The river Nile makes Egypt one of the best places for agriculture. On all sides there are great wastes of sand, the Sahara and Libyan deserts. But the river coming from the mountains of equatorial Africa where rainfall is frequent and great in amount, had made a long wide valley across the desert towards the Mediterranean Sea. There is a branch of the river, named the Blue Nile, which comes from the mountains of Abyssinia. Here there is much rain in summer, and the water coming into Egypt from the Blue Nile causes floods every year just after summer. In these floods much fertile earth, transported by the water, is spread over the fields on every side making them ready for planting crops. Fields do not become infertile even if the same crop is planted year after year; and, though there is almost no rainfall, the crops can be watered from the river. So naturally this country became one of the first places in which there was a great development of agriculture.
In such conditions, where it was not hard to make a good living, men had time for doing other things, i.e. spare time, or leisure as we call it. Leisure is very important for the development of civilization for only when men have time for other things besides working for their living, can there be development of arts and crafts. So the people of Egypt had leisure to become expert in many ways because they made their living by agriculture, and not simply as nomadic herdsmen. The great buildings of stone, which they made for their religion, may still be seen, though in a broken condition after so many thousands of years. Among them are the Pyramids, great masses of stones, hundreds of feet high, deep down under which they put their dead bodies of their kings, after carefully putting a covering of cloth round them, with chemical substances to keep them from decay.
The writing of the Egyptians was in pictures, and they did this writings on the leaves of a plant from the Nile, named ‘Papyrus’ (from which we get our word paper). They also did writing and painting on the walls of their buildings some of which can still be seen after thousands of years.
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