The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1900-08-19
ANCIENT EGYPT.
It's Architecture and Work Compared
With Americas.

The climate of Egypt appears to have
been very equable. ranging merely
from so degrees to 100 degrees in sum
mer; a warm land, without the bitter
winters known TO our latitude in these
days. But the country, though rich in
soil, never had. enough rain to water
the soil; hence the Egyptians, from the
earliest times, undertook to build
bitches or canals, through which the
waters of the Nile might pour. in IT'S
flooded season, through the length and
breadth of the land. Here we get a
hint that the Egyptians were probably
Aryans, or of the Japhetic race of the
human family; at all events. they are
the first known people who conquered
the natural obstacles of their native
or adopted ural habitations, and turned
the concentrated provisions of nature
10 their own use. l consider the old
system Of irrigation by means of the
Nile bitches far greater proof of hui
man advancement in civilization than
any one of the modern discoveries for
the use of natural gas or of electricity
And we name this matter of irrigation
by means of the Nile as one of the
very greatest gifts that ancient Gull
ture has handed down to the workers
of modern times.
In word, says the London Globe.
the Egyptians were the first of the
ancienJs to overcome great natural OBJ
stacles in the way of the future adj
vances of the race, and every man who
has dug a ditch TO save water or to
carry it away, from that day to this,
is natural debtor to those early mas
tiers Of the art of agriculture under diff
ficulties.
In truth, our entire Mississippi valley
needs to be ditched and cultivated, and
were we as a people as wideawake as
those early Egyptians, we would have
been looking into this matter long ago
instead of spending millions of money
to protect knaves in their thieving
manufacturing, and other years and
millions to protect other thieves of the
banking and broking fraternity in their
efforts to make gold the only standard
OF money value, so that they might
buy and sell the governments of the
nations at their, the brokers', pleasure.
" are very smart people in some
II but a little more horse sense,
in by a few CATO nine-tafls.
turn the tide of modern ciViIiZa-
nd bring our Wiseacre congress
peedy vote on the silver question
. n other questions not dreamed of
IN ~fOherS philosophy
The remains of the more ancient
mounds or buildings found in certain
regions of this country, in England and
in Asia, all go to show, when compared
with the structures of Egypt, that the
Egyptians were among the earliest
master builders of the world-in truth.
that they were the first master build
ers.
There is a tendency in our age to
make sport of the builders of the pyra-
midS, but alike in their choice of ma
terials of brick and stone and mortar,
as in their knowledge of mathematical
and artistic proportions, and in their
style of building solid foundations and
giving breadth of base to their great
structures, the Egyptians were not only
pioneers and leaders of the new ma
tons of men in the great and master
ful accomplishment of architecture and
practical maSOnry-they were and they
remain to this hour the teachers of the
race in the matter of real grandeur
and permanence in the 1rt indicated.
The Greeks later erected more grace
full buildings than the best things ever
done in Egypt, and the Romans. work.
ing alike upon the Egyptian and Gre
clan models. rounded the aateways of
art and glorified architecture alike by
their noble archways and the domes
erected thereon. Again, our modern
nations have pressed the Egyptian, the
Greek and the. Roman arch upward.
and copying after the forest aiSIes of
nature have given us IN such cathedrals
as that of Amiens, and the English
Salisbury, and our own cathedrals in
New York and Chicago, such aerial
structures in stone as the old Egyptian
would hardly have dared to undertake.
Nevertheless, in the art Of proportion,
in the nobility, in the grandeur and
above all in the laws and lines of per-
manence, Egyptian architecture is to
this hour among the master workman
ship Of all the cultured ages and deeds
of the world.
1 might go on to show you that the
gifts of Egypt to modern culture in the
lines of portrait art, and especially in
the line of astronomy, are among the
oreatest gifts Of any Of the ancient
nations
The Egyptians appear to have been
the first among the ancients to scale
the heavens and count the stars and
measure the star spaces and to ealcu-a
late thereon regarding the return of
comets and the general panorama of
celestial glory and mechanism, all of
which is still largely a mystery to the
expert and upStart astronomy of our
scientific days.
[ could go far back of the days when
Moses learned his first lesson in phil
osophical theology from the priests of
Egypt, and tracing. as far as history
will allow, the constant growth of this
science of God through 1000 years I'M
I'll after being baptized with Greek ac-
curacy, the AleXandrian school of phil
osophy in the days of dawn of our era
taught the doctrine of the eternal
LogOs. as the revealable nature of God,
and so brought the human mind into
some sort of preparedness to receive
the full and divine revelation of that
dogma, first in the scriptures and then
in the great councils of the church in
the later centuries.
The gifts of Egypt to modern culture,
practical moral and scientific. Dh;lo-
sOphical and theological. have been so
great that we are all debtors to the
ancient builders of the pyramids. and
would we build for eternity in our
characters, in our architecture, as in
our creeds, we may still follow their
massive example.
OF course we win not do so. We are
a light-minded race, less serious, and
many of our great buildings, as many
of our great systems of Thought, will
tOpple as rapidly as they were built,
like SO many Indian tepees. swept by
the fires and winds of hell.