Edwards, Amelia B.: A thousand miles up the Nile (New York, [1888])

vi PREFACE.

whom we know so well in tlie wall paintings of the tombs.
Square in the shoulders, slight but strong in the limbs,
full-lipped, brown-skinned, we see him wearing the same
loin-cloth, plying the same shaduf, plowing with the same
plow, preparing the same food in the same way, and eat-
ing it with his fingers from the same bowl, as did his fore
fathers of six thousand years ago.

The household life and social ways of even the provincial
gentry are little changed. Water is poured on one's hands
before going to dinner from just such a ewer and into just
such a basin as we see pictured in the festival scenes at
Thebes. Though the lotus-blossom is missing, a bouquet
is still given to each guest when he takes his place at table.
The head of the sheep killed for the banquet is still given
to the poor. Those who are helped to meat or drink touch
the head and breast in acknowledgment, as of old. The
musicians still sit at the lower end of the hall, the singers
yet clap their hands in time to their own voices; the danc-
ing-girls still dance and the buffoon in his high cap still per-
forms his uncouth antics, for the entertainment of the
guests. Water is brought to table in jars of the same shape
manufactured at the same town, as in the days of Cheops
and Chephren; and the mouths of the bottles are tilled in
precisely the same way with fresh leaves and flowers. The
cucumber stuffed with minced-meat was a favorite dish in
those times of old; and I can testify to its excellence in
1874. Little boys in JSfubia yet wear the side-lock that
graced the head of Barneses in his youth; and little girls
may be seen in a garment closely resembling the girdle
worn by young princesses of the time of Thothmes I. A
sheik still walks with a long staff; a Nubian belle still
plaits her tresses in scores of little tails; and the pleasure-
boat of the modern governor or mudir, as well as the daha-
beeyah hired by the European traveler, reproduces in all