her becoming a naval
power; no timber suitable for ship-building grew in the country--indeed,
scarcely enough was to be found to satisfy the demands for the
construction of houses and coffins for the dead. The early Egyptians,
like the Hindus, had a religious dread of the sea, but their
exclusiveness was, perhaps, not a little dependent on their want of
material for ship-building. Egypt was therefore compelled to enter on a
career of foreign conquest, and at all hazards possess herself of the
timber-growing districts of Syria. It was this urgent necessity which
led to her collisions with the Mesopotamian kings, and drew in its train
of consequence the sieges, sacks, and captivities of Jerusalem, the
metropolis of a little state lying directly between the contending
powers, and alternately disturbed by each. Of the necessity of this
course of policy in the opinion of the Egyptian kings, we can have no
better proof than the fact that Psammetichus himself continued the siege
of Azotus for twenty-nine years; that his son Necho reopened the canal
between the Nile at Bubastes and the Red Sea at Suez--it was wide enough
for two ships to pass--and on being resisted therein by the priests, who
feared that it might weaken the country strategically, attempted the
circumnavigation of Africa, and actually accomplished it. In those times
such expeditions were not undertaken as mere matters of curiosity.
Though this monarch also despatched investigators to ascertain the
sources of the Nile, and determine the causes of its rise, it was
doubtless in the hope of making such knowledge of use in a material or
economical point of view, and therefore it may be supposed that the
circumnavigation of Africa was undertaken upon the anticipated or
experienced failure of the advantages expected to arise from the
reopening of the canal; for the great fleets which Necho and his father
had built could not be advantageously handled unless they could be
transferred as circumstances required, either by the circumnavigation or
by the canal, from one sea to the other. The time occupied in passing
round the continent, which appears to have been three years, rendered
the former method of little practical use. But the failure experienced,
so far from detracting from the estimation in which we must hold those
kings who could thus display such a breadth of conception and vigour of
execution, must even enhance it. They resumed the policy of the
conqueror Rameses