The Egyptian World

Toby Wilkinson, Toby Wilkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781136753763
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Authoritative and up-to-date, this key single-volume work is a thematic exploration of ancient Egyptian civilization and culture as it was expressed down the centuries.Including topics rarely covered elsewhere as well as new perspectives, this work comprises thirty-two original chapters written by international experts. Each chapter gives an overvi

PART I

ENVIRONMENTS

CHAPTER ONE

THE NILE VALLEY

David Jeffreys

The geography of the Nile Valley is, of course, familiar to anyone with an interest in pharaonic civilization, but that familiarity tends perhaps to cloud our appreciation of its unusual and even unique qualities. Essentially a major river system passing through a hyper-arid desert (it has sometimes been described as a ‘linear oasis’), the valley consists of the river itself, with an average width of about 500 metres, and a strip of arable alluvial soil either side, giving a flood plain width varying from three to 12 kilometres. The edges of the valley are of only seasonal potential use, and in times of low floods and during the dry season were used for occasional grazing or abandoned altogether.

The northern Nile Valley (from Khartoum to Cairo) is fed by three main tributary sources (the White Nile rising in Uganda, the Blue Nile flowing from Ethiopia, and the Atbara which joins the main course in Sudan, north of the confluence of the other two at Khartoum); its regime within Egypt is not conditioned by local precipitation (except for the Mediterranean coastal region) but by weather events thousands of kilometres to the south, where the monsoon rains fall over the Ethiopian highlands, swelling the Blue Nile during the summer months. The White Nile, by contrast, provides a smaller and relatively even supply throughout the year, while the Atbara is largely seasonal and supplies comparatively little.

The history of formation of the northern Nile Valley is complex, and involves several geological stages (Eonile, palaeonile, prenile, proto-Nile, Neonile) whose formation is explained by responses to tectonic movement, climate change and sea levels (Said 1975, 1990). Only the last two of these phases coincide with human occupation: river terraces of Palaeolithic times can be traced at some points in the sides of the escarpment, and for the whole of the Neolithic, from about 12,000 BP, the valley has been gradually building. To a large extent this explains why very few Palaeolithic sites are located in or near the present flood plain, especially in the north: they are found either in the high desert and correspond to moister, savannah conditions in the eastern Sahara (McHugh et al. 1988; Wendorf et al. 1992/3), or occur in older riverbank deposits which have been cut by later channels and are now well above the valley floor (Sandford and Arkell 1929; Sandford 1934: 61; Vermeersch 2000). The desert limestones and sandstones underlying the earliest recent riverine deposits have been found (near Cairo) sometimes at depths of over half a kilometre (Said and Yousri 1968).

The Nile Valley today presents as a long thin ribbon of alluvial silts and clays along the river sides, with the highest ground usually lying along the riverbanks where the heaviest suspended material in the floodwaters has been deposited. These banks or levees most often show an eastward progression across the valley floor (Butzer 1976), although trends in the opposite direction are also evident (Kubiak 1998; Graham and Bunbury 2005). This movement is important for the study of settlement patterns: some east-bank sites may have been wholly or partially removed by the changing course of the river, while those on the other side will either have followed the river or been left lying inland.

The Egyptian Valley north of the First Cataract (‘Upper Egypt’) is often conventionally divided into three sections (e.g. Baines and Malek 1980): southern and northern upper (Aswan to Abydos or Asyut); middle (Abydos or Asyut to Fayum) and lower (Fayum to Cairo). This schema corresponds to the general width of the flood plain at various points: it is conspicuously narrow between Aswan and Kom Ombo, relatively broad throughout the region between Luxor and the Fayum, especially north of Asyut, and narrow again between the Fayum and Cairo. Upstream of the First Cataract at Aswan (usually taken as the southern frontier of pharaonic Egypt), the valley was exceptionally narrow before the construction of the Aswan Dam, and was interrupted by a series of other cataracts that result from bands of harder rocks such as granite crossing the course of the river. These, and one ex-cataract within Egyptian territory at Gebel el-Sisila, were traditionally exploited by the Egyptian state as useful sources of specialist building or sculptural stone.

Following the most recent drying phase of the Sahara from the fourteenth to the twelfth millennia BC onwards, and especially from the fourth to the third millennia BC, the Nile Valley and delta became a magnet for population movement and settlement from the former savannah areas to the west (Hassan 1988), and from the Levant and the south. Human exploitation of the Nile’s resources almost certainly began in prehistoric times: designs on painted pottery of the Naqada II Period have, for example, been interpreted as proto-images of an irrigated landscape, although there is debate on the question of how early a full, man-managed pattern of flood-recession agriculture was established. The assumption is that, by the time a fully functioning state apparatus for the Nile Valley evolved (probably by the 3rd Dynasty), the agricultural infrastructure was, if not centrally controlled, then at least organized as a series of networks at a regional level for maximum yield and storage capability. Throughout pharaonic history and, indeed, into modern times, agriculture was dependent on basin irrigation, which used the annual floodwaters to be stored in basins (Arabic ahwad, singular hod), bounded by earthwork dykes, until the suspended silts were deposited; the water was then drained off in a controlled sequence by breaching the boundaries between the basins. Only with the construction of the Aswan Dam at the end of the nineteenth century, and more crucially with the High Dam in the 1960s, did this system end and perennial irrigation become possible. With these modern constructions the traditional Nile regime and much of the Nilotic landscape has changed out of all recognition, as has the habitation pattern. The High Dam no longer allows the natural suspended silts to be carried over the flood plain; instead, these are mostly blocked and collect within the reservoir (Lake Nasser). Construction within Egypt, especially in high-value urban and suburban environments (most notably around Cairo), has been allowed to continue almost unchecked and is now at a critical stage (see below). The long-term rise in the floodplain due to natural sedimentation has also been arrested, and there are other ecological consequences (salination, local changes in weather, a rising groundwater table) that affect the economic sustainability of the country, and, by extension, its cultural heritage.

The periodicity of the flood recession cycle is, in some ways, crucial to an understanding of other features of the Egyptian social and economic calendar. The Nile in Egypt began to rise in late summer, reached its maximum in September, and subsided in late autumn. This reversal of the normal timing, with planting and cropping taking place in the winter months, was commented on by early visitors to Egypt, as was the observation that the Nile flowed in the ‘wrong’ direction (i.e. from south to north). Since a close record was kept of the dates and levels of inundations, it became apparent that celestial calendars (especially lunar) required compensation for annual environmental events.

Both the ancient Egyptian and the Arabic terminology for different parts of the flood plain suggest that there was a sophisticated understanding not only of the timing but also of the processes at work, or at least of the effects that these processes would have on a successful harvest. There were, for example, different terms for land regularly inundated, land only occasionally inundated, and land newly created or reclaimed from the river, as well as specific terms for different soil types. There must have been some awareness of the long-term properties of the river regime, such as the gradual rise in level of the plain, as well as the lateral movement of the river across it; although to what extent any action could be taken to counter or accommodate this behaviour is less clear. There are certainly instances of very old standing structures, found at levels that were once dry throughout the year, becoming gradually waterlogged or seasonally flooded; there is also some evidence in recent times of competition between municipalities over islands and other new productive or potentially productive land, and it is reasonable to suppose that this existed at earlier periods too. Individual towns and villages certainly had their own river defences, which might also act as military features in time of need, and the maintenance of municipal dykes was a carefully managed business.

The length and narrowness of the valley are among its most conspicuous features and these almost certainly contributed to the emergence of Egypt as one of the earliest, if not the earliest, of the world’s territorial states. Although stretches of alluvial deposition are found throughout the Nile Valley north of the First Cataract, the width of the valley floor varies from four to 12 kilometres across. Areas of particular constriction occur north of Aswan, prompting the suggestion at one time that this might account for competition and the early rise of state society in this area (Bard and Carneiro 1989); and just south (upriver) of the head of the delta branches, which is again very probably the reason for the location of the first capital of the unified state (White Walls, later Memphis; modern Mit Rahina) at this point (Jeffreys and Tavares 1994). It is not altogether clear how the hydropolitics of the valley operated in pharaonic times: there was almost certainly no real competition for water resources, since the technology needed for damming or for massive water storage did not exist, although some temporary arrangements for diverting river channels may have been introduced in the cataract regions (Vercoutter 1994; but see de Putter 1992, 1993). However, the need to cooperate in the maintenance of river defences and containing earthworks must have involved organization at the local, if not the national level. The interrelationships between the different nomes is of considerable interest, since the formal, normative documents from periods of settled rule rarely shed light on them. There are occasional eulogies of individual cities, and some administrative texts that record travel up and down the river, and temple landholdings; but only recently has evidence been produced for tension and even hostility between neighbouring nomes, significantly during the intermediate periods (Darnell and Darnell 1997a). In some cases new political foundations seem to be deliberately sited between existing power centres (e.g. Itj-tawy and Amarna; and possibly Thebes in the 12th Dynasty).

Similarly, interpretations of the relations between Egypt and Nubia have, until recently, rested on a fairly small corpus of official/ceremonial pharaonic texts. There is no very good reason for treating Egypt as a separate entity, isolated from societies further south: recent work has tended to reflect an awareness that Nilotic cultures in both Egypt and Sudan are, perhaps, more helpfully considered together (Welsby 1996), even to the extent of tracing the roots of pharaonic civilization to south of the First Cataract (Williams 1980, 1987; but see Adams 1985). Certainly the traditional view of Nubia as a culture or culture group under the shadow of a politically dominant Egyptian state has come to be questioned if not deconstructed in recent years.

In section, the Nile Valley appears as a slightly inverted saucer (Butzer 1976), with low-lying areas, often marsh and backswamp environments, near the desert margin and the highest ground near the river where the heavier soil particles were precipitated soonest after the arrival of the flood. Habitation sites in the valley typically cluster at its edges or along these levees and riverbanks, where the highest alluvial ground is found, above the floodwaters all year round. Northwards from Dairut in Middle Egypt, where the valley is at its widest, a subsidiary stream, the Bahr Yusuf (probably a relic of an older course of the main river, maintained and periodically cleared by successive governments) runs parallel to the Nile, with its own flood plain and associated settlement sites. Just north of Beni Suef, a branch of the Bahr Yusuf flows into the large wind-scoured depression of the Fayum with its (much reduced) lake, the Birket Qarun. The Fayum is a curious and interesting geographical feature and seems at times to have acted almost as an overflow facility to the Nile Valley: recent geoarchaeological work there is beginning to suggest that Egyptian water management might have been more ambitious than has been supposed (Hassan 2005).

Typically, settlements were located closest to the water resources, along riverbanks and the sides of subsidiary channels, where these allowed advantageous conditions. The question of transient populations, moving between towns and villages and the surrounding countryside, and even at times out into the desert regions, is not much discussed but they must have been a constant feature, though they appear only occasionally in the pictorial record.

Cemeteries were normally sited close to the settlements, or in the nearest available part of the desert margins. Only rarely, and for specific cult requirements, were burials made within settlements, and of necessity these were shallow enough to remain above the contemporary groundwater table during the inundation. The occasional reference to burials (and temples) being flooded makes it clear that these events were rare and were considered disastrous.

This historical settlement pattern has changed beyond all recognition during the twentieth century, once the successive Aswan dams had essentially created dry conditions throughout the year, allowing building to spread far beyond the original practical limits. The ecology of the Nile Valley is now, in fact, at a critical stage – one of the most acute in the world – in which the finite agricultural resources of the flood plain are in danger of being seriously depleted and eventually overrun by accelerating building programmes (Nasa Earth Observatory website). Overflow housing and irrigation schemes in the desert regions adjacent to the valley are only a partial solution to the problem, and create and perpetuate their own problems.

The river was vitally important to both practical agrarian behaviour and cognitive patterns, although it is perhaps curious that textual references are not more common. There was a distinct terminology for the ‘ordinary’ Nile (iteru), as opposed to the flood (hapi) which was deified and had an important shrine just south of Cairo (Zivie 1980), at the traditional meeting place of the valley and delta, the ‘Two Lands’. In Roman times the river in flood was personified in sculpture as a bearded male deity, similar to the Tiber figures, attended by 16 cherub-like beings representing the cubits of an ‘ideal’ flood. Monitoring of the Nile flood was carefully, indeed almost obsessively, maintained, and we have a near-continuous sequence of flood records from the Roman Period onwards (Popper 1951; Hassan 1981), although the records from pharaonic times are, perhaps surprisingly, much less abundant. Observations were made at a number of sites – usually at a kind of building, often attached to a temple, known in Roman times as Nilometer or Niloscope (later miqyas or manyal in Arabic), of which the best known are at Aswan (Elephantine Island) and Cairo (Roda Island). Curiously, we know little about this practice before the Late and Ptolemaic Periods: although a few flood marks do occur, also notably recorded on outlying parts of temple complexes, it cannot be assumed that they were part of a system organized on a national or even a regional scale (Borchardt 1906; Bonneau 1971). The late antique tradition of a Nilometer at Alexandria (or Memphis?) shows how closely the responsibility for recording the flood was in the hands of the priesthood or clergy (Engreen 1943).

It is assumed that there must also have been an equally rigorous method of recording property boundaries in between floods: considering the extremely precise cadastral records for individual properties it would be surprising if the same detail were not kept for agricultural holdings. How this was managed on the ground is, however, again uncertain: a series of cult objects known as cippi (an Italian term meaning ‘boundary stone’) is certainly known from Egypt, almost always associated with the image of Horus as a child, but this is entirely a contrived modern Egyptological term and it is far from certain that this was the original purpose.

As far as we can tell, the remote sources of the Nile and the cause of the flood were unknown in ancient times, although there was a pious fiction of a source both at Thebes (Gabolde 1995) and Aswan, and a separate, notional ‘source’ of the delta branches was located in the M...