Yorkville enquirer. [volume] (Yorkville, S.C.) 1855-2006, 1922-04-14
The EGYPT OF TODAY
Peasant Class Shows But Little
Change From the Past.
MAJORITY PEOPLE OF ANCIENT RACE

Country Is Now Free from SuzeraInty
Of Turkey, But Is Still Held Under
Mortgage of the British-Most Of the
Territory is Desert Waste.
King Fuad succeeds Cleopatra.
King Fuad succeeds Cleopatra!
"When Great Britain abandoned it's
protectorato over Egypt and the sui
tan of the Nile country changed his tt
tie to king, he became the first king of
Egypt since the Ptolemaic regime"
says a bulletin issued from the Wash
ington, D. c., headquarters Of the Ma
tional Geographic society.
The old Egypt of milleniums ago is
in many ways more familiar to the
world at large than the Egypt of to-
day, continues the bulletin. Pictures
of it's great pyramids and sphinxes, its
columned temples and rock-hewn
tombs fill histories and encyclopedias;
and inevitably the readers attention is
centered, not on the problems Of today,
but rather on the evidences Of 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 coun-
try; and that now convicts, instead of
building roads. excavate tombs and
temples for the government, the old
monuments are merely a background
for life hard enough to center local
thoughts mostly on daily bread-win-
ing
Superficially Egypt seems a large
country The eye sees its color spread
over a considerable part Of the north
eastern quarter of the map of Africa,
and statistics credit it with an area of
more than 100000 square miles. But
the real Egypt-the habitable parts
like cord with frayed end the mar
row valley and faring delta Of the
Nile. Except a few scattered GASES,
most Of the rest Of the nominal Egypt
els parched desert sand, gravel and
rocky hills. OF it's more than a third
of million square miles of territory,
about $4,000 are estimated to be capa-
BILE of cultivation, and u considerable
part of this has not yet been actually
titled.
Peasant Like 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 fundamentals. The
Egyptian of today does not speak his
old tongue, but instead, Arabic his old
gods are forgotten, and he has-with
the exception of a small minority
adopted the religion of Mohammed.
But in spite of numerous invasiOns,
the blood of the great majority Of the
population has been altered hardly at
all, Practically the fellaheen, or peas
ants might have stepped from the
cient 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
Pharaohs, or who dropped seeds into
the mud Of the receding Nile thou
sands of years ago, even as they are
dropped today.
Egypt's resources are almost wholly
agricultural, and in the agricultural
scheme the millions Of fellaheen are
the ultimate units. They work Ions
hours scratching the soil with crude
implements, or tediously raising water
in skin buckets attached to pivoteC
poles that the thin stream may save
their plants from parching. Taxes are
heavy, and it is the lOwly fellaheer
who keep the treasury supplied. Liv.
ing conditions are very poor; muC
huts house most of Egypt's thirteer
millions. In the fields they wear little
more than a loin cloth, and the young
er children of the villages go naked
When the fclah is dressed up" III
wears a rough shirt and loose trousers
One of the Earliest Governments.
There is little cause to marvel a
Egypt's checkcred history. A simpl
reason is that she began early Her,
is one of the earliest places in whicl
man lived IN ordered life and left rec
ords of his activities. Some anthro