The Nile Read online

  A flood measuring six feet below normal at Aswan could reduce agricultural yields by three-quarters, bringing famine. By contrast, a flood six feet above normal would breach dikes, overwhelm settlements, destroy granaries, encourage plagues of insects and delay sowing, causing the ripening crops to wither under the hot summer sun. (The year 1818 witnessed just such a flood; whole villages were washed away, several hundred people were drowned, and “Every available boat was engaged in carrying precious grain to higher ground.”10) Thus, as well as bringing life and prosperity to Egypt, the Nile’s waters also determined the country’s fate—year after year. This explains the Egyptian preoccupation with measuring the height of the annual inundation, by means of Nilometers built at key locations in the Valley—notably the island of Elephantine at the foot of the First Cataract and the island of Roda on the outskirts of Cairo. The annual measurements of the inundation were pored over by priests and bureaucrats alike, for they gave an unerringly accurate prediction of the following year’s harvest. It is telling that Egypt’s earliest historical records—a set of annals, carved on a slab of basalt, noting the main events of each year of each reign starting at the beginning of the First Dynasty—give pride of place to the height of the annual Nile flood, measured in cubits, palms and fingers. For every man, woman and child in Egypt, not just the country but their very lives were the gift of the river.

  THE NILE BRINGS WATER and fertility to the fields of Egypt, turning what would otherwise be barren desert into a picture of abundance. That is not its only gift. The river also connects every settlement in Egypt and has the added bonus of flowing from south to north, against the prevailing wind which blows from north to south. This means that travel both up- and downstream is practical and convenient—at least in theory. The river is not just the source of Egypt’s agricultural wealth, it is also a great waterway whose cargoes—human and material—have built a civilisation.

  Once the Nile has passed the First Cataract, for the rest of its course it flows at a gentle pace and can give the impression of being an easy river to navigate. Looks can be deceptive, however. The very sluggishness of the current lends itself to the accumulation of hidden sandbanks which are prone to shift position without warning. This makes navigation difficult by day and dangerous by night. Ancient Egyptian literature is full of metaphors about being marooned on sandbanks, and the same danger has persisted throughout history. In his observations of mid-nineteenth century life in rural Egypt, Edward Lane noted that

  In consequence of the continual changes which take in the bed of the Nile, the most experienced pilot is liable frequently to run his vessel aground; on such an occurrence, it is often necessary for the crew to descend into the water to shove off the boat with their backs and shoulders.11

  Later in the century, when tourist trips down the Nile became popular, ship captains were issued with instructions, prominent among which was that “Captain and Pilot must know the exact draught of the boat on which they are working.”12 Even today, in an era of sonar and navigational aids, sailing on the Nile is impossible without an experienced rayyis (pilot) who can tell, simply by looking at the surface of the water, what lies beneath. The prevalence of sandbanks and sunken rocks in the bed of the Nile has influenced both navigation and the design of Nile craft, most of which draw very little water at the stern, allowing them to be freed more easily if they run aground. (In the Pyramid Age, boats were sometimes adorned with figureheads in the form of hedgehogs, looking backwards—though exactly how this was believed to help navigation remains one of the more esoteric riddles of Egyptology.)

  Another challenge for Nile shipping is the unpredictability of the wind. Although the prevailing direction is northerly, winds from the south are not uncommon; in such conditions, faring upstream—against both current and wind—becomes impossible and boats are easily becalmed. This must have been a frequent occurrence in earlier times, and a major impediment to the free movement of people and materials. It was just as well that, for most of pharaonic history, the major pyramids and temples were located downstream of the quarries that supplied them, so that the transport of heavy building stone could rely entirely on the Nile current.

  Lack of wind is one problem; in the narrowest parts of the Nile Valley, where the river flows between steep cliffs, sudden whirlwinds and squalls present another danger. An abrupt bend in the course of the river at Gebel Abu Feda in Middle Egypt has always been particularly notorious for sudden gusts of wind, with dangerous consequences for lightweight craft. A visitor to Egypt in the late nineteenth century recounted a memorable incident:

  On our way to Cairo we gave shelter to Edwin Arnold and his wife and daughter who had just been shipwrecked under the cliffs of the Gebel Abu-Fôda. They were ascending the Nile in a small dahabia [a flat-bottomed house-boat] and a sudden gust of wind in the early morning had capsized the boat. The ladies were still in bed, and had been obliged to crawl through the windows of their cabins in their nightdresses; Edwin Arnold and his son had managed to put on a few clothes. No one was drowned except the cook, but, so far as I could judge, the Arnolds seemed to consider the loss of their water-colour sketches a more serious calamity than that of their cook. They had to sit for several hours on the upturned bottom of the dahabia, like “sea-gulls in a row”…and when at last they landed, cold, hungry and half-clothed, it was the eastern shore, which in those days was barren and uncivilised. Eventually, however, a dahabia came to their rescue, in which young Arnold continued his voyage up the Nile; the rest of the family had had quite enough of it.13

  (Edwin Arnold was undaunted by this mishap; he went on to pursue a successful career as a journalist, poet and interpreter of Buddhism to the West; among other accomplishments he arranged Stanley’s journey to discover the course of the Congo, and was awarded the Order of the White Elephant by the King of Siam.)

  Besides geological and meteorological hazards, travellers on the Nile faced dangers from wildlife. Ancient Egyptian art and literature are full of references to the crocodile and hippopotamus, two species which presented daily hazards to communities along the river. Crocodiles were a major threat at the water’s edge; the reptiles are well known for observing and learning the daily patterns of behaviour of their prey, and there must have been numerous incidents where people or animals coming down to the Nile to drink or wash were seized by a crocodile and dragged down into the depths. Hippos, on the other hand, presented more of a danger to those crossing the Nile, especially in flimsy or unstable craft. (Even today, more people in Africa are killed by hippos than by crocodiles.) It is no accident that a small statuette of a hippo was a favourite item of tomb equipment in ancient Egypt: since the beast posed a threat to Nile navigation, there was a strong belief that the winding waterways of the underworld would be similarly infested, and magical protection was thus deemed essential.

  Despite such dangers, shipping of all kinds and for all purposes has plied the waters of the Nile since the earliest days of human habitation in the Valley. Because all settlements in Egypt (until very recently) were located within easy reach of the river, the Nile has traditionally offered the fastest communication within Egypt. Boats were the main engines of trade and warfare, and the principal means of moving men and materials. In ancient times, travel anywhere in Egypt meant travel by boat, to the extent that the word for “travel north” was written with the sign of a rowing boat, while “travel south” was written with a sailing boat. The terms for “port” and “starboard” entered the language to denote “left” and “right” even on land, and the language was replete with nautical metaphors. Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, was lauded as “the bow-rope of Upper Egypt, the mooring-post of the Southerners, the effective stern-rope of Lower Egypt.”14 In their autobiographies, courtiers boasted of giving “a boat to the boatless” alongside feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. Commoners and kings alike regarded a boat as essential for the afterlife journey.

  The simplest Nile craft were
lightweight skiffs constructed from bundles of papyrus reeds. Paddled like a canoe or propelled with a long pole, like a punt, they offered an inexpensive and easy solution for short journeys. If the tomb scenes are to be believed, high-ranking members of ancient Egyptian society used them for leisure pursuits, notably fishing or fowling in the reed marshes along the banks of the river. Such skiffs (though made from sedge or sugar cane rather than papyrus, which is now extinct in the wild in Egypt) can still occasionally be seen today in the more rural parts of Upper Egypt, where they are particularly well suited for travelling along shallow irrigation canals.

  For longer journeys and the transport of cargo, wooden boats were the preferred option and remain a common sight on the Nile today. Different boat types were developed for different purposes. At one end of the spectrum, small rowing boats were—and are—perfect for crisscrossing the Nile and for fishing midstream. (It is curious that, although the oars surviving from ancient boats have well-defined blades, their modern counterparts are generally no more than planks of wood. This makes the act of rowing heavy work.)

  Rowing may be fine for crossing from one side of the river to the other, but for journeys along the river, especially upstream, sailing offers a more practical solution. In ancient times, sailing boats were steered by one or more long steering-oars at the stern; today, a rudder is used, albeit a very broad one necessitated by the shallow draught of most Nile craft. As for the different types of sailing boat, form has always been determined by function. For royal and religious use, barques and ships of state were among the most spectacular boats to be seen on the ancient Nile. A “Director of the Royal Boat” is first attested at the dawn of Egyptian history, and from the beginning of the First Dynasty Egypt’s kings embarked on regular royal progresses the length of the Nile Valley to see and be seen, to adjudicate on important matters of state, and to reinforce their authority.15 Down the millennia Egyptian rulers have recognised the symbolic power as well as the convenience of boats. Perhaps the most impressive of all such craft—and the oldest complete boat in the world—is the solar boat buried next to the Great Pyramid and lovingly reconstructed in the 1950s to sit in its own museum at Giza. Built from planks of costly cedar wood, imported from the hills of Lebanon, it measures 143 feet long by nearly twenty feet in the beam and has a displacement of forty-five tons. With its slender, curved form, roofed cabin and high stern, it is a stunning example of the ancient shipwright’s craft, built “frame-first,” its planks lashed together with such skill that no caulking would have been required to make the boat watertight.

  Barques of similar design were employed in the most important religious festivals of ancient Egypt. For example, during the annual Festival of the Sanctuary, inaugurated in the Eighteenth Dynasty, the sacred image of the god Amun-Ra was carried in procession by boat from his cult centre at the temple of Karnak to the temple of Luxor and back again amid scenes of great rejoicing. The god’s special boat was called the Userhat, “powerful of prow”; its bow and stern finials were carved in the shape of rams’ heads (an animal sacred to Amun-Ra); and its central cabin (which held the god’s shrine) was fashioned with gold, silver and precious stones.

  In more recent times, the royal yacht belonging to the last king of Egypt, Farouk, was an equally sumptuous craft. Yet the statement it made about royal power turned out to be rather hollow: the Kassed Kheir, as it was called, was the boat that bore Farouk into exile, following the military coup of 1952.

  Ancient Egyptian boats, with their non-existent keels, flat bottoms and enormous sails, could not have sailed light for fear of capsizing; they must have been weighted with ballast, stowed under the deck. Indeed, where river transport really came into its own was in the carriage of freight. During the inundation, heavy boats with a deep draught could navigate the main Nile channel in safety, while boats with shallower draughts could travel across the flooded fields to the very edge of the cultivation. From the stone-barges of the Pyramid Age to the grain-ships of the Roman and Arab periods, Egyptian civilisation has been built on the extraordinary capacity of the Nile to transport materials.

  In the causeway of the pyramid of Unas at Saqqara, dating from the Fifth Dynasty (circa 2325 BC), panels of relief decoration show massive barges transporting columns and door-jambs of granite from the First Cataract all the way north to Saqqara to adorn the king’s pyramid complex. The accompanying inscription describes the scenes as “coming from Elephantine bringing granite columns/door-jambs for the pyramid.”16 Nearly a thousand years later, barges of a similar design were used to transport the twin obelisks of Hatshepsut from the quarries at Aswan to her mortuary temple at Thebes. Throughout pharaonic history the river must have been busy with cargo boats carrying blocks of granite and basalt, sandstone and limestone for the construction of pyramids and temples. Even today, barges carrying building materials (stone and sand) are a common sight on the Nile. Less harmless cargo was also transported by river, as witnessed by a nineteenth-century traveller to Egypt who observed “a government tug towing three or four great barges closely packed with wretched-looking, half-naked fellâheen bound for forced labour on some new railway or canal.”17

  In the mind’s eye it is not the barges, ships of state or rowing-boats that have come to epitomise life on the Nile, however, but three other distinctive types of vessel. The first, and most characteristic of all, is the felucca. With its broad beam, shallow draught, curved mast and single triangular sail, this is the quintessential Nile boat. Typically crewed by two or three men (although it can be sailed solo), and accommodating up to ten passengers, the felucca remains a stalwart of Nile travel. There can be no more quintessential image of Egypt than a flotilla of feluccas at Aswan, their white sails standing out against the blue water, or circling on the Nile in front of the temple of Luxor as the sun sets over the west bank.

  More elaborate than the felucca is the dahabiya, a flat-bottomed, two-masted house-boat whose Arabic name, “golden one,” recalls the gilded state barges of Egypt’s medieval Muslim rulers. The basic design of the dahabiya goes back even further, to ancient times, and “reproduces in all essential features the painted galleys represented in the tombs of the kings.”18 With its shallow draught, easily poled off moorings and sandbanks, the dahabiya is ideally designed for Nile travel, and became firmly established as the transport of choice for well-heeled visitors to Egypt during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most dahabiyas had at least two or three bedrooms and a bathroom, perfect for a party of four or five, while the crew typically comprised a rayyis, eight sailors, a steersman and a kitchen boy. The largest boats had a main cabin large enough to seat eight for dinner. The lower deck, covered by a canvas awning, doubled as a seating area for the guests during the day and a sleeping area for the crew at night; while an upper deck was typically “furnished with lounge-chairs, table and foreign rugs, like a drawing-room in the open air.”19

  In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, feluccas and dahabiyas were joined by double-decker steamers, modelled on Mississippi river boats. They had multiple bedrooms and lounges that were glazed from floor to ceiling to take advantage of the Nile scenery. Despite the protestations of the more romantically inclined—who argued that “the choice between dahabeeyah and steamer is like the choice between travelling with post-horses and travelling by rail. The one is expensive, leisurely, delightful; the other is cheap, swift, and comparatively comfortless”20—the steamers caught on and became the most common form of cruise ship on the Nile. In due course, they were superseded by even larger craft with many more bedrooms, swimming pools and all the other paraphernalia expected by present-day holiday-makers.

  In the last fifty years, the Nile has been replaced as Egypt’s principal means of transport by road and rail. Most freight is carried by land, leaving the river as the preserve of fishermen, village ferries and trippers. (Ironically, the roads are so bad, the railways so run-down, that a boat remains by far the most pleasant and reliable form of transport.) At th
e height of the season, from December to March—assuming a stable political situation and a functioning economy—the Nile is crowded with cruise ships: along the corniche at Luxor, they moor up ten abreast; they form long queues at the Esna barrage; and they fill the river between Luxor and Aswan, their bright lights and pounding music disturbing the peace and tranquillity. Egypt may be the gift of the river, but the river itself has largely been gifted to tourists.

  EVER SINCE Herodotus travelled to Egypt and wrote his memorable descriptions of the country in the fifth century BC, the Nile Valley, with its picturesque scenery, enchanting tableaux and ancient civilisation, has intrigued and captivated the Western imagination. Herodotus’ account, compiled from personal observation and information provided by Egyptian priests, opened the eyes of the classical world to the mysteries of pharaonic Egypt and spawned an interest in the history and geography of the Nile Valley that has never abated. Subsequent classical authors, notably Diodorus Siculus (circa 70–20 BC) in the middle of the first century BC and Strabo (64 BC–AD 25) a generation later, followed in Herodotus’ footsteps, literally and literarily, explaining to eager readers the land of the pharaohs.

  After Julius Caesar sailed up the Nile with his lover Cleopatra in 47 BC, Egypt became firmly established as a favourite destination for the wealthy and curious. The dozens of Greek and Latin graffiti carved into the façade of the great temple of Abu Simbel in Lower Nubia and on the legs of the Colossi of Memnon at Thebes record the names, motives and impressions of tourists who visited the Nile Valley in classical times. Mostly, they came to marvel at the ancient ruins—Pliny the Elder was one of the first authors to describe the Sphinx at Giza, while Homer had written of the fabled “Hundred-gated Thebes”—or to hear the “singing of Memnon” (the eerie sound emitted from one of the Colossi of Memnon) at dawn, an experience that became especially fashionable in the reign of Hadrian. Many visitors were soldiers in the Roman army who took advantage of a tour of duty in Egypt to see some of the sights.