The Nile Read online

  ALSO BY TOBY WILKINSON

  Early Dynastic Egypt

  Royal Annals of Ancient Egypt

  Genesis of the Pharaohs

  Dictionary of Ancient Egypt

  Lives of the Ancient Egyptians

  The Egyptian World (editor)

  The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2014 by Toby Wilkinson

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies. Originally published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury Publishing, London.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Chapter illustrations are from The Nile; or, Glimpses of the Land of Egypt by W. H. Bartlett (1849).

  Other images are from the author’s own collection unless credited otherwise.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wilkinson, Toby A. H.

  The Nile : a journey downriver through Egypt’s past and present / by Toby Wilkinson.—First American edition.

  pages cm

  “Originally published by Bloomsbury, London, in 2014.”

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-385-35155-3 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-385-35156-0 (eBook)

  1. Wilkinson, Toby A. H.—Travel—Nile River. 2. Nile River Valley—Description and travel. 3. Nile River Valley—History. 4. Egypt—Civilization. I. Title.

  DT116.W55 2014

  962—dc23 2013045874

  Jacket photograph: The Cheops pyramid at Giza, Egypt, during a flood of the Nile, ca. 1875, by Antonio Beato. Adoc-photos / Art Resource, N.Y.

  Jacket design by Isabel Urbina Peña

  Maps by John Gilkes

  v3.1

  For Umm Toby

  Egypt … is an acquired country—the gift of the river.

  —HERODOTUS

  Egypt is always herself, at all stages in her history.

  —JEAN-FRANÇOIS CHAMPOLLION

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map of the Nile Valley

  Preface

  ONE The Nile Egypt’s Eternal River

  TWO Aswan Source of the Nile

  THREE The Deep South Where Egypt Began

  FOUR Luxor City of Wonders

  FIVE Western Thebes Realm of the Dead

  SIX Qift and Qena The Centre and the Provinces

  SEVEN Abydos Place of Mysteries

  EIGHT Middle Egypt Cradle of Religion

  NINE The Fayum A Lake in the Desert

  TEN Cairo Egypt’s Capital

  Postscript

  Appendix: Timeline

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  A Note About the Author

  Photo Insert

  Preface

  The country is a palimpsest in which the Bible is written over Herodotus, and the Koran over that.1

  —LUCIE DUFF GORDON

  Egypt is the most populous country in the world’s most unstable region. It is the key to Middle East peace, the voice of the Arab world, and the crossroads between Europe and Africa. Its historical and strategic importance is unparalleled. In short, Egypt matters. Understanding the country and its people is as vital today as it has ever been.

  The key to Egypt—its colourful past, chaotic present and uncertain future—is the Nile. More than two thousand years ago, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus famously remarked that Egypt is “the gift of the river,”2 and so it is. Egypt is the Nile, the Nile Egypt. The river is the unifying thread that runs throughout Egyptian history, culture and politics. It has shaped Egypt’s geography, controlled its economy, moulded its civilisation, and determined its destiny. From Egypt’s earliest art (prehistoric images of fish-traps, carved into cliffs overlooking the river) to the Arab Spring (fought over on the bridges of Cairo), the Nile has been central to Egypt’s story. Throughout the country, the connections between past and present are many and deep. Travelling down the Nile, past villages, towns and cities, dazzling ancient monuments and ambitious modern developments, is the best way to feel the pulse and understand the unique character of this chaotic, vital, conservative and rapidly changing land.

  As I write this, in a boat on the Nile, Egypt stands at the most critical juncture of its recent history. With a past longer than most countries, its future has never looked less certain. Its first democratically elected leader—in five thousand years—has assumed dictatorial powers. Parliament and the courts are at loggerheads. Islamists and secularists are fighting (and dying) over radically different visions of Egypt’s future. The balance of power in the Middle East and the entire trajectory of the Arab world rest on the outcome. The world holds its breath.

  Yet with the sunlight sparkling on the water, waves lapping gently at the sides of the boat, herons wading in the shallows and fishermen casting their nets in mid-stream, there is a timelessness to life on the river that belies the momentous events sweeping the country. Political Egypt seems a world away, a distant sideshow. Rural life continues much as it has for millennia—sowing and harvesting in the fields, fishing on the Nile. The river and its rhythms, not the pronouncements of politicians, are the measure of people’s lives. As one Victorian traveller to Egypt remarked, “There is a sense that transcends the passage of years or the stirring events of history. The visitor to the Nile can smell the same smells as the Ancient Egyptians, of hot dust and damp reeds, of the river itself as it flows smoothly toward the north.”3

  In a country heavy with history, the continuities and interconnections of Egypt’s past and present are particularly visible along the Nile. The same stretch of water along which I am now passing has conveyed pharaonic battleships sailing south to crush rebellions in Nubia and returning laden with the spoils of battle; barges carrying great obelisks from the granite quarries of Aswan to the temples of Thebes; Ptolemaic grain-ships and Roman troop-carriers; papyrus skiffs and Cook’s Nile steamers. On the banks, satellite dishes sprout from the roofs of mud-brick houses, churches and mosques jostle for space with the ruins of pagan temples, and men in galabeyas ride donkeys while talking on mobile phones.

  Egyptians are acutely aware of their rich inheritance. They could not fail to be, with physical manifestations of their past all around. A common complaint about the Muslim Brothers is that they are ignoring Egypt’s long history of diversity and accommodation. As an Egyptian friend put it, “They think we forgot the last seven thousand years; we didn’t.”4 In an attempt to comprehend the enduring influence of those seven thousand years, this book sets out to tell the story of Egypt from the vantage point of its great river. Down the millennia, disparate periods, places and people have been united by the common experience of the Nile. Together, their stories weave the history of an entire country—a country in flux, a country that demands to be understood.

  By the time this book is published, Egypt may have resolved its current crisis and charted a new course—or it may still be in limbo. It may have embraced democracy or it may have reverted to its more accustomed tradition of autocratic rule. For the vast majority of its long-suffering and resilient people, life will continue as before, a daily struggle to make ends meet, put food on the table, nurture the next generation. Amidst all the uncertainties, the Egyptians know they can count, as they always have, on the Nile. Its steady flow is the heartbeat of a nation, and its life-giving waters offer the eternal promise of a better
future.

  Since I finished the first draft of this book in December 2012, events in Egypt have unfolded rapidly and violently. Everything has changed and nothing has changed. In the postscript, I reflect briefly on the situation at the time of going to press.

  —TOBY WILKINSON

  The Nile, Egypt

  December 2012

  Egypt is the Nile … The Nile has created its limits and gifted it with opulence.1

  —SAMUEL COX

  Egypt covers an area of over 380,000 square miles. Ninety-five per cent of it is barren desert. The climate across most of the country is extremely dry, and nowhere receives sufficient rainfall to support agriculture. Without the Nile, there would be no Egypt. The narrow strip of green—the floodplain of the Nile—that runs through Egypt from south to north constitutes less than one-twentieth of the country by area, yet supports more than 96 per cent of its population. As the Roman geographer Strabo put it, “Egypt consists of only the river-land”;2 and that sentiment remains as true today as it was two thousand years ago.

  We now know that the Egyptian Nile is born of the confluence of two great rivers, the Blue Nile which rises in the highlands of Ethiopia, and the White Nile which is fed by Lake Victoria. Just downstream of the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, they join to form a single mighty watercourse, a river that runs northwards for a thousand miles until it reaches the sea. In the southern half of its course, barriers of hard, igneous rock intrude across the Nile Valley at various points. Each barrier causes the river to divide into narrow streams and rivulets as it surges around the natural obstacles in its path. These are the Cataracts of the Nile, conventionally numbered from north to south (even though the river flows from south to north). They are not the massive waterfalls found on other African or American rivers, but regions of rocks and rapids no less hazardous to shipping.

  Only when the Nile has broken through the last such barrier—the granite outcrops of the First Cataract at Aswan—can it continue its journey, uninterrupted, to the Mediterranean. Flowing gently between cliffs of sandstone, its floodplain is at its narrowest, the strip of green on either bank no more than a few feet wide in places. Beyond the towering quarries of Gebel el-Silsila, the sandstone gives way to limestone, creating a softer landscape of age-eroded bluffs, and a broader valley. North of Luxor, the Nile swings sharply to the east in a great bend that brings it closer to the Red Sea than at any other point in its course. But it soon returns to its northwards flow, its floodplain broadening out still further in the remote backwaters of Middle Egypt. Some 625 miles from the First Cataract, the power of the Nile begins to abate and it divides into smaller channels as it makes its increasingly sluggish way to the sea, its alluvial plain fanning out to produce the Delta. (The ancient Egyptians conceptualised their land as a papyrus plant, the narrow valley forming the stalk and the broad delta the flower-head.) Finally, the river meets the sea in a series of brackish coastal lagoons before disgorging its last remaining sediment into the Mediterranean—the sea known to the ancient Egyptians as “the great green.”

  By way of counterpoint to this south–north direction of flow, there is the east–west dynamic of the Valley. Over the aeons, the river has shifted within its floodplain, creating and destroying alluvial land as it goes. The meandering of the river’s channel means that the broader expanse of fertile alluvium is sometimes to be found on the east bank, sometimes on the west. At some points in its course, the river runs close up against the western escarpment, with barely a strip of green between; at other places, it is the eastern cliffs that approach the river’s edge, while the western hills are hazy in the distance beyond the fields. It is this east–west rhythm of the river as much as its south–north flow that has determined the human geography of the Nile Valley. Between the First Cataract and the Delta, the major settlements alternate between the east and west banks, depending on the local topography: Aswan on the east, Edfu and Esna on the west; Luxor, Qift and Qena on the east; Abydos, Asyut and the towns of Middle Egypt on the west; and, finally, Cairo back on the east bank.

  As well as the alluvial land that makes agriculture and human settlement possible, the Nile has also created some of the most striking and memorable scenery anywhere in the world. The landscape, with its patterns of blue, green and yellow-brown, has remained largely unchanged since the days of the pharaohs and imparts a timelessness to the Valley that somehow manages to blur the intrusions of modern life. While the Nile’s green thread is most strikingly apparent from the air, the scenery along its banks is best appreciated from the water itself,

  the level bank shelving down steeply to the river; the strip of cultivated soil, green with maize or tawny with dura; the frequent mud-village and palm-grove; the deserted sugar factory with its ungainly chimney and shattered windows; the water-wheel slowly revolving with its necklace of pots; the shadûf worked by two brown athletes; the file of laden camels; the desert, all sand-hills and sand-plains, with its background of mountains; the long reach, and the gleaming sail ahead.3

  Indeed, “the traveller on the Nile really sees the whole land of Egypt … through which the Nile has been scooping its way for uncounted cycles …”4

  The Egyptians have always been acutely aware of their unique environment; its harmonies and contrasts have shaped their society and world view. The sharp divide between the green strip of floodplain and the yellow-brown desert on either side only emphasises the precariousness of existence and the delicate balance between feast and famine, life and death. In such a world, Egyptians of all periods have revered their river and the life it makes possible.

  Since the dawn of time, Egyptians have speculated about the creation of the world; they have invented various stories, but the most powerful of the ancient myths tells how a small island emerged from the waters of chaos, like a sandbank from the Nile, bringing the possibility of life to the world. Christian and Muslim theologians came up with different accounts, but the importance of the Nile remained strong. Writing around AD 1000, the Arab scholar al-Muqaddasi praised Egypt with the following words: “God has mentioned this region repeatedly in the Qur’an, and has shown its pre-eminence to mankind. It is one of the two wings of the world … its river the most splendid of rivers.”5

  Belief in the Nile’s creative power has continued down to modern times. After Europeans discovered the Nile, they attributed to it quasi-magical properties. Nile water was believed to encourage the birth of twins, or even sextuplets, and was exported in sealed jars for purchase by wealthy—and gullible—clients. Even as great a polymath and scholar as Jean-François Champollion, the man who deciphered hieroglyphics, took Nile water as a curative. In 1825, an Irish doctor named Dr. Richard Madden opined, “In its wholesome properties, I believe the water of the Nile exceeds that of any other river in the world … by its gentle action as an aperient, it benefits health”—even though his close examination of the said water under a microscope had revealed it to be “alive with animal-culae”6 (parasites, algae and bacteria).

  While the Nile’s water has always been more likely to kill than cure, it does, however, have miraculous properties, properties upon which Egyptian civilisation itself was built. Until 1964 and the completion of the High Dam at Aswan, the river’s unique gift was made manifest in its peculiar annual regime. Each summer, the rains falling over the Ethiopian highlands surged downhill, swelling the Blue Nile and causing it to breach its banks in a great inundation. In Egypt, the flood first became apparent in mid-July at the First Cataract—as much by the noise of the crashing torrent as by the increased volume of water. Over the course of just a few days, the flow at the Cataract rose fifteen-fold; as the flood spread northwards, the entire floodplain was inundated to a depth of six feet, with only dikes and the towns and villages on higher ground remaining dry above an inland sea.

  If too great, such an inundation could prove devastating—it was common practice for watchmen to be stationed along dikes at regular intervals at the start of the flood season, to monitor the ris
ing water level and build emergency defences if the flood threatened to overwhelm settlements. But, in a good year, the flood brought twin blessings: water to the fields (even those some distance from the river) and a fresh deposit of fertile silt, carried downstream from the Horn of Africa. An average inundation carried 110 tons of sediment into Egypt, replenishing the soil and renewing its fertility on an annual basis. As Strabo noted, “The water stays more than forty days in summer and then goes down gradually just as it rose; and in sixty days the plain is completely bared and begins to dry out.”7 The after-effects of the flood—the magical combination of water and nutrients, under the warmth of the Egyptian sun—gave the Nile Valley an agricultural productivity that was the envy of other lands. (The introduction of perennial irrigation in the early twentieth century raised the number of crops that could be grown each year from one to three, increasing yields and profits still further. Another result, with unforeseen consequences in the long term, was a rapid rise in Egypt’s population.) It was thanks to the annual inundation that Egypt was able not only to feed itself but to develop a sophisticated civilisation.

  The flood was so vital a phenomenon that the ancient Egyptians set their calendar by it, the first day of the first month of the inundation season marking the start of the new year. The flood was worshipped as the corpulent fertility god Hapy, bringer of abundance, and hymns were composed to him. Classical authors likewise rhapsodised on the Nile flood, and the magnificent Palestrina mosaic was created to celebrate the river’s bounty. The Arab poet Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi praised the after-effects of the inundation, which meant that “all the earth is cultivable.”8

  The only problem with the Nile’s annual miracle was its variability. The Roman historian Pliny explained that

  An average rise is one of sixteen cubits [twenty-seven feet]. A smaller volume of water does not irrigate all localities, and a larger one by retiring too slowly retards agriculture … in a rise of twelve cubits [Egypt] senses famine, and even at one of thirteen it begins to feel hungry, but fourteen cubits brings cheerfulness, fifteen complete confidence and sixteen delight.9