80 feet in thickness at the base, perpendicular at the outside, but sloping internally, the top being 30 feet thick, and sufficiently extensive for three chariots to ride abreast. The interior portion of the walls was made of bricks without straw. Zoar is now desolate—and the waters of the Nile flow over a portion of this once populous and renowned city.
The River of Egypt, (Josh. xv. 47,) does not mean the Nile, but the Sihor, or the brook Bezor, which runs into the Mediterranean. That which is called, (Gen. xv. 18,) by way of pre-eminence, the River, (Gen. xli. 1; Ex. vii. 17,) and sometimes Sihor, (Isa. xxiii. 3,) or Shihor, (1 Chron. xiii. 5,) is the Nile, a remarkable river, which flows 1200 miles without meeting a tributary stream. Its overflowings inundate the adjoining country, (Amos viii. 8; ix, 5,) and give it its extraordinary fertility. Hence a failure of this periodical overflowing must occasion the utmost distress.—(Isa. xix. 5, 6.)
The Egyptians were celebrated legislators and able politicians, magistrates born for government, men that have excelled in all arts and sciences, philosophers who carried their inquiries as far as was possible in those early ages, and who have left us such maxims of morality as many Christians ought to blush at.
From the history of Herodotus we learn that the ancient Egyptians were black, and that their hair was frizzly or curly.
The inhabitants of ancient Colchis, since called Mingrelia, were originally Egyptians, and colonized that country when Sesostris, king of Egypt, extended his conquests in the north. They had, like the Egyptians, black skins and frizzly hair, and were the ancestors of the warlike Philistines. Samson's wife was the daughter of a Philistine.—(Judges xxiv.; Herodotus.)
THE LAND OF CANAAN.
Canaan was the Scripture name of what was called Palestine, or the Holy Land. This name was derived from Canaan, the fourth son of Ham, [literally black,] whose posterity settled there, and remained for about
