f the Nile. Cereals,
sugar, cotton, and tobacco are important products. Mohammedan Arabs
constitute the bulk of the people, but there is also a remnant of the
ancient Coptic race. The country is nominally a dependency of Turkey
under a native government, but is in reality controlled by the British,
who exercise a veto on its financial policy, and who, since 1882, have
occupied the country with soldiers. The noble monuments and relics of her
ancient civilisation, chief amongst which are the Pyramids, as well as
the philosophies and religions she inherited, together with the arts she
practised, and her close connection with Jewish history, give her a
peculiar claim on the interested regard of mankind. Nothing, perhaps, has
excited more wonder in connection with Egypt than the advanced state of
her civilisation when she first comes to play a part in the history of
the world. There is evidence that 4000 years before the Christian era the
arts of building, pottery, sculpture, literature, even music and
painting, were highly developed, her social institutions well organised,
and that considerable advance had been made in astronomy, chemistry,
medicine, and anatomy. Already the Egyptians had divided the year into
365 days and 12 months, and had invented an elaborate system of weights
and measures, based on the decimal notation.

EGYPTIAN NIGHT, such as in Egypt when, by judgment of God, a thick
darkness of three days settled down on the land. See Exodus x. 22.

EGYPTIANS, THE, of antiquity were partly of Asiatic and partly of
African origin, with a probable infusion of Semitic blood, and formed
both positively and negatively a no inconsiderable link in the chain of
world-history, positively by their sense of the divinity of nature-life
as seen in their nature-worship, and negatively by the absence of all
sense of the divinity of a higher life as it has come to light in the
self-consciousness or moral sense and destiny of man.

EGYPTOLOGY, the science, in the interest of ancient history, of
Egyptian antiquities, such as the monuments and their inscriptions, and
one in which of late years great interest has been taken, and much
progress made.

EGYPTUS, the brother of Danaues, whose 50 sons, all but one, were
murdered by the daughters of the latter. See DANAUeS.

EHKILI, a dialect of S. Arabia, interesting to philologists as one
of the oldest of Semitic tongues.

EHRENBERG, a German naturalist, born in Delitsch;