba, the victorious, and from that time gradually tended to decay. Protected from Oriental as afterwards from Roman invasions by the desert, they ever retained some power; but when Israel was at its point of culmination, when the Queen of Sheba visited, and, as some say, became the wife of Solomon, the Sabæan dominion had declined. Arabian mariners have, however, in all time maintained a reputation for enterprise and extensive voyaging by sea.

102. But the glory of Sheba has departed. Villages occupy the sites of the Homerite cities, and Aden is a coaldepôt for the steamers of the descendants of those whom her forefathers deemed barbarians of the western seas. Yet behold, traversing in every direction over the barren sands, hosts of camels, countless caravans, from all the borders of Islam, swarming to the Kebla, the sacred tomb of one of the greatest of the sons of men; from Russia, from Siberia, from China, from India, from Istamboul, from Syria, from Egypt, from Africa, they come, they come; in thousands and tens of thousands the pilgrim merchants are crowding over the arid wastes to their devotions and to their trade; Mecca holds her religious festival, and summons the faithful to her fair.

103. MUSCAT.-On the north-eastern coasts, on the margin

of the Persian Gulf, once stood towns which almost rivalled the fame of Sabæa, which received like her the spices and the merchandise of Serendib and Hindostan, and by the camels of Midian and Moab and Idumæa conveyed them to Petra, the empress of the rocks, on their destinations to Egypt, Phoenicia, and the furthest west. There, near where the promontory of Oman divides the gulf, in the midst of rude rocks and breakers, surrounded by desolation, founded in piracy and nurtured in blood, has sprung up a representative of the ancient Arabian fame. In her cavernous recess, among pinnacled cliffs and ragged precipices, and on the rugged islets of her loch, amidst frowning batteries and busy docks, sits Muscat; her ships are bearing the ivory of Africa, the spices and merchandise of India, and the opulence of Europe to her feet.

104. THE EGYPTIANS of Memphis, 3500 years before the Christian era, and centuries before that period the Egyptians of Thebes, navigated the bounteous Nile. Their river was their great highway, and during no inconsiderable portion of the year its northern regions were a wide expanse of water, dotted with towns and villages extending to the They drew a material portion of their sustenance from those waters, which irrigated their land. They traversed them in boats of respectable dimensions and occasionally of enormous magnitude, as well as in boats of wicker and reeds, and on bladders and bottles, and bundles and logs of wood.

sea.

105. A ship was the religious emblem of Egypt. The ordinary river-craft were generally flat-bottomed or provided with a very shallow keel, on account of the ever-varying shoals and banks of sand. They were impelled and furnished, even the fishing-boats, with sails and oars. They had cabins and compartments, often spacious; some gorgeously furnished for princes and passengers, others adapted to cattle and stores; some of large size for commerce. The sails were of reed, like the Chinese, or of linen from the Egyptian loom, generally square, with a yard above and below.

106. On the coasts of the Red Sea, and occasionally on the Mediterranean, they fitted out vessels of war-some of considerable dimensions; but the Egyptians were not a seafaring race.

107. More than 1300 years before the Christian era, Ramses Miamoun the victorious indulged, in anticipation of the Ptolemies, in the building of a monstrous ship, rather a palace than a thing of use. This structure was chiefly formed of cedar, 420 feet in length and 72 feet from the keel to the top of the poop, probably based on a double vessel―

an enormous paragua.

103. They delighted in various and gaudy colours, not only in the body of the vessel, but in the sails; and each exhibited on its standard a device, a phoenix or a sphinx, or some other emblem of royalty or religion, sometimes on the long projected pole of the rudder, sometimes at the head of the ship.

109. The Israelites might have found in Egypt models for their ark, not only in the religious ceremonies, but on the waters of the Nile.

110. About (1350–1345 B.C.) a century and a half after the exode of the Israelites, and while they were endeavouring to rescue themselves from slavery under Moab, Sesostris (Ramses Miamoun) commenced his career of conquest, the greatest which Egypt achieved. His army is represented as having consisted of 600,000 infantry, 24,000 horse, and 27,000 chariots, and his navy of 400 ships. He is said, at about the same time, to have sent as many ships with linen sails to India. His conquests are said to have comprised Arabia, India, Bactria, Persia, Cappadocia, and Colchis on the Phasis, the last of which he colonized; and it is said that evidence of his colonization remained, in the swarthy skins and woolly hair and traces of the Egyptian language among the inhabitants, to the time of the first historian of Greece. He left there also maps, engraved on pillars of brass; the first traces of the delineation of the earth of which

we are informed, but copied perhaps from those in the Egyptian archives, whence Moses may have derived, if he wrote it, the description of the nations of the earth.

111. During one short period afterwards the Pharaohs held the dominion of the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea. 112. But their ships were probably manned with Phonician mariners, those from the coast of Asia Minor, Arabia, and the isles of Cyprus and Crete, for the Egyptians abhorred the sea. The river and its commerce were their own, but they dreaded the ocean and all who traversed it; and as the habit of those who frequented their northern coasts much resembled that of the ancient Saxons and Danes, as we find from the exploits of Menelaus, who gloried in the atrocities of the buccaneer, we need not feel surprised at the Pharaohs restricting commerce for the most part to a single port. Naucratis was built and chiefly inhabited by Greeks.

113. But the Egyptians were considerable manufacturers, and through other nations carried on an extensive trade. The catalogue of their productions would exceed the dimensions of this book. They were a sumptuous and luxurious nation; their temples and their palaces were vast and gorgeously adorned; and in these adornments we read the history of their progress, and the description of their productions, their manufactures, and their arts. In the colossal works of the architect and the sculptor, in the manipulations of gold and of silver, and of bronze and of tin, the precious and the useful metals alike; in the most beautiful varieties of glass, in fine linen and in paper, and infinite works of industry, the Egyptians excelled. They exported the produce of this industry for the raw material which they required. The statues of their ancient monarchs were wrought with chisels fabricated from British tin mixed with copper, possibly from the Cornish, more probably from the Spanish mines.

114. They participated in the traffic of the Sabæans with India and Taprobane, from the neighbourhood of their fron

tier on the Red Sea. They derived the products of the East, which came by land and the Persian Gulf, by the caravans through Damascus and Petra, and the produce of the West by ships and caravans from the Phoenician ports.

115. And although they dreaded the sea and the piratical ships which swarmed upon it, the Pharaohs were the patrons of maritime enterprise and discovery. It was under them that the Phoenician expedition circumnavigated Africa, sailing by the Erythræan, doubling the Cape of Good Hope, and returning through the Pillars of Hercules to their port in the Mediterranean Sea. This disputed but indubitable event occurred in the reign, and under the auspices, of Necho, 610 years before the Christian era, while Cyaxares was driving back the Scythians, and the Phocæans were fitting out their expedition for the founding of Marseilles.

116. The same Necho renewed the attempt, which had been first made by Sesostris, to unite by a canal the Erythræan with the Mediterranean Sea.

117. Engineers, with skill and appliances and powers unknown to the Pharaohs, have resumed in a different direction the difficult, if not desperate, undertaking. Ptolemy indirectly accomplished the object to some extent. The iron-road has attained most of the purposes for which the canal was required.

118. The commerce of Egypt on the Red Sea was conducted chiefly by the Arabians of her own and the opposite coasts. Her commerce on the Mediterranean was conducted chiefly by the Phoenician and the Greek. It was with their forces that she temporarily exercised dominion over the neighbouring portion of the Mediterranean Sea. Each was alternately her enemy or her ally. After the foundation of Naucratis by the Milesians, about the time of Necho, in the Canopic mouth of the Nile, with an independence of the sovereign government, such as a great Hanse town in after ages enjoyed, the Phoenicians were to a considerable extent excluded from the Egyptian coasts.