The Nile

by Toby Wilkinson

  Aswan, with its two strategic roles as entrepôt and frontier, has been of particular interest to Egypt’s national authorities down the centuries. In Ptolemaic times, a fortified wall over thirty feet high, fifteen feet thick at the base, and nearly five miles long was built behind Syene, running south from the city harbour to the plain of Shellal at the southern end of the Cataract, to protect the portage road against raids by bedouin tribes. To reinforce this physical security, soldiers were garrisoned at Aswan throughout the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, their other important role being to collect government taxes on the lucrative trade that passed through the Cataract region. For the most part, the troops saw little military action beyond repelling occasional border raids. They were, however, involved in one armed encounter which, in retrospect, has a special place in Egyptian history. It was at Aswan, on 27 August 186 BC, that the very last native Egyptian to proclaim himself pharaoh made his final stand. Ankhwennefer was a native of the southern Nile Valley, the heartland of Egyptian nationalism, and at his father’s death in 199 BC he found himself leader of a long-running rebellion against Ptolemaic rule. In a decade-long campaign against the Greek-speaking authorities, Ankhwennefer showed impressive strategic ability, rallying much of southern Egypt to his cause and harrying Ptolemaic troops along a considerable stretch of the Nile Valley. But he met his match in the troops stationed at Aswan. In a decisive final battle, his army was defeated, his son killed, and Ankhwennefer himself was taken prisoner. His rebellion was extinguished and the Egyptians resigned themselves to a long period of foreign domination. Not for another 2,138 years and the generals’ coup of AD 1952 would Egypt be ruled by one of its own countrymen.

  As I stand on the riverbank on a chilly December morning, with the city of Aswan behind me, and look westwards to the towering cliffs on the opposite shore, the long, low outline of Elephantine dominates the view. Perhaps nowhere else in Egypt has such a rich and layered history as this little island in the Nile’s stream. At every period, Elephantine has been at the heart of events on Egypt’s southern border. Its places, its people and its stories evoke the frontier mentality which imbues the Cataract region. The island’s very name indicates its importance, from earliest times, as an emporium for the ivory trade; and Elephantine’s position has always made it the perfect place from which to control the movement of goods and people between Nubia and Egypt.

  Once I have crossed over to the island in one of the small, brightly painted boats that line the quayside at Aswan, I climb up the steps to the old museum, then turn left towards the archaeological zone. Hurrying through a thicket of mimosa, past blocks of decorated stonework and mud-brick walls, I am keen to see the spot that gave Elephantine its special status. After a ten-minute walk, I arrive on the south-eastern edge of the island, atop the towering granite boulders that resemble a herd of slumbering elephants. From here, I have an unparalleled view of the deep water channel through which all north- and southbound river traffic must pass. People have been coming here, for just this view, for millennia. In 3000 BC, one of the very first acts of the newly formed Egyptian state was the construction of a large fortress on the highest point of the island. A rectangular structure with semi-circular bastions for extra protection, the fort combined the functions of border post, customs house and government storage facility. Its construction and subsequent enlargement created a building that dominated the island, towered over the neighbouring hovels and interrupted access to the local community shrine. It was an early, and stark, indication that a government’s priorities (revenue collection and national security) do not always coincide with the best interests of its people.

  Elephantine is today full of archaeology, but rarely visited by tourists. On the day I visit, both its museums—one built by the English a century ago, the other a new display of finds from the ongoing German and Swiss excavations—are deserted. For not only is Elephantine a little off the beaten track, it has also had its fair share of problems in recent decades. The Nubian village adjoining the archaeological zone is a notorious flashpoint, and the villagers have a reputation for violence. So despite the presence of valuable ancient remains beneath the houses and streets, the archaeologists and authorities steer well clear. A chain-link fence keeps the two rival groups—Nubians and archaeologists—apart. Despite these tensions, there is significant activity at the northern tip of the island, in the form of a new hotel. Following the conclusion of a fifteen-year court case which had stopped all construction, the empty concrete shell, for so long a blot on the landscape, is at last being clothed and finished, to become an annexe of the Mövenpick next door. The ground between the two buildings is being levelled to accommodate a huge swimming pool. There must be antiquities aplenty here, but, as a local guide explains, the first reaction of an Egyptian to finding antiquities on a building site is “to cover it with concrete.”10 Otherwise, the land would risk being compulsorily seized by the Antiquities Department. And, of course, the whole of Egypt is potentially an archaeological site.

  Throughout the pharaonic period, troops were stationed on Elephantine to escort caravans of goods travelling from Nubia to Egypt, before the main garrison was moved across the Nile to Syene under Ptolemaic and Roman rule. The life of one particular and rather special military community has been brought to light by the discovery of a remarkable collection of papyrus documents. Found amongst the ruins of mud-brick houses in the south-eastern corner of Elephantine, the papyri, written in Aramaic, date from the fifth century BC. They comprise twenty-four legal documents, eleven letters and a list; and they chronicle the lives of a community of Jewish mercenaries and their families who guarded Egypt’s southern frontier over a period of ten generations.

  The contribution of Jews to the history of the Nile Valley is largely forgotten because of today’s geopolitics, yet it is a story of long and significant engagement. Jews had been living in the Cataract region for at least two hundred years when a Persian army conquered Egypt in 525 BC. The Persian policy of deploying mercenaries from one corner of the empire to keep control in another (a policy still used today by governments from Syria to China) bolstered the numbers of foreigners stationed in Egypt. So, besides the Jewish mercenaries garrisoned on Elephantine, there were other peoples from western and central Asia, including Arameans (stationed at Aswan), Babylonians, Caspians and Persians themselves. The Jewish archives from Elephantine come from the households of three men called Mibtahiah, Ananiah and Jedaniah—all named in honour of their god Iahu (Yahweh). Together, the documents provide the earliest testimony of the life of a Jewish community anywhere in the world—here on Egypt’s southern border and the Persian empire’s farthest frontier.

  As soldiers, the Jews of Elephantine received a standard monthly ration of grain and lentils, which they supplemented with locally grown fruit and vegetables. As mercenaries in the employ of the Persian government, they also received a monthly payment in silver from the royal treasury. This made them somewhat wealthier than most of their Egyptian neighbours, and ownership of a house was within reach of most mercenary families. The Jews lived in distinctive houses with long, narrow rooms and barrel-vaulted ceilings, quite different from the wooden-beamed roofs of their Egyptian neighbours. Despite close personal links between the island’s two ethnicities, Egyptian and Jewish, the combination of cultural difference and economic disparity did not always make for stable community relations.

  Ananiah ben Azariah was a leading member of the Jewish community on Elephantine. His wife, Tamut, was an Egyptian woman who had been a slave girl. Even after her marriage she remained bound to her master, and later to his son. Ananiah and Tamut lived together in a large house on King Street. Its location was especially convenient, for it lay directly opposite the temple of Yahweh where Ananiah worked as a priest. A literate man among largely illiterate neighbours, Ananiah was likely called upon to write messages on behalf of others. Long-distance letters were written on lengths of papyrus, rolled, tied and sealed, while communications destined for Syene,
just across the river, typically used cheaper material such as flakes of pottery or stone. Aware of the importance of writing as a permanent record, Ananiah certainly made sure that important legal transactions affecting him and his family were committed to papyrus. One such contract was the gift of half his house to his wife, probably when she bore him a son. Like all his Jewish compatriots, Ananiah wrote in Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Persian empire; but his name, and those of his Jewish relatives, is Hebrew, reflecting their particular cultural heritage.

  Ananiah’s workplace, the temple of Yahweh, had been built before the Persian invasion. It was a magnificent building by local standards, sixty cubits (101 feet) long with stone pillars, five stone gates with bronze hinges and a cedarwood roof. In accordance with Jewish custom, the temple faced towards Jerusalem. Yet, despite worshipping Yahweh, Ananiah and his fellow Jews were not particularly devout. They sometimes broke the Sabbath. They happily absorbed gentiles (like Ananiah’s own wife) into their community. And they were quite happy to swear legal oaths by other deities, including Elephantine’s Egyptian goddess Satet.

  But this acceptance of other customs and cultures extended only so far. At the important Jewish festival of Passover, Ananiah and his people were determined to honour their own religious tradition by sacrificing a lamb—to the evident disgust and outrage of the local priests of Khnum, god of the Cataract, whose sacred animal was the ram. As revenge for what they saw as an act of supreme sacrilege (or, perhaps, to get even with a community that was markedly better off than the local Egyptians and in cahoots with the Persian oppressors), the Khnum priesthood instigated a riot that destroyed the temple of Yahweh. The Jewish community went into mourning for three years; and when their Persian protectors were ousted from Egypt in 399 BC, the Jews of Elephantine left swiftly afterwards, bringing to an end centuries of coexistence on this small island in the Nile.

  While we have tantalising glimpses of the lives of Ananiah and his fellow Jews, it is in death that the native Egyptian inhabitants of Elephantine are best known to us. High above the river, hewn into the cliffs of the west bank below a promontory known as Qubbet el-Hawa, the “dome of the winds,” there is a series of rock-cut tombs, many of them still vibrant with colour and detail. They are the funerary monuments of Elephantine’s pharaonic elite. Here, on the porous frontier between Egypt and Nubia, one particular category of official was especially esteemed: the desert scout. In the Sixth Dynasty (2325–2175 BC), towards the end of the Pyramid Age, when the Egyptian government was feeling its way to an accommodation with the nascent kingdoms of Nubia, men who knew the terrain beyond the Cataract and who could lead an expedition into Nubia (and safely home again) commanded both huge respect and considerable wealth. The status of individuals like Sabni—who led a secret expedition to Nubia to repatriate the body of an Egyptian government agent killed by hostile tribes—is written all over his richly decorated tomb. His neighbour in death, Harkhuf, led not one but four expeditions deep into the interior of foreign territory, bringing home a king’s ransom in exotica (“300 donkeys laden with incense, ebony, precious oil, grain, panther-skins, elephant tusks, throw-sticks: all good tribute”11) and winning royal recognition for his exploits. A detailed account of his remarkable journeys can still be read, as fresh as the day it was carved, over four thousand years ago, on the façade of his rock-cut tomb above the Nile.

  Sabni and Harkhuf achieved fame and fortune in their day as masters of the Cataract region. But for another of this elite group of desert scouts, one Pepinakht, the prize of bravery and derring-do was nothing less than immortality. At the very end of the Pyramid Age, in the reign of King Pepi II (2260–2175 BC), the loyal Pepinakht (whose very name means “Pepi is victorious”) was entrusted with a mission of great political sensitivity. The kingdoms of Nubia were in the ascendant, and Egypt felt its national interests increasingly threatened. In this febrile atmosphere, an Egyptian caravan leader had been killed while on government business in Nubia—building a ship for a trading expedition to the fabled land of Punt, on the Red Sea coast of modern Sudan. Bringing back his body for burial in Egypt was thus not just a matter of national pride, but also of national security.

  To Pepinakht fell the responsibility of accomplishing this covert task. The details do not survive (perhaps they were subject to an ancient Official Secrets Act), but we can be sure that Pepinakht was successful. For not only was he granted a rock-cut tomb at the Dome of the Winds, but, as a national hero, he also achieved celebrity status throughout the Cataract region, where he was given the nickname Heqaib, loosely translated “heart-throb.” After his death, a shrine in his honour was built on Elephantine, and for generations afterwards Egyptians came to pay their respects and offer their prayers to the great man, hoping no doubt that some of his worldly success would rub off. Today, thanks to the painstaking efforts of archaeologists, the sanctuary of Heqaib, the heart-throb of the Cataract region, has emerged from the rubble of centuries to provide a window on the distant past.

  JUST A STONE’S THROW from the sanctuary of Heqaib is one of the least impressive but most important monuments in all of Egypt. On the eastern bank of Elephantine, an inconspicuous flight of rock-cut steps descends from ground level down to the water’s edge, and the walls of this stone staircase are scored with horizontal lines at regular intervals. Easily overlooked, this is the Nilometer, the key to Egypt’s fabled wealth. As we have seen, the height of the annual Nile flood was a direct predictor of the following season’s agricultural yield. Measuring the Nile allowed the government, quite literally, to set the budget for the year ahead. And because the floodwaters first manifested themselves at the Cataract, the calculation made at the Nilometer on Elephantine determined the parameters for the entire Egyptian economy. This humble monument—carved under the pharaohs, rebuilt under the Roman emperors, used until modern times—measured the heartbeat of Egypt.

  For as long as people have farmed by the banks of the Nile, they have had an interest in measuring the river’s flood. Another ancient Nilometer once stood on the island of Philae at the southern end of the Cataract, before it was quarried away to build a palace. Elsewhere in Egypt, simple measuring sticks would have done the same job. Along with determining the height of the Nile’s flood, controlling its waters has been crucial to Egypt’s prosperity. From ancient times, the paraphernalia of irrigation—dykes and ditches, shadufs and water-wheels, pumps and sluices—have dotted the Egyptian landscape. By a variety of methods, simple and ingenious, the Nile’s water has been channelled, raised, diverted and retained to produce food for people and their animals. Not, however, until the twentieth century was an attempt made to contain and harness the river’s full force. That epic endeavour is one of the most remarkable in Egypt’s long history, and its ramifications continue to be felt, not only at Aswan, but throughout the country.

  In the second half of the nineteenth century, the ruler of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, was engaged in an ambitious programme of national renewal. To carry out this enterprise he hired large numbers of European advisors, while he also set about enlarging Egypt’s army to project the country’s new-found authority. Both actions required substantial finance; the easiest way of generating the necessary revenue was through the export of cash crops; the most lucrative crop was cotton; and cotton needed perennial irrigation. So the equation was simple: Muhammad Ali’s modernisation meant controlling the Nile. Without the latter, the former would be impossible. Moreover, since the cotton-growing lands of the Delta belonged to the Egyptian royal family and its wealthy supporters, the introduction of perennial irrigation promised a rapid rise in the fortunes of Muhammad Ali and his inner circle.

  The question was how best to harness the power of the Nile in order to even out the effects of the annual inundation and permit year-round watering of the fields. The man chosen for the task was a 31-year-old English engineer by the name of William Willcocks (1852–1932). He duly set off for Egypt in 1883 and, seven years later, as Director-General of Reservoir St
udies for the Egyptian government, published his formal study of Egypt’s irrigation potential. Willcocks had little doubt that the solution to Muhammad Ali’s challenge lay in the construction of a dam: “By the winter of 1890,” he wrote, “I had made up my mind that the best reservoir for Egypt would be formed by a dam built across the Nile at some suitable rocky barrier, provided a sufficient number of openings were made in the work to allow the flood to pass through.”12 Having studied the geology and hydrology of the southern Nile Valley, Willcocks identified three possible sites: from south to north, Kalabsha, Aswan and Gebel el-Silsila. To adjudicate on the preferred location, and the best form for a dam, the Anglo-Egyptian government appointed an International Commission. Despite their very different characters, the Commission’s three members—the ascetic British engineer Benjamin Baker, builder of the Forth Bridge; the Frenchman Auguste Boulé, a connoisseur of fine food; and the Italian Giacomo Torricelli—came to an agreement and issued their opinion accordingly: “The Commission recommends a single dam pierced by numerous sluices as the best and safest solution. It accepts the Aswan Cataract as the best site.”13 Words were simple; putting them into practice would prove a major challenge.

  The engineers proposed to build the dam at the southern end of the Cataract, but this would inevitably mean the submersion of Philae, regarded by many as “the most beautiful spot on the Nile.”14 Boulé was so horrified by this likely consequence of the project that he insisted on issuing a minority report, vehemently opposing the scheme while supporting the engineering assessments that had led to its recommendation. Others, too, were appalled; archaeologists in particular issued a storm of protest. But more influential voices in London remained unmoved. Winston Churchill, then a precocious teenager, ridiculed the academic objections and urged that Philae should be sacrificed for the economic and political benefits a dam would bring. Moreover he looked forward to a day when dams along the entire length of the Nile Valley would harness the full power of the river and when “the Nile itself, flowing for three thousand miles through smiling countries, shall perish gloriously and never reach the sea.”15 Then, as later, a powerful and persuasive orator, Churchill’s argument won the day. The decision was taken to proceed.