236 Outlines of European History buildings to accommodate the public offices and departments of government. Along the sea and in the harbors were wide quays .and far-reaching moles, where the traffic with distant lands passed in and out. At Alexandria a vast lighthouse tower (Fig. 102), one of the wonders of the world, shed its beams far across the sea to guide the mariner into the harbor. Time and A public clock, either a shadow dial, such as the well-to-do Egyptian had had in his house for over a thousand years, or a water clock of Greek invention (Fig. 103), stood in the market place and furnished all the good townspeople with the hour of the day. The calendar used by the government offices employed the inconvenient moon month of Macedonia, and that of the Greeks was no better. The Ptolemies or the priests under them attempted to improve the practical and convenient Egyp- tian calendar of twelve thirty-day months (see p. 23) by the insertion every four years of a leap year with an additional day, but the people could not be gotten out of the rut into which usage had fallen, and they continued to use the inconvenient moon month of the Greeks. There was no system for the numbering of the years anywhere but in Syria, where the Seleucids gave each year a number reckoned from the begin- ning of their sway. In Egypt at least, there was a postal service which carried all royal communications. Greek papers The soil of the Nile valley is still yielding to the modern dug up^ m excavator enormous quantities of office documents and house- Egypt (d^ papers (Fig. 104) written chiefly in Greek, which disclose to us the way in which the business of government and of private citizens was then conducted. These masses of papers form one of the most interesting revelations of ancient life which modern discovery has furnished us. Indeed, the grave of a member of the Greek community in Memphis has preserved to us the oldest-surviving Greek book. Commingling It is in such papers that we discern how Greek and oriental oriental life life were interfused in these Hellenistic states. While this was an re igion ^^^^ ^^ ^^ whole fabric of life, in art and literature, in customs,
