Note 339 — Chapter IV

Ritter supposes Egypt to have been a sandy desert when it was first occupied by man. "The first inhabitant of the sandy valley of the Nile was a desert dweller, as his neighbors right and left, the Libyan, the nomade Arab, still are. But the civilized people of Egypt transformed, by canals, the waste into the richest granary of the world; they liberated themselves from the shackles of the rock and sand desert, in the midst of which, by a wise distribution of the fluid through the solid geographical form, by irrigation in short, they created a region of culture most rich in historical monuments."—Einleitung zur allgemeinen vergleichenden Geographie, pp. 165, 166.

This view seems to me highly improbable; for though, by canals and embankments, man has done much to modify the natural distribution of the waters of the Nile, and possibly has even transferred its channel from one side of the valley to the other, yet the annual inundation is not his work, and the river must have overflowed its banks and carried spontaneous vegetation with its waters, as well before as since Egypt was first occupied by the human family. There is, indeed, some reason to suppose that man lived upon the banks of the Nile when its channel was much lower, and the spread of its inundations much narrower than at present; but wherever its flood reached, there the forest would propagate itself, and its shores are much more likely to have been morasses than sands.