85

Chap. 11 .] Egyptian Mental.

those who carry them, and appear to have been formed of staves, andhooped.

As an evidence of the antiquity of watering land with pots, we may re-fer to one of the constellations, to “ Aquarius” or the “ Water Pourer,” afigure which was adopted as an expressive emblem of that season, whenrains descended, and the lauds were irrigated by nature alone. Althoughit may possibly be true, as some authors suppose, that some of the presentsigns of the Zodiac were substituted for more ancient ones at some periodof time, posterior to the Argonautic expedition—(see Goguet’s Disserta-tion on the names and figures of the constellations—Origine des Loix,Tom. ii.) there are others, and among them the “Water Pourer,” whichare for any thing known to the contrary, original figures, adopted by thefirst cultivators of astronomical knowledge, i. e. by the antediluvian sonsof Seth, who, according to Josephus , were the “ inventors of that pecu-liar sort of wisdom which is concerned with the heavenly bodies and theirOrder(Ant . B. i, chap. 2.) and which signs were continued by theirsuccessors, the Chaldeans, in the first ages after the flood, and have re-mained unaltered to our days. The extreme antiquity of astronomy, andits Connection with agriculture, are undoubted, of which we shall meet withother examples besides the one just given. This Connection was thesource of the great mass of sytnbolical imagery which pervades the his-tory, mythology, and almost every thing connected with the remote an-cients; most of which is so perplexing to decipher, and the greater partof which has defeated all attempts of the moderns satisfactorily to explain.In the time of Job, who is supposed to have lived before Moses, theconstellations were well known. “ Canst thou bind the sweet influencesof Pleiades , or loose the bands of Orion,” xxxviii, 31. “ Which maketh

Arcturus, Orion and Pleiades , and the chambers of the South.” ix, 9. In-deed, M. Bailey and others have admitted that the astronomy of Chaldea,India , and Egypt , is but the wreck of a great System of astronomical Sci­ ence , which was carried to a high degree of perfection in the early agesof the World.

When water is only required to be raised two or three feet from atank or river, a vessel suspended by four cords, and worked by two men,is very extensively used in the east. In Egypt it is named the “Mental,”the figure of which is copied from Grande Description.

No. 29. Egyptian Mental.

A small trench is dug on the edge of the river, on the borders of whichtwo men stand opposite each other. They hold in each hand a cord, theends of which are attached to a hashet of palm leaves covered with leather.After launching it into the water, they lean backwards so as to be half