Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Pictorial Records of the English in Egypt: With a Full and Descriptive Life of General Gordon, the Hero of Khartoum
The other is placed under aburning sun, which produces either the terrible sterility of the desert or the rank luxuriance of the moistened valley. It is inhabited by a race of princes, oppressors, and their miserable serfs. Here is liberty, progress, wide spread comfort, Christian civilization; there is slavery, ignorance, heathen barbarism. Yet it was not always so. Unlike in many things, England and Egypt are most unlike in their past history. The history of our own country is all a thing of yesterday; the history of Egypt takes us back to the most remote past. It is connected with the very earliest annals of our race. Let us take a thousand years from the records of England: there remains but the story of a barbarous people. The exploits of Julius Caesar in Britain belong to Rome, not to England. It is only from a good many centuries later that we can really say our history begins. Nay, if we take little more than five hundred years from our records, there is very little that is worth recording left. Let us take a little more than this. Let us go back to Magna Charta, which was obtained in 1215. There is perhaps no event before this, with the exception of the exploits of Alfred, which Englishmen can dwell upon with unmixed pleasure. After it came the growth of parliament and of constitutional freedom; all the great names in English literature; all the prosperity of our country; all the world-wide fame of our empire.
Look now at Egypt, and consider how great the difference. A thousand years ago all that makes Egypt famous in the history of the world had not only already happened, but was already in the distant past. The pyramids had been built, her great cities had ?ourished and decayed, Alexander and Caesar had passed as conqueror over her; the lustre of her renown had at that distant time a hoary antiquity which is not perceptibly greater now than it was then. In old times Egypt was famed for the wisdom of its learned men and the fertility of its soil. It is said that Plato, one of the greatest men the world ever saw, travelled to Egypt years ago, and learned the germs of his system of philosophy from the priests of that country.
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