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d to its usual size before the winds cease. Anaxagoras, who was followed by Euripides, the poet, thought that the large supply of water came from the melting of snow in Ethiopia. Ephorus thought that there were deep springs in the river's bed, which gushed forth with greater force in summer than in winter. Herodotus and OEnopides both thought that the river was in its natural state when the country was overflowed; and the former said that its waters were lessened in winter by the attraction of the sun, then over Southern Ethiopia; and the latter said that, as the earth grew cool, the waters were sucked into its pores. The sources of the Nile were hidden by the barbarism of the tribes on its banks; but by this time travellers had reached the region of tropical rains; and Agatharcides said that the overflow in Egypt arose from the rains in Upper Ethiopia. But the Abyssinian rains begin to fall at midsummer, too late to cause the inundation in Egypt; and therefore the truth seemed after all to lie with the priests of Memphis, who said the Nile rises on the other side of the equator, and the rain falling in what was winter on that side of the globe made the Nile overflow in the Egyptian summer. From the very earliest times, says Ebers, the Pharaohs had understood the necessity of measuring exactly the amount or deficiency of the inundations of the Nile, and Nilometers are preserved which were erected high up the river in Nubia by kings of the Old Empire, by princes, that is to say, who reigned before the invasion of the Hyksos. Herodotus tells us that the river must rise sixteen ells for the inundation to be considered a favourable one. If it remained below this mark, the higher fields failed in obtaining a due supply of water, and a dearth was the result. If it greatly exceeded it, it broke down the dykes, damaged the villages, and had not retired into its bed by the time for sowing the seed. Thus the peasant, who could expect no rain, and was threatened neither by frosts nor storms, could have his prospects of a good or bad harvest read off by the priests with perfect certainty by the scale of the Nilometer, and not by the servants of the divinities only, but by the officers of the realm, who calculated the amount of taxes to be paid to them in proportion to the rising of the river. [Illustration: 254.jpg NILOMETER AT RHODHA] The standard was protected by the magic power of unapproachable sanctity, and the husbandman
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