Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
10
The hour-glass of accumulated
or denuded sediments
In July 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte's army invaded Egypt and com-
menced a huge and famous survey of its antiquities and natural his-
tory. The French hold on the region was weakened following the
celebrated Battle of the Nile when Horatio Nelson (1758-1805)
showed his prowess, and the British assumed control in 1801.
Thereafter the fashion for things Egyptian spread to England and
remained much in vogue until the 1920s. There is a nineteenth-
century children's ditty that describes the foolishwomanwho, grinning
to her worried friends, set off to explore the River Nile riding on the
back of a crocodile: 'at the end of the ride the lady was inside and the
smile was on the crocodile.' An earlier traveller was more fortunate,
and he lived to make one of the earliest contributions to geological
literature.
Herodotus (484-408
BC
) was a Greek traveller born in Western
Anatolia (what is now Turkey) who has been styled the 'Father of
Geography' on account of his writings and observations on the
changes effected on the Earth's surface by river action and erosion.
Although Herodotus did not travel widely by modern standards (his
world was a triangle drawn between Greece, Italy and Egypt), by
standards in the fifth century
BC
he would have clocked up plenty of
'mileage points'. On one trip he sailed to Egypt and onwards up the
Nile, preferring to use a boat unlike the crocodile-riding lady, and the
first thing that struck himas he approached Egypt was that the sea was
very shallow far out to sea, and that it continued to shallow as he
approached the delta front a day's sailing away. Once he arrived at the
delta, he noted how flat the land either side of the river channels was,
and how fertile it was. He also appreciated that the sediment had been
carried a great distance by the river. Herodotus was one of the earliest
