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The mud of the Nile, which is the sediment of the matters which the river holds suspended, is destitute of manganese; but it contains, according to the analysis of M. Regnault, six parts in a hundred of oxide of iron; and its colour, at first black, changes to yellowish brown by desiccation and the contact of air. The mud consequently is not the cause of the black crusts on the rocks of Syene.
The Via Babuino opens upon the Piazza del Popolo, the finest and largest square in Rome. In the centre is a magnificent Egyptian obelisk of red Syene granite, about eighty feet in height, carved with hieroglyphics, with four marble Egyptian lions at each corner of the platform upon which it stands, pouring from their mouths copious streams of water into large basins, with a refreshing sound.
He gave up to them the whole of Lower Ethiopia, or the province called Nubia. The valley for seventy miles above Syênê, which bore the name of the Dodecaschonos, had been held by Augustus and his successors, and this was now given up to the original inhabitants.
This was done by measuring on the ground the distance between Syene, a city exactly under the tropic, and Alexandria, situated on the same meridian. The distance was found to be five thousand stadia. The meridional distance of the sun from the zenith of Alexandria he estimated to be 7° 12', or a fiftieth part of the circumference of the meridian.
Syenite originally received its name from the celebrated ancient quarries of Syene, in Egypt. It differs from granite in having hornblende as a substitute for mica, and being without quartz. Werner at least considered syenite as a binary compound of feldspar and hornblende, and regarded quartz as merely one of its occasional minerals.
While the larger part of the Roman legions was withdrawn into Arabia on an unsuccessful quest for treasure, a body of thirty thousand of these men, whom we may call either Arabs, from their blood and language, or Ethiopians, from their country, marched northward into Egypt, and overpowered the three Roman cohorts at Elephantine, Syênê, and Philas.
To think of all this, here on this ground, on a night so calm and blue! And these same walls of granite from Syene, on which my puny hands now rest, to think of the beings who have touched them in passing, who have fallen by their side in last sanguinary conflicts, without rubbing even the polish from their changeless surfaces!
They had reached a spot on the shore where a ship was being unloaded of its cargo of granite blocks from Syene. Black and brown slaves were dragging them to land.
He paints Latona, weary and in pain in the island of Delos, as leaning against a palm-tree, by the side of the river Inopus, which, sinking into the ground, was to rise again in Egypt, near the cataracts of Syênê; and, prettily pointing to Philadelphus, he makes Apollo, yet unborn, ask his mother not to give birth to him in the island of Cos, because that island was already chosen as the birthplace of another god, the child of the gods Soteres, who would be the copy of his father, and under whose diadem both Egypt and the islands would be proud to be governed by a Macedonian.
A thousand years before the foundation of Rome, and two thousand years before the Christian era, it had been excavated from the quarries of Syene and worshipped at Heliopolis. It was as old to the Cæsars as the days of the Cæsars are to us.
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