DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN TRAFFIC.

In ancient Egypt agriculture counted for more than manufactures, and manufactures were of more importance than commerce. The trade which existed was brisk enough as far as it went, but it aimed at little more than the satisfaction of local wants by the more or less direct exchange of commodities between producers.

The limited development of internal traffic was due to two principal causes: the natural products of different parts of the country were too much alike for much intercourse to be necessary for purposes of exchange, and the conformation of the country, in itself scarcely larger than Belgium, was such as to give the longest possible distance from north to south; and though, of course, the Nile made communication possible even from the extremity of Southern Nubia to the Delta, the mass of the population found the distances a bar to voluntary intercourse. Thebes and Memphis even, to say nothing of Pelusium and Syene, are about as far apart as Berwick and the Land's End.

The Nile was the only known highway, so much so that the language scarcely possessed a general word for travelling; going southward was called “going up stream,” and a journey to the north, even by land into the desert, was described by a term meaning to sail with the current.