Egypt [antikvár]

Egypt is a fortunate land. Within its borders lives a population which is friendly, good-na-tured, receptive, open to progress. For the proverbial fertility of its soil and the mildness of its climate, cold and hunger, those two afflictions which generate authentic social disorder in less favoured countries, are here practically unknown. And what of the Nile, the king of rivers? Each year, on more or less the same date, swollen by the torrential rains falling along the stretches of the Upper Nile, the river overflows its bed, inundates the land around it and withdraws again after having deposited a layer of precious slime. In other countries, the flooding of a river is usually a catastrophe. But Egypt, far from considering the Nile an enemy to be fought without respite, sees in it a friend to be thanked, a friend whose gift of fertility brings with it wealth. As a nation, Egypt merits our closest attention. Its role in the scheme of international affairs has always been important, almost comparable to that of any European state. There exists no major historical event, in fact, in which Egypt has not found itself involved by force of circumstance; this is the most significant aspect of its history. Egypt, unlike so many other countries, has not flashed brilliantly into sight for a few brief seconds, only to disappear forever in the obscurity of the ages. It has instead had the uncommon destiny of continuing to project its great prestige for seventy centuries. In this enormous lapse of time, at almost every epoch it has been pre-eminent in one field or another. Egypt is the cradle of all civilisations: while the rest of the world was still untouched by history, Cheops was building monuments that not even modern art can surpass in grandeur. Thot-Mosis, Amon-Ofis, Ramses, subjugated all the races of man known at the time. Under the Greeks and the Romans, Egypt continued to dominate, no longer with weapons but now with ideas. And it was the philosophical sects of Alexandria who brought to the point of supreme crisis the great spiritual movement which was to give birth to the modern world. V 3