The Nile River and Valley
To the Egyptians, their
country was the Two Lands: Upper Egypt, the Valley, and the Delta, known as
Lower Egypt. The central part of both of these lands was the River, which we
call the Nile. The Delta is the core of Lower Egypt, while Upper Egypt is the
long narrow valley stretching south into the Sudan. The Valley and Delta joined
in the area of the Old Kingdom capital of Memphis, called Mennefer, or Hikuptah,
which gave its name in its Hellenized version Aigyptos, to the country.
The Nile Valley including
the Delta is about 14,450 sq miles. Of the 7.5 million acres of arable land, 6
million lie in the Delta. The Nile runs 840 miles from the first cataract in
Aswan to the Mediterranean.
The mere mention of the
Nile evokes for us images of Pyramids, great temples, fantastic tales of
mummies, and wondrous treasures. But the Nile represents life itself to both the
ancient and modern people of Egypt. In fact, for thousands of years, the River
has made life possible for hundreds of thousands of people and animals, and has
shaped the culture we today are only beginning to truly understand.
The Nile (called simply Iteru
by the Egyptians, meaning, River) is the longest river in the world, stretching
north for approximately 4000 miles from the mountains of East Africa in the
south to the Mediterranean in the north. Egyptians traveling to other lands
would comment on the “wrong” flow of other rivers. For example, a text of
King Tutmosis I in Nubia describes the great Euphrates River of Mesopotamia as
the “inverted water that goes downstream in going upstream.”
The ancient Egyptian
calendar was divided into three seasons, based upon the cycles of the Nile.
These three seasons were: akhet, Inundation, peret, the growing
season, and shemu, the drought or harvest season. During the season of
the Inundation, layers of fertile soil were annually deposited on the
flood-plain. This soil gave the name Kemet, or Black Land, to ancient
Egypt.
Herodotus, the great
Greek philosopher, wrote of the Nile: “the river rises of itself, waters the
fields, and then sinks back again; thereupon each man sows his field and waits
for the harvest.” The great historian also called Egypt the gift of the Nile.
This description would lead the casual reader to imagine Egypt as being a great
paradise where the people simply sat and waited for the sowing and harvesting to
need be done. But the ancient Egyptians knew better. Too high a flood from their
river, and villages would be destroyed; too low a flood, and the land would turn
to dust and bring famine. Indeed, one flood in five was either too low or too
high.
From the earliest times,
the waters of the Nile, swollen by monsoon rains in Ethiopia, flooded over the
surrounding valley every year between June and September of the modern calendar.
Every Inundation season, the Nile would rise about 25 feet above normal level
and spread five or more miles out past its banks in all directions.
Along most of its length
through Egypt, the Nile has scoured a deep, wide gorge in the desert plateau.
The Nile Valley is a canyon running 660 miles long with a floodplain occupying
4,250 square miles. The alluvial deposits built up by the annual inundation
formed a floodplain which is only about 6.2 miles wide on average, a mere 1½
miles wide at Aswan and 10 ½ miles wide at Beni Suef, just south of the Faiyum
depression west of the Nile.
The Nile’s mouth, the
Delta, representing 63 percent of the inhabited area of Egypt, spans some 8,500
square miles, and is fringed in its coastal regions by lagoons, wetlands, lakes
and sand dunes. The delta’s potentially usable land was at least double the
amount in the Valley.
While today the Nile
flows through the Delta in only two principal branches, the Damietta and the
Rosetta, in ancient times there were three principal channels, known as the
water of Pre, the water of Ptah and the water of Amun. In classical or Graeco-Roman
times, these were called the Pelusiac, the Sebennytic, and the Canopic branches.
There were additionally subsidiary branches or artificially cut channels.
The most dominant
features of the Delta are the gezira, the sandy mounds
of clay and silt that appear as islands rising 3-40
feet above the surrounding area. Since
these mounds would not be submerged by the inundation, they were ideal sites for
Predynastic and Early Dynastic settlements, since villages and cemeteries built on these mounds were
safe from normal floods, and indeed
evidence of human habitation have been found on these ridges. The land around
these ridges was used for crops or grazing, and the swamps contained more fish,
wild life, and papyrus than in the Nile valley.
Perhaps these mounds
rising above the water table inspired the ancient belief of creation as having
begun on a mound of earth that emerged from the primordial waters of Nun as
written in Pyramid Text Utterance 600.
The Nile in Egypt was at
its lowest level from April to June, in our calendar. The level rose in July
with the flood from the summer monsoons in Ethiopia beginning in August. The
flood would cover most of the valley floor, washing salts out of the soil and
depositing a layer of silt. Since most of the Egyptian people worked as farmers,
when the Nile was at its highest and they could not plant, they were drafted by
corvee into labor projects such as building Pyramids, repairing temples and
other monuments and working on the king’s tomb.
The waters of the Nile
come from three tributary rivers: the Blue Nile, arising in the Ethiopian
Highlands in
Lake Tana and joining up near Khartoum in Sudan, the parent White Nile, which rises in Lake Victoria in central Africa
and is fed by many smaller rivers in southern Sudan, and the Arbara, the
smallest stream joining the river above the Fifth Cataract.
At Aswan, north of the
first cataract, the Nile is deeper and its surface smoother. Within the southern
section between Aswan and Khartoum the River passes through formations of hard
igneous rock, resulting in a series of rapids, or cataracts, which form a
natural boundary to the south. Between the first and second cataracts lay Lower
Nubia, and between the second and sixth cataracts lay Upper Nubia.
At Elephantine, the first
great cataract of the Nile is found. Legend held that the ram-god Khnum, who had
created humanity on His potter’s wheel, also controlled the floodwaters from
their cavern under the island of Elephantine, which lay near the southern border
of Egypt.
This first cataract is a
place where the river is hindered by a natural barrier of rock, and the stream
is broken into many rocky channels, navigation is difficult, as the water is
rough. From here to the Mediterranean, the river flows uninterrupted for 750
miles.
Elephantine Island
contained a nilometer, which measured the level of the waters. A nilometer was a
device for measuring the height of the Nile in ancient times. It usually
consisted of a series of steps against which the increasing height of the
Inundation, as well as the general level of the river, could be measured.
Records of the maximum height were kept. Surviving nilometers exist connected
with the temples at Philae, on the Nubian Egyptian border, Edfu, Esna, Kom Ombo,
and Dendera.
The Nile flowed from
south to north at an average speed of about four knots during inundation season.
The water level was on average about 25-33 feet deep and navigation was fast.
That made a voyage from Thebes north to Memphis last approximately two weeks.
During the dryer season when the water level was lower, and speed slower, the
same trip would last about two months. At the great bend near Qena, the Nile
would flow from west to east and then back from east to west, slowing down
travel. No sailing was done at night because of the danger of running aground on
one of the many sandbank and low islands.
Downstream from Aswan the
Nile flows northerly to Armant before taking a sharp bend, called the Qena. From
Armant to Hu, the River extends about 180 kilometers and divides the narrow
southern valley from the wider northern valley.
When one cruises on the
Nile, one will pass many famous places from the history of ancient Egypt. From
south at the First Cataract to north and the Delta, one passes the now-submerged
island of Philae, whose Ptolemaic-era temple to the goddess Isis/Aset has been
moved to safer ground; the double temple of Kom Ombo, dedicated to the god Sobek
and the falcon-god Horus the Elder, with its wall reliefs depicting medical
instruments; the well-preserved Ptolemaic temple of Edfu, dedicated to Horus,
with its inscriptions providing the greatest detail of ancient religious
rituals; the temple of Esna, sacred to the god Khnum; then the mighty temple
complexes of Karnak and Luxor at Thebes; the temple of Dendera, sacred to the
goddess Hathor; the ancient site of Abydos, where archaeologists still uncover
new artifacts and expand the knowledge of ancient Egypt; and eventually the
river turns into the Delta. Off to the west before one reached Memphis would be
found the Faiyum.
The basic areas of the
country, The Nile valley, the delta, the Faiyum, were supplemented by parts of
the surrounding regions over which the Egyptians had rights, such as mining.
Valley edges supplied any amount of easily worked building stone, limestone,
sandstone, granite and basalt. In the deserts abounded agate, amethyst,
carnelian, feldspar, garnet, onyx, electrum, and obsidian.
The southern frontier,
traditionally at the First Cataract of the Nile, at Aswan, moved further south
during some periods. For example, during the New Kingdom, the so-called Imperial
Age of Egypt, texts use words for Egypt to refer also to parts of Nubia, The
line of oases that runs from Siwa in the north to el-Kharga in the south was
settled and governed by Egyptians during most of the Pharaonic period.
The Faiyum is the biggest
oasis, containing Lake Moeris, 44 meters below sea level. The Faiyum was a
lakeside oasis west of the Nile valley and south of Memphis, where during the
Middle Kingdom period the capital of all Egypt was situated. It was fed by the
Bahr Yusuf, a branch of the Nile that diverges westward north of Asyut, and ends
in Lake Moeris, now called the Birket Qarun. The kings of the 12th
Dynasty in the Middle Kingdom did the major amount of work to irrigate the
Faiyum and reclaim land from the lake.
The kings also left monuments in the Faiyum. The Ptolemaic kings later made the
Faiyum one of the most prosperous and heavily populated parts of the country.
The River filled all
areas of life with symbolism. In religion, for example, the creator sun-god Ra
was believed to be ferried across the sky daily in a boat (compare that to the
Greeks and Romans whose non-creator sun-god rode across the sky in a chariot
driven by fiery horses, and Hymns to Hapy, the deity personifying the
Nile, praise his bounty and offerings were left to him, and the creation myths,
as mentioned earlier, revolve around the primordial mound rising from the
floodwaters surrounding it; in ritual where Nile creatures such as the
hippopotamus, whose shape the goddess Tawaret took, or the crocodile,
called Sobek, or Heket, the frog, deities deemed powerful in the
processes of childbirth and fertility, were revered, in writing, where floral
signs such as the lotus and papyrus figured prominently, in architecture, where
the very structure of temples emulated the mounds of the Nile and its waves,
from the bottom to the top of capital columns and the trim on walls, and in
travel, where models of boats have been found dating from the fifth millennium
BCE.
The god Hapy was earlier
mentioned as being the personification of the floods and ensuing fertility. Two
Hymns to the Nile, one probably composed in the Middle Kingdom, the second
written later in the Ramesside period, praise Hapy and the river for its renewed
life for Egypt.
“Hail
to you Hapy, Sprung from earth, Come to nourish Egypt…Food provider, bounty
maker, Who creates all that is good!…Conqueror of the Two Lands, He fills the
stores, Makes bulge the barns, Gives bounty to the poor.” (from the Middle
Kingdom hymn as translated by Lichtheim)
The rock inscription
called the Famine Stela, dated in its present form from the Ptolemaic period,
recounts an incident, (whether real or fictitious is not currently known for
certain), from the period of King Djoser of the Third Dynasty. The King writes
to a governor in the south, describing himself as disheartened over the
country’s seven-year famine. The King learns from a priest of Imhotep that if
gifts are given to the temple of Khnum, the creator-god of the region, who it
was believed had control over the Nile and its flooding, then the famine would
be ended.
“I was in mourning on my throne, Those of
the palace were in grief….because Hapy had failed to come in time. In a period
of seven years, Grain was scant, Kernels were dried up…Every man robbed his
twin…Children cried…The hearts of the old were needy…Temples were shut,
Shrines covered with dust, Everyone was in distress….I consulted one of the
staff of the Ibis, the Chief lector-priest of Imhotep, son of Ptah
South-of-the-Wall….He departed, he returned to me quickly, He let me know the
flow of Hapy…Learn the names of the gods and goddesses of the temple of Khnum:
Satis, Anukis, Hapy, Shu, Geb, Nut, Osiris, Horus, Isis, Nepththys…As I slept
in peace the god stood before me, I propitiated him by adoring him and praying
to him. He revealed himself to me with kindly face and said: I am Khnum, your
maker! My arms are around you…For I am the maker who makes, I am he who made
himself, Exalted Nun, who first came forth, Hapy who hurries at will…I shall
make Hapy gush for you, No year of lack or want anywhere, Plants will grow
weighed by their fruit…Gone will be the hunger years…Egypt’s people wil
come striding…Hearts will be happier than ever before….I made this decree on
behalf of my father Khnum…In return for what you had done for me…all tenants
who cultivate the fields…their harvests shall be taken to your granary…All
fishermen, all hunters…I extract from them one tenth of the take of all
these…One shall give the branded animals for all burnt offerings and daily
sacrifices, and one shall give one-tenth of gold, ivory, ebony, ochre, carob
wood, carnelian, all kinds of timber…” (as translated by Lichtheim)
The Cultural Atlas of Ancient Egypt by John Baines and Jaromir Malek
The Dictionary of Ancient Egypt by Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson
Egypt and the Egyptians by Doug Brewer and Emily Teeter
Ancient Egypt edited by David Silverman
Ancient Egypt Uncovered by Vivian Davies and Renee Friedman
Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vols. I and III, by Miriam Lichtheim
A Short History of Ancient Egypt by T.G.H. James
People of the Nile by John Romer
Red Land, Black Land by Barbara Mertz
British Museum Book of Ancient Egypt by Stephen Quirke