First Person: Exploring the Nile River
The guidebooks and river cruise itinerary for the Nile River cruise were studied and neatly packed for my trip, but nothing really prepared
me for what surely is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to savor firsthand and physically close some of the most striking and memorable scenery and
history anywhere in the world.
As I write this, I’m traveling down the Nile in a flat bottomed, two masted houseboat, a dhahabiya (الدهبية) in Arabic, meaning “golden one,” which vaguely recalls the state barges of Egypt’s medieval Muslim rulers. A group of twelve or so of us move at an aquatic snail’s pace down-river from Aswan toward Cairo, marking five thousand years of history in villages, towns, and cities, with an astounding array of dazzling temples and tombs, and even modern developments, in chaotic, vital, conservative, and changing Egypt.
But first things first. The Nile River begins as smaller rivers flowing into Lake Victoria and flows northwards to empty into the Mediterranean. It flows over 4,100 miles through ten other countries and is crucial to life in Egypt. More than two thousand years ago, the ancientGreek historian and geographer Herodotus famously proclaimed that Egypt is “the gift of the river.” Egypt is the Nile, the Nile Egypt.
Historically, the Nile simultaneously provided two things nearly unique on planet earth for the livelihood and prosperity of the populace. The first was perfect agricultural inputs like reliable water and high fertility soil. And it wasn’t scarce desert rainfall that gave rise to the mighty Nile, but instead the seasonal torrents from the Ethiopian highlands and overflow from the African Great Lakes. The Nile was so flushed with water every year, so much a constant focal point that the ancient Egyptians’ calendar began the year with the first month of flooding. “Nilometers” on stone columns marked water levels for predictive signs of flooding or low water. And “basin irrigation” was an innovation specialty.
The Egyptian religion venerated a deity of flooding and fertility, Hapy. About fertility, the Nile’s modern name comes from Nelios, the Greek word for river valley. But the ancient Egyptians called it Aror Aur, meaning “black,” a reference to the dark nutrient-rich sediment, explains Barry J. Kemp in Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization.
The Nile even played an important role in the creation of the monumental tombs such as the Great Pyramids of Giza that reach four hundred feet or so in height. We know from ancient papyrus diaries that workers transported massive locks of limestone on wooden boats and then routed the blocks through a canal system to the construction sites.
The second factor for ancient Egypt’s well being, maybe even more important than water, was that the Lower Nile was safe. It’s easy too imagine standing on the ridge above the flood plan at any point and looking east or west to an enormous desert waste that wasn’t easy for a hostile force to cross. “It was one of the few places in the world where there was enough water to survive, and enough security to thrive,” geo-realist Peter Zeihan once told me. All of which produced not only food surpluses, but also a surplus of labor, a guaranty that Egypt would be on the road to a rich civilization. Thus, by 3150 B.C. a single government dominated all of the useful Nile territories between the Mediterranean and what today is Aswan. “In short, “ Peter Zeihan again, “Egypt proved to be the longest-lasting of the ancient civilizations, outliving its ancient contemporaries by two millennia.” Even today, one twentieth of Egypt’s land mass supports ninety-five percent of the population. In ancient times any outside invasion would have been so diluted by the sheer mass of the Egyptian population that the government would have had little problem retaining control.
An aid to our knowledge of ancient events is that hieroglyphs, the topic of a language lover’s heaven, going back to at least 3100 B.C., formed a complex system of writing for monumental purposes. With attention to repeated motifs and important names encircled in cartouches (some of them sheltered from the scouring of sand-laden wind), all of them give modern meaning to thousands of years of history. The significance of the Rosetta Stone for decipherment screams loudly and clearly, even if silently.
Eventually, with new technologies, domesticated camels and sailing ships among them, outsiders breached Egypt’s desert buffers with ancient, medieval, and industrial eras whose remnants trumpet a roll-call for Nile Valley history. Among those eras, the Greek city states, the Persian Empire, the Great Arab Conquest, the Sublime Porte of the Ottomans, the armies off Napoleon, and the bureaucrats of the East Asia Company. Each of them with contentious histories and competing interpretations.
What isn’t subject to a lot of interpretation today is that the flow of the Nile River has dropped from 3,000 cubic meters per second to 2,800 over the past 50 years. The dynamics for this danger are varied. Lake Victoria has high levels of evaporation. Sea levels are rising, causing the saline waters of the Mediterranean Sea to encroach on the Nile. That salt water pollutes land where crops are grown along the Nile River delta. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) is an issue for lower water levels and the possibility of reduced hydroelectric production. Very simply, if not effectively dealt with, growing water scarcity will put severe strains on Egypt’s economy.
Facts are that Egypt is currently using more water than its internal renewable resources supply, and, with one of the highest population growly rates in the Middle East, the country is expected to use even more water in the near future. According to Egyptian statistics, the country’s per capital water resources have fallen below United Nation’s thresholds for sufficiency measured by drinking, agriculture, and nutrition. The government here has drawn up the National Water Resources Plan 2017-2037, and billions of dollars will need to be invested to achieve lasting water security in the future. Amid the challenges of the future in a turbulent part of the world, the dependability of the Nile will be as important as ever.
T. Nelson Thompson just returned from several weeks in Egypt. He recently retired as the Maritime Environmental and Energy Technical Adviser at the U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD) in Washington, DC. He is the author of After Babel: Reflections on Language and Languages (Seattle: All Bilingual Press, 2023).