Syria, that he used to send her water from the Nile, which alone she was able to drink.
III. Divine Honors paid to the Nile. — Considering the immense importance of the Nile in every point of view, it was not unnatural for the ancient Egyptians to re- gard the river in very much the same light as that in which the Ganges is viewed by the Hindus. Helio- dorus {Ethiop. lib. ix) tells us that the Egyptians paid divine honors to the river, and revered it as the first of their gods ; for he adds, " They declared him to be the rival of heaven, since he watered the earth without the aid of clouds or rain." The god of the Nile, according to Osburn, was an impersonation of Nu or Noah. His name was written in the hieroglyphics hp-mv, and on the most ancient monuments hp-ro-mu, signifying "the waters whose source is hidden." This name often oc- curs in monuments of the eighteenth and nineteenth dj'nasties, where he is represented as a fat man of difl'er- ent colors, with a cluster of water-plants on his head, and holding in his hands stalks and flowers, or water jars, indicative of the inundation. In a representation at Phite he is termed " the father of the fathers of the gods." He was often represented with the Nile issuing from his mouth. On the tomb of Pharaoh Barneses HI there is a device in which the river in its three different stages is represented. Three figures, one of larger size than the other two, are painted in colors — blue, green, and red — with the river flowing from the mouth of the chief one into the mouths of the others, and thence on to the ground, showing that this god underwent three different impersonations at the three states of the Nile, which were colored accordingly, so that the deity was wor- shipped in a different image at each change of the river. The principal festival of the Nile was at the summer solstice, when the inundation M'as considered to have commenced ; at which season, in the dog days, by a cruel and idolatrous custom, the Egyptians sacrificed red-haired persons, principally foreigners, to Tyjihon, the peculiar god of the dog-star, who was worshipped chiefly at Heroopolis,Busiris, etc., by burning them alive, and scattering their ashes in the air for the good of the people (Plutarch, Isis et Osir. i, 383). Hence Bryant sagely conjectures that these victims may have been chosen from among the Israelites dming their sojourn in Egypt! See Nilus.
IV. Scriptural Prophecies respecting the Nile. — In ad- dition to the numerous incidental allusions noticed above, various incidents in the history of Israel of an ominous character are mentioned in Scripture as having hap- pened in connection with the Nile. The seven well- favored and ill-favored kine of which Pharaoh dreamed, in the dream which Joseph interpreted, are said to have come up out of the river (Gen. xli, 1-3). Pharaoh's dream is a most lively figure, representing things exactlv con- formable to the state of the countrj', enriched as it was by the inundation of the Nile; and without this the beasts would have had no grass to feed them, much less to fatten them. The banks of the river are enlivened by the women wbo come down to draw water, and, like Pharaoh's daughter, to bathe, and by the herds of kine and buffaloes which are driven down to drink and wash, or to graze on the grass of the swamps. It was into this river that the male children of the Israelites were cast by command of the cruel king who had recently as- cended the throne, and who " knew not Joseph" (Exod. i, 22). The mother of Moses hid her child in an ark of bulrushes, which she laid in the flags by the river's brink, beside which Pharaoh's daughter came to bathe, when her maidens are represented as walking along the bank, and thus the child was preserved. Two of the plagues which God inflicted upon the Egyptians were intimately connected with the waters of the Nile which they esteemed so precious (Exod. vii, 17, 18 ; viii, 1-3). Nearly a thousand years later in Israel's history Isaiah was inspired to foretell judgments upon Egypt and the Nile: "The Egyptians will I give over into the hand of a cruel lord, . . . and the river shall b3 wasted and
NILE
104
NILES
dried up, . . . the paper reeds by the brooks shall wither anil be no more. The fishers also shall mourn, and all they that cast angle into the brooks shall lament, and they that spread nets upon the waters shall languish" (Isa. xix, 4-8), Though history shows how truly the prophecy respecting the Egyptians being given over into the hands of cruel lords (the word is in the plural number, lords, though the adjective rendered cruel is singular) was accomplished in the twelve petty tyrants who ruled in Egypt, according to Herodotus, about a century after the time of Isaiah, the expression may also be understood to denote the decay of Egj'pt's strength by metaphors taken from the decrease of the river Nile, upon the overflowing of which the plenty and prosperity of the country depended. Thus the king of Egypt is described (Ezek. xxix, 3) as " a dragon lying in the midst of many waters," and boasting of his strength, as his predecessor did in the days of Closes, "My river is my own," etc., which was fulfilled in the person of Pharaoh-hophra (mentioned in Jer. xlvi, 38), or Apries (as he was called by the Greeks), who pro- fanely boasted, as Herodotus (ii, 1G9) tells us, that " there was no God who could cast him down from his eminence." In the Theba'id crocodiles are found, and during Low Nile they may be seen basking in the sun upon the sand-banks. " The paper reeds" are said in the prophecy to grow by the " mouth of the brooks," i. e. by the side of the brooks ; expressed elsewhere (Gen. xli, 3 ; Exod. ii, 3) by " the brink of the river," when refer- ring to the Nile. Paper was an invention of the Egyp- tians, and was first made of a reed that grew upon the banks of the Nile, as Ovid (^Metamorph. i) describes it —