Social life in ancient Egypt / by W.M. Flinders Petrie.

  • Flinders Petrie
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Social life in ancient Egypt / by W.M. Flinders Petrie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    sufficient fall to carry it away, and so wash off any salt which had arisen. This basin irrigation has lasted down to our time, and has only been abolished in favour of perennial canal irrigation in the last few years. The effect is not quite satisfactory ; the people have not the habit of control needed for the new system ; they let the high-level supply run too long and raise the water- table in the soil, so that cotton suffers by water¬ logging, and a field is often useless by being flooded when it should be in full crop. The management necessarily depended on exact knowledge of the height of the river, and this was recorded for every year from the 1st dynasty onward, and measured at Nilometers in several places. There were large sluices and lock-gates, but for a great flow they seem to have used simply an earth dam, which was cut away at the suitable time. Diodoros says that opening and closing the Fayum dam cost fifty talents each time. Great dams were used till modern times, and cutting the dam of the canal at Cairo was the greatest festival of the year. The Wady Tumilat canal at Zagazig was also recently dammed till far into the winter. All these ancient methods, however, are now fast vanish¬ ing, with the spread of barrages and sluice-gates on every canal. The preservation of the dykes was a very
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