Wilkinson, John Gardner: Topographie of Thebes, and general view of Egypt: being a short account of the principal objects worthy of notice in the valley of the Nile, to the second cataracte and Wadi Samneh, with the Fyoom, Oases and eastern desert, from Sooez to Bertenice (London, 1835)

216 BEANS. [Chap. V.

cannot answer better to any of the order of gramina,
than the Sorghum,* or Egyptian Doora.

Beans, the abhorrence of the priesthood, were
no doubt grown in Egypt from a very early period,
but did not probably constitute, as at present, the
chief food of the lower orders. Herodotus makes
them at once an indigenous plant of the Nile (in
which he is not supported by fact) when he asserts,
that " they were never sown in the country, but if
they grew spontaneously they neither formed an
article of food, nor even, if cooked, were they eaten
by the Egyptians.1' This aversion, which origi-
nated in a supposed sanitary regulation, did not
however preclude their cultivation; and whether
we admit or reject the testimony of Diodorus, who
says that some j" only abstained from their use, no
religious prejudice would forbid their being given
to camels or other cattle. That the priests may
have considered themselves bound by a supersti-
tious feeling to avoid them as impure, may easily
be credited, and similar sanitary precautions J

* Of the fifteen species of holcus five at least are natives of
Egypt. There appear to be also two unnoticed varieties.

t Lib. i. s. 89.

I Many of them were erroneous. Cicero, in speaking of the
reason of the prohibition of beans by the Pythagoreans, says,
" quod habet inflationem magnam is cibus,"—De Div. i. 30;
but the Egyptian priests may have had some other reason, quite as
absurd no doubt, as " in flore ejus literse lugubres repriantur."—
Plin. xviii. c. 12. Justly does Cicero observe, " Nihil tarn absurde
dici potest, quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum."