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Updated: June 5, 2025
You find here enormous acacias, monkey-bread trees, raphia palms and baobabs; less gloom, and fewer creeping and hanging plants. Berselius, as a rule, brought with him a taxidermist, but this expedition was purely for sport. The tusks of whatever elephants were slain would be brought back, but no skins; unless, indeed, they were fortunate enough to find some rare or unknown species.
They also sent succours to Gythium which he had already besieged, and ambassadors to Rome to make known these transactions. King Antiochus having, this winter, solemnized the nuptials of his daughter with Ptolemy king of Egypt, at Raphia, in Phoenicia, returned thence to Antioch, and came, towards the end of the season, through Cilicia, after passing Mount Taurus, to the city of Ephesus.
Philopator led his whole forces to the frontier to oppose his march, and met the Syrian army near the village of Raphia, the border town between Egypt and Palestine. Arsinoë, his queen and sister, rode with him on horseback through the ranks, and called upon the soldiers to fight for their wives and children. At first the Egyptians seemed in danger of being beaten.
Sargon had next to suppress a revolt in Hamath, as well as an invasion of Palestine by the Egyptians. The Egyptian army, however, was defeated at Raphia, and the Philistines with whom it was in alliance returned to their allegiance to the Assyrian king. Now came, however, a more serious struggle.
After a siege of three years, Samaria, the capital, fell into the hands of Sargon, who had succeeded him, the kingdom of Israel was subverted, and a great part of the people dragged off into captivity. In 720 B.C., Sargon encountered Shabak, in the great battle of Raphia, in southern Palestine, whom he defeated, and put to flight.
A fifth was from Palestine to Alexandria, running along the coast of the Mediterranean from Raphia to Pelusium, and thence, leaving the coast to avoid the flat country, which was under water during the inundation; it joined the last at Andropolis. The sixth road was from Koptos on the Nile to Berenicê on the Red Sea. These six were probably the only roads under the care of the prefect.
I have given them plenty of first-rate materials, far superior to those which they use when left to their own resources. These consist, first, for the foundations, of little smooth stones, some of which are as large as an almond. With this road-metal are mingled short strips of raphia, or palm-fibre, flexible ribbons, easily bent.
Nevertheless, let us invoke experiment, the best of witnesses. I borrow from the kitchen-range an iron trivet whose legs will supply a solid foundation for the engine which I am devising. This is a coarse network of strips of raphia, a fairly accurate imitation of the network of couch-grass roots.
Under the successor of the enervated Egyptian king, Ptolemy V., a child five years old, Antiochus the Great retrieved the disaster at Raphia, and in 199 won a victory over Scopas the Egyptian general, in consequence of which Judaea, with Phoenicia and Coele-Syria, passed from the Ptolemies to the Seleucidae.
Now, as they resumed their way, the trees altered and drew farther apart, the ground was solid under foot, and through the foliage of the euphorbia and raphia palm came stray glimmers of sunshine, bits of blue sky, birds, voices, and the whisper of a breeze. "This is better," said Berselius. Adams flung up his head and expanded his nostrils. "Better, my God!" said he; "this is heaven!"
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