The Nile and Egyptian Civilization

A. Moret

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136198748
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Originally published between 1920-70,The History of Civilization was a landmark in early twentieth century publishing. It was published at a formative time within the social sciences, and during a period of decisive historical discovery. The aim of the general editor, C.K. Ogden, was to summarize the most up to date findings and theories of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and sociologists. This reprinted material is available as a set or in the following groupings:
* Prehistory and Historical Ethnography
Set of 12: 0-415-15611-4: £800.00
* Greek Civilization
Set of 7: 0-415-15612-2: £450.00
* Roman Civilization
Set of 6: 0-415-15613-0: £400.00
* Eastern Civilizations
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* Judaeo-Christian Civilization
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* European Civilization
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PART ONE

THE COUNTRY AND THE BEGINNINGS OF HISTORY

CHAPTER I

COUNTRY, NILE, AND SUN THEIR INFLUENCE ON SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

NO country in the East has its boundaries so definitely fixed by nature as Egypt. In the north is the Mediterranean; east and west are the Arabian and Libyan deserts; in the south are the cataracts of the Nile. These were hard barriers to pass, and behind them the oldest known civilization found, in the lower valley of the Nile, a very safe refuge. As Diodorus says (i, 30-1), “ Egypt is fortified on all sides by nature.”

Egypt, properly so called, extends from the First Cataract to the Mediterranean.¹ I have described its general physical characteristics in From Tribe to Empire (pp. 117-22); here I shall dwell only on the more special features of the country.

Nature has divided Egypt into two regions—the Valley and the Delta.

The Valley is a longitudinal rift in the rocky desert plateau of the Eastern Sahara, through which the Nile has forced a passage from Central Africa to the Mediterranean. Its waters have eroded the exposed edges of the plateau, forming cliffs (Pl. II, 1), which rise 600 feet above the plain, which is uniformly flat.² An interminable corridor, 500 miles in length,³ and between 6 and 12 miles wide, at places narrowing down to the breadth of the stream, with steep, bare walls on either side; the two dry, burning rims of boundless desert, where the red and yellow sand drifts over the baked rocks, and between them a flood of blue water rolling across an unbroken carpet of pastures and cornfields, green and golden; a draught of refreshing air under the blazing sun— these are the features of the land, ta-shemâ, which we call Upper Egypt. The epithet has only a relative value, for the ground is not at all high, falling imperceptibly from an altitude of 300 feet at the First Cataract to Memphis, at the apex of the Delta, barely 40 feet above sea-level.

North of Memphis, or of the present Cairo, the aspect of the country changes abruptly. The Libyan and Arabian cliffs, cut into a V by an old marine gulf, diverge more and more until they fall into the sea, and the Valley spreads out in a Delta ⁴ like a gigantic fan, 60 miles long and almost 400 miles in perimeter. The eyes of the traveller, hitherto accustomed to a narrow valley, marvel at the vast prospect of low-lying plain, stretching away to the distant sea, whose waters recede imperceptibly every year before the advancing silt. It is an aequor, in which land, canals, lagoons, and beaches merge in one absolutely level surface. There the dazzling light of the sun is veiled in transparent haze, and the heat is tempered by humidity. That is the “ Northern Land ”, ta-meh, Lower Egypt; away from the heat and solitude of the African desert, it is in touch with the busy roads of the Mediterranean, it is attached to the Arabian isthmus, it reaches out towards Europe, and it is refreshed by “ the delightful breezes of the North ”.⁵

So nature has created a Mediterranean Egypt and an African Egypt. The differences between these “ Two Lands ”, as the Egyptians called them, are great enough to make a marked impression on the mythological and human history of the country, as we shall see. Nevertheless, the Two Lands are inseparable one from the other. They harmonize together; the Valley is all length, the Delta all breadth, but their cultivable surface, their economic value, their population are equal, and the two equal forces balance one another. The two Egypts could never prosper apart; the Delta by itself lacks the resources of the country above, and the Valley, without the coast, is a blind alley, having no outlet on Europe or Asia. The Nile is what chiefly makes the indivisible unity of the Two Lands. Without the Delta, the Valley would be a stalk with no flower blooming at the end; cut off from the Valley, the Delta could no more live than a flower in full bloom, shorn from the slender stalk which feeds it.

PLATE II

1. CLIFF OF THE LIBYAN DESERT AT DER EL-BAHARI AND TEMPLE OF HATSHEPSUT

2. KARNAK. THE NILE AND THE GREAT TEMPLE OF AMON-RA

The Nile ⁶ was the biggest river of the world which the ancients knew.⁷ Where it enters Egypt, after the First Cataract, its deep bed is already over 500 yards wide, and lower down it spreads out to about half a mile. This huge volume of water flows between two immense barren deserts, which follow it all along its course towards the sea, not only in Egypt, but from as far up in the south as the Egyptians ever went. Now the sands do not absorb the river; on the contrary, the black mud carried by the water encroaches on the tawny ground and clothes itself in corn and greenery. There is no visible source, no persistent rain to feed its waters; no tributary comes in from the neighbouring countries, within the borders of Egypt, to swell the inexhaustible flood. What a wonder it must have been for the first inhabitants of the valley ! We know that the Egyptians never solved the mystery of the origin of their river.⁸ What is more, hardly less ignorant than they, we were still unaware less than a century ago of the great lakes in the centre of Africa. It was only recently that the sources of the Nile were discovered.⁹ The Egyptians, admitting their ignorance,¹⁰ declared that this sacred water came to the earth from heaven, or else rose by secret ways from the Lower World. For them, the majestic river which fed them was “ the Great River ”, itr-âa, or “ the Sea ”, iumâ ; they called it Hapi when they made it into a god of human form. The name Nile, NeîXos, which first appears in Hesiod, is of unknown origin. In Homer Aέγυπτός means first the Nile and then the country made by the river; for Egypt is a “ gift of the river ”, δώρόν τόυ πόταμόύ, according to the very true description of the Egyptian priests, recorded by Herodotus.¹¹

The river has made the soil of Egypt of mud stolen from the Abyssinian plateau by the Blue Nile and the Atbara. The alluvium deposited on the rocky subsoil through centuries has an average depth of 30-40 feet, and in certain parts of the Delta, where the deposit is better preserved, it is as much as 80-100 feet¹²; this soil is rich in potash, very fertile, and easy to cultivate. Wherever the muddy water reaches it covers the ground with a carpet of this humus, which forms the “ Black Land ”, kem-t, and the ancient Egyptians gave this name to their country ¹³ (Plate II, 2).

The Nile not only brings this black earth—it waters it. First there are the infiltrations which take place through the porous soil, all along the river. Generally these are invisible, but in places they are sufficiently considerable to form a natural channel alongside the Nile, such as the Bahr Yusuf on the left bank, running from the Thebaïd to the Fay um. The five oases of the Libyan desert, situated in a row, between 60 and 120 miles from the valley, are fed from a layer of river water which has soaked through the sandstone of the plateau to a depth of 500 to 650 feet; this water comes out by natural springs or artificial wells, and fertilizes the ground over hundreds of miles.

But the annual inundation is the greatest of the miracles of the Nile. By this the river keeps up the depth of cultivable soil, compensates for evaporation, and gives it the humidity needed in a rainless country. Did the Egyptians know the real cause of the periodic flood ? Herodotus and Diodorus are vexed that they could learn nothing, from the priests or anyone else, about the nature of the Nile, the river which, unlike all others, flooded in the height of summer. “ The rising of the Nile is a phenomenon which astounds those who see it and appears quite incredible to those who hear of it. For, whereas other rivers shrink about the summer solstice, and grow smaller and smaller from that point onwards, the Nile alone begins to swell, and its waters rise, day by day, until in the end they overflow almost the whole of Egypt.” ¹⁴

The Greeks ventured upon hazardous explanations which Herodotus rejects with scorn. According to some the Etesian winds from the north caused the flood, by pushing back the water of the Nile and preventing it from falling into the sea. Others said that the flood was simply a movement of the ocean surrounding the earth, from which the Nile sprang. A third explanation ascribed it to the melting of the snows, followed by periodic summer rains, on the high plateau— but how could there be snow in a country where even rain was unknown, and the sun was so hot that it turned men black ? As far as one could ascend the Nile, in four months of sailing, the intense heat makes the country a desert.¹⁵ Since no hypothesis was satisfactory, most of the Greeks were content simply to marvel at the phenomenon, as the Egyptians did.

To-day we know that the inundation comes chiefly from the regular winter rains in the region of the great lakes and from the melting of the snow on the lofty plateau of Abyssinia, the maximum effect of which is felt about the summer solstice. The White Nile sends down a mass of water which advances slowly down the 4,000-mile-long valley, passing Khartum at the beginning of April and reaching Elephantine towards the beginning of June. A wave of green, laden with vegetable detritus from the equatorial swamps heralds the inundation. One month later, the Blue Nile sends its red wave, coloured by the ferruginous mud brought down from the soil of Abyssinia. Descending from the plateau in spate, it imparts a rapid pace to the inundation and fills the water with humus. The two streams, combined, arrive in force in the lower valley about the 15th June, bringing to the Black Land, which has been burnt by the sun until it is dry, brittle, and as powdery as sand, “ the water of renewal,¹⁶ the water of life.” ¹⁷ From June to September, during nearly a hundred days, the Nile rises 40 or 45 feet in the confined gorges of Upper Egypt and 20 or 25 feet in the wide plains of the Delta. It submerges the whole country, and, after remaining for some days at the same level, till the beginning of October, it falls. About the 10th November, it has lost half the height it had reached, and then it returns to its normal bed, shrinks in breadth, and loses by evaporation until the return of the flood in its season. So the Nile takes possession of the country during four months of the year, and leaves it deeply permeated with water and covered with damp, soft mud, ready to receive the ploughshare and the seed.

The grand spectacle of the inundation and its effects, both terrible and beneficent, inspired the oldest religious literature of the Egyptians, engraved in the pyramids of the VIth Dynasty. “ They tremble, they who see Hapi (the Nile) when he beats (his waves); but the m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• List of Plates
• Foreword
• Introduction: Sources and Chronology
• Part One: The Country and the Beginnings Of History
• Part Two: Kinship And Society
• Part Three: Intellectual Life. Religion, Art, Science
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index