The Nile - Egypt

"I will now turn to Egypt, because this country possesses many marvellous things and monuments which surpass all description and comparison with those of any other place…"
(Herodotus, Histories, II, 37.)

The Nile, the world's longest river runs through Upper Egypt, we have all heard of Speke and Burton, who yearned to find its source, of Tutankhamun, the boy king who slumbered undisturbed in the Valley of the Kings for over three thousand years, before Howard Carter shattered his peace forever. Few of us will forget the evocative name shaduff one of the oldest means of irrigation known to man, so romantic is the name we can see the pink haze shimmering in the distance and the white Brahmin cow pulling the pivot bringing forth life in the waters of the Nile.

From the Pharaohs, through to the tales of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar immortalised by Shakespeare, we have listened enthralled. Even Papyrus the world's first writing parchment was discovered in Egypt. The scarab beetle, the Gods of Ra, Horus and Seth, all evoke something, in all of us. Even the illiterates are not immune to the lure of the great River and Egypt, the classic cinema epics of Cecil B DeMille, The Ten Commandments, The King of Kings, and Cleopatra, all tell the blblical tale of Egypt.

In short the power of mystery and majesty of the world's greatest River has been etched on every aspect of our consciousness as children. Whether we have an interest in palaeontology, archaeology, history , geography or geometry Egypt entices us, from the literature of Wilbur Smith in the Seven Scrolls and the Sunbird, or the cinema or the Bible. The lure of the Nile that has ebbed and flowed since time began has a memory for all of us and for all of us that memory is different. Fertility is the source of the Nile's richness, not the fecundity of its people, the richness of its soil. Since the dawn of man water has been vital to the development of fields and agriculture, later towns and later still civilisation.

Life began in the area we know as Egypt about 40,000 years ago. The ancient Egyptians are credited with being one of the first civilisations to plant seeds, despite the fact that the soil on the banks of the Nile is very heavy and it has high clay content. Life evolved around the crop cycle, planting, and harvesting; the annual flooding of the Nile was imperative in a country with almost zero rainfall. The ancient Egyptian's made clay houses to shelter from the elements. Society had developed to the level of a unified kingdom about 3200 B.C. and a series of pharaohs or kings were to rule for three thousand years. That means that ancient history is of paramount importance in the region, by the time of Christ the area was in decline.

The origins of the unified Egyptian state are as murky as the waters of the Nile. There are no contemporary sources, and later sources are contentious, it is accepted my most scholars that about 3000 BC, the Nile valley was unified. This area is thought to have been from the Nile Delta and the first cataract at Aswan, the seat of its power was the city of Memphis. According to Manetho, an ancient Greek historian, one of the few writers whose works have survived the King was known as Menes.

During the period of the Pharaohs huge burial chambers were built to honour the kings, and the pyramids are the only surviving wonder of the ancient world. The wealth and power of these great dynasties were not rivalled anywhere else in the world. Certainly Chinese civilisation is as old, and as illustrious, but not as wealthy. Ancient Egypt consisted of two upper and lower kingdoms; the Upper kingdom covered the area we know as Southern Egypt today whilst the lower was the North. Whilst this description may seem juxtaposed it does not originate in geography, but geology. The Nile flows northwards or upstream to the Mediterranean that is downstream.

Upper Kingdom.
Stretching along both banks of the Nile from Lake Moeris to the area of the River known as the cataract, or waterfall, which was then the border of the Nubian kingdom. It as a long thin stretch of land barely thirteen miles wide, flanked by mountains, but it is 750 miles in depth. Its major cities were Heracleopolis, Hermopolis, Abydos, and Thebes. Upper Egypt was separated from the Red Sea by a wadi or a dry riverbed. Today there are islands where the power of water has coursed through the hills eroding and isolating them.

Lower Egypt
The kingdom of Lower Egypt was the Nile Delta, a huge basin where according to Pliny seven branches of the River Nile flowed into the Mediterranean Sea. This was the food basin of the two kingdoms as the Nile flooded over the alluvial plains The Delta contained two-thirds of Egypt's arable land and was where most of the principal cities of Lower Egypt lay, Avaris, Tanis (later Pi-Ramses), Sais, and Bubastis. Lower Egypt did contain a small section of the River Nile where the cities of Heliopolis and Memphis were built.

The narrow geographic layout of the old kingdoms made them difficult to attack; however once it did succumb to foreign rule it lasted for over 2,000 years. In 1954 part of President Nasser's acceptance speech was to state that he was the first native Egyptian to hold sovereignty since 341BC when Nectanebo II, was overthrown by the Persians.

Later the kingdoms were to be ruled by the Greeks, and the Romans. It was the Arabs who brought Islam to Egypt in the seventh Century and they were to reign supreme for the next six hundred years. The Mamluks seized administrative control in the thirteenth Century and they managed to hold it until the Turks invaded in 1517, the Egypt was to become a part of the Ottoman Empire under the control of the Byzantines. In 1882 it became under the control of Britain, until its independence in.

The Nile as the world's longest River is 4132 miles long is more than an Egyptian River; it rises South of the equator in Burundi, flowing through the Congo, Eritrea, Zaire, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Sudan and Uganda. Hoowever the Nile transforms Egypt, without it Egypt would have been indistinguishable from any other Saharan country, the Nile and Egypt are intertwined. The origin of the name is the Greek word Neilos or river valley, but the ancient Egyptians called it the River Aur, which means black. Beyond the Nile the country of Egypt is a desert with a series of five fertile oases. Their fertility is ensured by a sandstone bed 500 ft. below the surface,the water forces itself through natural fissures to the surface. One of the phenomena of Egypt is the mirage which can be seen in the desert and the uncultivated lands in the North, the optical illusion of icebergs and ships are co clear they are often percieved to be real.

Many of the modern cities contain the relics of the Pharaohs, Greeks or Romans. The Pyramids of Gizeh are a mere eight miles from the west of the capitol Cairo. There are many monasteries and churches dating back to the earliest times of Christianity. Any traveller in today's Egypt can witness the character of the orient and the occident, the ancient and modern nestle tantalisingly side by side.