Remember where Egypt is located, and what surrounds it. Deserts, like the ones on either side of Egypt, are seldom noted for their biological diversity. This fact suggests a severe limit on the likely variety of wild foods available, which have since been forgotten. Futher, the myth comes to us from a time before many of the now familiar foodstuffs were even introduced into the region. In light of these facts, the possibility that such a common preference might be nothing more than a coincidence, becomes more plausible than it would be, had the myths been written recently, especially had they been written in a country in which more of the countryside is green.

(As great as is its length, no less than 570 miles, the black (arable) land of Egypt is so narrow, that as Erman notes on p. 15, as of 1894, it covered a mere 12,500 square miles, making it smaller than Belgium. Annexing the Nubian portion of the valley, even all of the way down to Khartoum, as the pharoahs tried to do with mixed success at best, would only have added 1125 square miles to its territory. This land was crowded, even by modern standards. Erman states that the population was "over five million" (p. 17), and I seem to recall that more recent studies set this figure at around 9 million, about the present-day population of crowded Belgium, which, as we've pointed out, has more land than the Egyptians did, not counting the desert. Yet, remarkably, this small, densely populated country managed to be a food exporter, eventually going on to feed much of the Roman Empire. This suggests very intensive cultivation, which would have left relatively few wild plants growing on land, in the fertile portions of Egypt, and not much biological diversity).

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