The taxes were no less high than before, but Cæsar saw to it that Egypt was placed in a position to pay her taxes every year. He had all the Nile canals, which had got choked or dried up under previous rulers, thoroughly cleansed and repaired by his soldiers; he completed the canal system where it required completion; and the beneficial results of these necessary measures were very soon apparent. The famous statue of the Nile is surrounded by sixteen _putti_, as a symbol that the river must rise sixteen cubits if Egypt is to hope for an abundant harvest; if it only rises half that height it means dearth and famine in the land. But after the restoration of the canal system under Augustus a rise of twelve cubits indicated a good harvest as early as the governorship of Petronius, and if the rise was only eight, it did not necessarily mean a bad one. In one of the latter years of Augustus the Nile must have risen to an extraordinary height, if we may trust the mutilated records of the Nilometer at Elephantine--probably twenty-four cubits. [Illustration: ROMAN CATAPULT] The soldiers of Augustus were also employed in making roads and constructing cisterns at various places. Coptos is the point to which most of the roads which connect the Nile Valley with the Red Sea converge. Here an interesting inscription has recently been discovered, dating probably from the last years of the reign of Augustus, and bearing a long list of the names of the soldiers who had made cisterns at various points along these roads and laid out a fortified camp where they met. The Indian trade rose rapidly to prosperity under Augustus. As early as the time when Strabo journeyed through Egypt he saw at the most diverse spots signs that the country was beginning to recover from the ruinous consequences of the system of government pursued by the last Ptolemies. In the latter years of Cleopatra’s reign barely twenty ships had ventured to put out from the Red Sea; under the rule of Augustus there was a stately fleet of Indiamen, which engaged in the African and Indian trade with great success, and brought in a substantial profit to the Egyptian government, which not only exacted import duties but afterwards charged a considerable export duty upon Indian goods. But it is hardly possible to estimate, even approximately, the revenue which Augustus drew from his newly acquired province.[c] ADMINISTRATION OF THE PROVINCES An explanation should be given of the general principles which were followed by the Romans in the administration of subject lands. The consecutive pursuit of these principles secured the result that provinces originally disparate in every particular, through the influence of Roman administration, were made into a single whole which was not only externally symmetrical but also internally harmonious--a whole in which the various nationalities with their political, civil, and social idiosyncrasies more or less disappear.