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Updated: May 12, 2025
This carelessness seemed to him like indifference, and indicated a general laxness in the temple servants. Therefore he again entered the columned hall. He looked uneasily at the Nilometer, in which the water had sunk. There was no hope of the fifteen ells of water which the earth needed for the harvest of the year.
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.
Some days later the caliph was murdered at night by the captain of his Turkish Guard, and Muntasir, who is commonly supposed to have instigated the crime, was immediately proclaimed as his successor in the government. The most important event in Egypt during the reign of Mutawakkil was the falling in of the Nilometer at Fostât.
The water of the Nile, when at its lowest, covers 7 cubits of the Nilometer, and when it reaches a height of 15-2/3 cubits the Sheikh of the Nile proclaims the Wefa, i.e., that the height of the water necessary for irrigating every part of the Nile valley has been attained. The signal is then given for the cutting of the embankment.
For the heart with its affections, never dieth: they may, indeed, flow inward, and corrupt to selfishness; becoming then, in lieu of fountains of waters, gushing forth to everlasting life, a bottomless volcano of hot lava, tempestuous and involved, setting up the creature as his own foul god, and living the perpetual death-bed of the damned; or they may nobly burst the banks of self, and, rising momentarily higher and higher, till every Nilometer is drowned, will seek for ever, with expanding strength, to reach the unapproachable level of that source in the Most Highest whence they originally sprung.
They crossed the broad Nile exactly at the spot where the nilometer, or river guage, measures from day to day, and from year to year, the increasing or decreasing treasures of the stream, and landed at a village where thousands of eggs are made into chickens by the process of artificial incubation. Mrs.
On the island at our right was the machine they call the Nilometer, a stone-column whose business it is to mark the rise of the river and prophecy whether it will reach only thirty-two feet and produce a famine, or whether it will properly flood the land at forty and produce plenty, or whether it will rise to forty-three and bring death and destruction to flocks and crops but how it does all this they could not explain to us so that we could understand.
In order better to understand the rise of the Nile, to fix the amount of the land-tax, and more fairly to regulate the overflow through the canals, the Nilometer on the Island of Elephantine was at this time made. It was under Ælius Gallus, the third prefect, that Egypt was visited by Strabo, the most careful and judicious of all the ancient travellers.
A part of the garden-ground is devoted to grass and shrubbery, and permeated by gravel-walks, in the centre of one of which is a beautiful stone vase of Egyptian sculpture, having formerly stood on the top of a Nilometer, or graduated pillar for measuring the rise and fall of the River Nile. On the pedestal is a Latin inscription by Dr.
In the time of the Pharaohs it was the priesthood that declared to the king and to the people their estimate of the inundations, and at the present day, the sheik, who is sworn to secrecy, is under the control of the police of Cairo, and has his own Nilometer, the zero point of which is said to be somewhat below that of the ancient standard.
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