Perth Amboy evening news., 1922-04-13
Geographic News
Bulletins BY the
National Geographic Society
THE GYP OF 1929


when Great Britain abandoned
its p%rotectorate over Egypt, and n
sultan of the Nile country changed
his title to king. he became the first
king since the Ptolemaic regime"
says a bulletin issued from the
Washington, ID. G. headquarters Of
the National Geographic Society.
THE old Egypt of millenniums
6 is in many ways more familiar
) to the world at large than the
Egypt of today" continues the bull
letin. Pictures of its great pyra,
mids aud sphinxes. its columned
histories and encyclopedias: and in
evitably the readers attention Is
centered, not on the problems OF
today. but rather on the evidences
of a dead civilization.
Monuments Background for
Hard Life
But aside from the fact that
mummy hunting was for many years
\ one of the leading private industries
of the country; and that now con-
victs, instead of building roads, ex-
cavate tombs and temples for the
government, the old monuments are
merely a background for n life hard
enough to center local thought
II AlC1kA w aeANL A1o
specifically Egypt SEEM a large
country. The eye sees its color
spread over a considerable part OF
the northeastern quarter of III map
of Africa. and statistics credit IT
with an area of more than $780,
900 square miles. But the real
Sgypt-the habitable parts like
a cord with a frayed end: the mar
row valley and fiaring delta OF the
Nile. Except a few scattered GASES.
most of the rest OF the nominal
Egypt Is parched desert sand, gravel
and rocky hills. OF its more than
a third of a million square miles of
territory, about $4,000 are estimated
to be capable of cultivation, and a
considerable part of this has not yet
been actually titled.
Peasant lake Figure From Carvings
'In comparing the Egypt of today
with that of the dawn of history one
is divided between wonder at the
marked changes on the surface and
the lack of change in some funda-
mentals. The Egyptian of today
does not speak his old tongue. but
instead. Arabic; his old gods are
forgotten, and he has-with the ex-
ception of a small minority adopt
ed the religion of Mohammed. But
| III spite VI NUMEROUS liiNdclObS. tb1
blood of the great majority of the
population has been altered hardly
at all. Practically the fellaheen, or
peasants, might have stepped from
the ancient carvings; they are but
a fresh generation of the men who
dragged the great blocks of stone
into place to build the artificial
mountains of the P~haraohs, or who
dropped seeds into the mud of the
receding Nile thousands of years
ago. even as they are dropped today.
"Egypt's are almost
wholly agricultural, and in the agri-
cultural scheme the millions of fell
laheen are the ultimate units. They
work long hours scattering the soil
with crude implements, or tediousiy
raising water in skin buckets at
tached to pivoted poles that the tiny
stream may save their plants from
parching. Taxes are heavy. and 1t
is the lowly ~fellaheen who keep the
treasury supplied. Living conditions
are very poor; mud huts house most
of Egypt's thirteen million. In the
fields they wear little more than a
loin cloth. and the younger children
of the villages go naked. When the
fellah is dressed up he wears a
rough shirt and loose trousers.
One Of Earliest Governments
There is little aus to marvel at
Egypt's checkered history. A SIM
pie reason is that she began early.
Here is one OF the earliest places
in which man lived an ordered life
and left records of hiss activities.
Some anthropologists, in fact. look
upon central Africa as the place or
origin of man, and upon Egypt as
one of the first waystations in his
diffusion over the other continents.
After the long region of the
Pharaohs Egypt had its Grecian
and Roman regimes which. brought
but a few changes. Then in Gal A.
d. came the invasion of the Saracens
from which time began Egypt's MO-
hammedan history. For a Inn the
country was a province OF the Ara
bian Caliphs: later it was indepen-
dent. though still Mohammedan.
under the Mamelukes; and finally
in 1916, 1t became a province OF
Turkey, which controlled it hrst
through a governor and later
through a sort of hereditary viceroy
or khedive.
Khcdive-Sultan-King
"For the third time Europe took
a hand in the affairs of Egypt In
1928, when Napoleon won his bat
tie Of the Pyramids. The British
drove the French out in 1901 and
turned the country back to Turkey.
In 1869 came the building of h
Suez Canal by De Lesseps. which has
given Europe an ever-growing In
terest in Egyptian affairs. To pro-
tect European bond-holders France
and Great Britain made a Joint in
tervention in 1879 and for a while
controlled finances. The uprising OF
1882 against the Khedive was sup
pressed by the British alone, and
after hat they controlled finances
without assistance. The govern
ment was in effect Egyptian with
British assistance and with the NOM
inal ~suzerainty of Turkey acknow-
lodged.
"When the World War began
Great Britain established a protec-
torate, abolished Turkeys s%uzerain-
ty, deposed the Germanophile khe-
dive, and appointed another prince
of the family to be Sultan. The
British prosectorate is now with
drawn, but instead of the former
Turkish interest being restored,
Egypt is set up as an Independent
kingdom