The Nile Delta

Histories from Antiquity to the Modern Period

Katherine Blouin

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2024
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009188494
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This is the first volume on the history of the Nile Delta to cover the c.7000 years from the Predynastic period to the twentieth century. It offers a multidisciplinary approach engaging with varied aspects of the region's long, complex, yet still underappreciated history. Readers will learn of the history of settlement, agriculture and the management of water resources at different periods and in different places, as well as the naming and mapping of the Delta and the roles played by tourism and archaeology. The wide range of backgrounds of the contributors and the broad panoply of methodological and conceptual practices deployed enable new spaces to be opened up for conversations and cross-fertilization across disciplinary and chronological boundaries. The result is a potent tribute to the historical significance of this region and the instrumental role it has played in the shaping of past, present and future Afro-Eurasian worlds.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: The Nile Delta, Real and Imagined
• 2 Call Me by My Names: Naming the Delta through Time and Space
• 3 The Nile Delta before the Pharaohs
• 4 The Khetem-Border-Posts in the Delta during the New Kingdom
• 5 New Land amongst New Rivers?: Reconstructing the Ancient Waterscape and Settlement History in the Central Northwestern Delta
• 6 The Mareotis Area: Integration of a Marginal Territory into Egypt through Wine Production
• 7 From Memphis to Alexandria: The Delta within the Persian and Macedonian Empires (End of the Sixth to the First Century BCE)
• 8 Growing with the Empire? From Village to Town: Kom Abou Bellou and Its Urban Development
• 9 Mapping the Cult of Christian Saints in the Nile Delta from the Fifth to the Ninth Century CE
• 10 Alexandria: A Brief Overview of the Major Hydraulics of the City, from Its Foundation to the Arab Conquest
• 11 Imperial Power, Tribal Settlement and Fiscal Revolts in the Early Islamic Delta (Seventh to Ninth Century CE)
• 12 The Nile as Nexus: The Nilometer at al-Rawda Island between Veneration and Mediation in Medieval Islamic Egypt
• 13 Water and Prices: A View of the Nile from the Cairo Genizah
• 14 Water Development in the Medieval Western Delta
• 15 The Nile Delta in European Cartography, 1200-1800
• 16 Just Passing Through?: The Nile Delta, Colonial Modernity and the Egyptian Tourist Economy (ca. 1870-1914)
• 17 Reclaiming the Archive: The Contribution of Egyptian Women to the Archaeologies of the Delta (1880-1924)
• 18 Short Commentary on Accounting Documents from a Vanishing Cotton Estate (?Izba) in the Nile Delta
• Index