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Updated: May 12, 2025
The little island is only five hundred yards long and sixty yards wide, and contains the Temple of Isis, Temple of Hathor, a kiosk or pavilion, two colonnades, and a small Nilometer. In the gateway to one of the temples is a French inscription concerning Napoleon's campaign in Egypt in 1799. All the buildings are of stone, and the outside walls are covered with figures and inscriptions.
The following description by Strabo is taken from Baedeker's Guide to Egypt: "The Nilometer is a well, built of regular hewn stones, on the bank of the Nile, in which is recorded the rise of the stream not only the maximum, but also the minimum, and average rise, for the water in the well rises and falls with the stream.
A great book is the Nilometer which measures intellectual life as the original Nilometer measured the life and fertility of the land of Egypt. A description of the rise of the Nile and of the Divine Comedy of Dante, as such a measurer of the life of the Middle Ages, made up the speech. Toast. "Religious Press and Questions of the Day." Eternity begins here.
Now they stood again in the first hall, and, pointing to the Nilometer, Amram said, "Famine!" "There is no doubt of that. Therefore all superfluous mouths should be stopped." "What!" Phater saw that he had made a slip of the tongue. "I mean," he said, "Pharaoh must consider how to get corn." "He would find a Joseph useful just now." "Why?" broke in Phater more vehemently than he intended.
Certain columns were erected in different parts of the valley, on which cubits and the subdivisions of cubits were marked and numbered, for the purpose of ascertaining precisely the rise of the water. Such a column was called a Nilometer. There was one near Memphis, which was at the upper point of the Delta, and others further up the river.
When the slowly rising waters each year reach the figures on the stone column of the Nilometer which show that the Nile has spread abroad his fertile bounty by covering the cultivable lands, and has filled the dams and ditches for future needs, the news is spread abroad and the people rejoice with festivities and processions."
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.
By the orders of this prince the ruined Nilometer was abandoned, and a new one built at the meridional point of the island now called Rhodha, just between Fostât and Gizeh.
The institution of a standing commission regarding the exactions of magistrates in the provinces, occasioned by the frequency of complaints as to such cases, in 605, and the laws as to extortion following each other so rapidly and constantly augmenting its penalties, show the daily increasing height of the evil, as the Nilometer shows the rise of the flood.
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, that 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.
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