ISBN: 9781458894434

Marcius Willson, Paperback, English-language edition, Pub by General Books LLC Books Outlines-of-History~~Marcius-Willson General Books LLC Purchase of this book includes free trial acce… More...

Marcius Willson, Paperback, English-language edition, Pub by General Books LLC Books Outlines-of-History~~Marcius-Willson General Books LLC 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: priesthood, whcse members were the patrons of tbe arts and sciences and it is supposed that the nation was divided into three distmc classes, ?the priests, the military, and the people;?the two formel holding the latter and most numerous bodyjn subjection. After this government had existed nearly two centuries, under rulers whose names have perished, Mnes, a military chieftain, is supposed to have subverted the ancient sacerdotal despotism, and to have established th1 first civil monarchy, about 2400 years before the Christian era. Mnes was the first Pharaoh, a name common to all the kingi of Egypt. 9, Upon the authority of Herod'otus1 and Josephus,9 to the first king, Mnes, is attributed the founding of Memphis,3 probably the most ancient city in Egypt. Other writers ascribe to him the building of Thebes4 also; but some suppose that Thebes was built manycenturies later. Mnes appears to have been occupio, during most of his reign, in wars with foreign nations to us unknown. According to numerous traditions, recorded in later iges, he also cultivated the arts of peace; he protected religion and the priesthood, and erected temples; ho built walls of defence on the frontier of his kingdom? and he dug numerous canals, and constructed dikes, both to draw off lean, on the east by the Isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea, on the south by Nubia, and on the west by the t i real Desert and the province of larca. The cultivated portion of Egypt, embraced mostly within a narrow valley of from five li twenty mile in widlh, ie indebted wholly lo the annual inundations of the Nile for its fertility and without them, wuitid soon become a barren waste. The rivee-begins to swell, in its higher parts, in April; but al the Delta no increase occurs until the beginning of June. Its greate...<