Besides its vegetable and mineral products, it furnished a large number of excellent sailors to the Persian fleet.
It remains to notice briefly those provinces of the south-west which had not been included within any of the preceding monarchies, and which are therefore as yet undescribed in these volumes.

These provinces are the African, and may be best considered under the three heads of Egypt, Libya, and the Cyrenaica.
Egypt, if we include under the name not merely the Nile valley and the Delta, but the entire tract interposed between the Libyan Desert on the one side and the Arabian Gulf or Red Sea on the other, is a country of nearly the size of Italy.

It measures 520 miles from Elephantine to the Mediterranean, and has an average width of 150 or 160 miles.

It must thus contain an area of about 80,000 square miles.

Of this space, however, at least three fourths is valueless, consisting of bare rocky mountain or dry sandy plain.