suited for the vine and the olive.
It grew also sufficient corn for its own use. But its special value
arose from its mineral products. The copper mines near Tamasus were
enormously productive, and the ore thence derived so preponderated over
all other supplies that the later Romans came to use the word Cyprium
for the metal generally--whence the names by which it is even now known
in most of the languages of modern Europe. On the whole Cyprus was
considered inferior to no known island. Besides its vegetable and
mineral products, it furnished a large number of excellent sailors to
the Persian fleet.

It remains to notice briefly those provinces of the south-west which had
not been included within any of the preceding monarchies, and which are
therefore as yet undescribed in these volumes. These provinces are the
African, and may be best considered under the three heads of Egypt,
Libya, and the Cyrenaica.

Egypt, if we include under the name not merely the Nile valley and the
Delta, but the entire tract interposed between the Libyan Desert on the
one side and the Arabian Gulf or Red Sea on the other, is a country of
nearly the size of Italy. It measures 520 miles from Elephantine to the
Mediterranean, and has an average width of 150 or 160 miles. It must
thus contain an area of about 80,000 square miles. Of this space,
however, at least three fourths is valueless, consisting of bare rocky
mountain or dry sandy plain. It is only along the course of the narrow
valley in which the Nile flows from the Cataracts to beyond Cairo, in
the tract known as the Faioum, and in the broad region of the Delta,
that cultivation is possible. Even in the Delta itself there are large
spaces which are arid, and others which are permanent marshes, so that
considerable portions of its surface are unfitted for husbandry. But if
the quantity of cultivable land is thus limited in Egypt, the quality is
so excellent, in consequence of the alluvial character of the soil, that
the country was always in ancient times a sort of granary of the world.
The noble river, bringing annually a fresh deposit of the richest soil,
and furnishing a supply of water, which is sufficient, if carefully
husbanded, to produce a succession of luxuriant crops throughout the
year, makes Egypt--what it is even at the present day--one of the most
fertile portions of the earth's surface--a land of varied products,
all excellent--but especially a land of corn, to which the p