Steven Solomon
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The first to wear the double crown was Egypt’s traditional founder Menes, the so-called King Scorpion, who as prince of Upper Egypt finally conquered the delta around 3150 BC and established Egypt’s capital at Memphis at the delta’s head. Power had consolidated over the previous centuries in both the delta and the valley from the battles of dozens of independent chieftains, themselves descendants of the nomadic hunter-gatherer bands who had settled closer to the river’s water supply during the gradual drying of the regional climate. Whether Menes was a ceremonial title or an actual historical king, possibly identified with the early ruler Narmer, his legend accurately reflected the essential origins of Egyptian civilization, including his close personal identification with irrigation waterworks, and the fundamental duty of the ideal Pharaoh to control the flow of the Nile. Menes’ royal ceremonial macehead, for instance, shows him as a conqueror wearing the white crown of the valley, dressed in a kilt and belted loincloth with a bull’s tail, and using a hoe to dig an irrigation canal, while another figure removes the excavated dirt in a basket.
Menes’ macehead paralleled records from other hydraulic societies showing sovereigns immersed in the daily functions of opening and closing floodgates, allocating irrigation water to peasants’ fields, and directing waterworks construction. The older hydraulic civilization in Sumeria, with which Egypt had sea contact from the earliest times, was notably influential in the developmental trajectory of ancient Egypt’s methods and tools. The hydraulic nature of ancient Egypt was also evidenced in the world’s first recorded dam, a 49-foot masonry giant, supposedly built around 2900 BC to protect Menes’ capital at Memphis from floods. Actual archaeological remains exist of another similar, masonry-faced, earthen reservoir dam 37 feet tall and 265 feet wide at the base, from between 2950 and 2700 BC about 20 miles south of modern Cairo. Far more common in ancient Egypt were simple, often short-lived earth-and-wood diversion dams to direct irrigation water during flood season.
The Nile’s propitious characteristics and the simple, irrigated basin agriculture it supported visibly shaped all aspects of Egyptian culture, society, and daily life. At the apex of the hierarchical Egyptian state was the Pharaoh, the absolute sovereign who in the Old Kingdom was viewed as a living god who owned all the land and controlled the river. Supporting him was an administration of elite priest-managers, with such indicative titles as “inspector of the dikes,” “chief of the canal workers,” and “watcher of the nilometers.” The priests’ divine authority was validated by their command of such vital esoteric secrets as when the river would flood or recede, and when was the right moment to plant and to sow, and the technical engineering of durable waterworks. The state’s totalitarian power was underpinned by the centralized collection, storage, and distribution of grain surpluses produced in good years. Labor on waterworks, and other state projects, was carried out by one of the oldest forms of manpower mobilization in world history—the compulsory, seasonal corvée. The peasant’s duty to Pharaoh and state was so absolute that it continued into the afterlife; the peasant was often buried with clay statuettes that symbolically stood in for his perpetual work obligations after death. Control of water also helped foster the development of many of Egypt’s early sciences and arts. The learned elites created calendars to facilitate farming, surveying tools to regrade and mark off land after inundations, and maintained written administrative records on parchment manufactured from the common papyrus reeds of the Nile delta. Papyrus, the oldest form of paper, represented one of history’s earliest uses of water in manufacturing. It was fabricated by peeling away the outer covering of the reed, then cutting the stalks into thin strips, which were then mixed with water to activate its innate bonding properties. The thin strips were then layered, pressed, and dried.
A second linchpin of Pharaoh’s power, repeated in societies throughout every age of history, was control of the region’s key water transport highway. Control of shipping on the Nile allowed the Pharaoh to regulate all important transport of people and goods, and thus provided the means to exert effective rule over all Egypt. Barges laden with grain, oil jars, and other goods commonly plied Nile ports from Memphis to Thebes to Elephantine Island and, after 2150 BC, beyond to Nubia in modern Sudan when a canal was excavated through the solid granite at the Aswan water falls. The Nile artery, the richness of its valley and the delta, the predictable onset of its floods, and its protective surrounding desert also rendered Egypt one of world history’s most inward-looking, changeless, rigidly ordered, and longest-enduring civilizations. Yet Egypt’s simple basin agriculture was only a one-crop system with limited capacity to increase output beyond a certain ceiling. This capped Egypt’s maximum population level and left Egyptians highly susceptible to famine and instability during prolonged periods of low Nile floods.
From about 2270 BC onward, the central authority and cultural grandeur of the Old Kingdom gradually disintegrated amid anarchic warfare among provincial chieftains, banditry, and famine. A climatic dry period in the Mediterranean region, which simultaneously disrupted civilization in Mesopotamia, contributed to a series of low floods on the Nile that undermined the agricultural economic basis of society.
Egyptian civilization’s first dark age of disunity and competing fiefdoms lasted nearly two centuries. The return of abundant Nile floods resuscitated agricultural prosperity and facilitated the reunification into the Middle Kingdom following the military conquests and diplomacy of the rulers of Thebes in Upper Egypt in about 2040. The Middle Kingdom restoration was also associated with large new water projects and intensified food production, including the expansion of cropland into a large, swampy depression fed by high Nile floods called Faiyum. It was the prosperity of the Middle Kingdom that may have drawn the biblical family of Jacob to Egypt’s delta during a period of drought and political upheaval in Palestine.
A series of droughts weakened the central state’s power to resist Egypt’s first full-fledged foreign invasion. In 1647 BC, the Hyksos, a Semitic-Asiatic group of Bronze Age charioteers who had penetrated Egypt through the increasingly porous Sinai Desert frontier, seized control of the delta almost without resistance. The Hyksos conquest traumatically altered Egyptian history by forcibly ending the cultural sense of fixed order and security that its isolated, predictable river environment had provided for so long.
When the hated Hyksos were finally expelled a century later and Egypt reunified under its New Kingdom, which would last half a millennium, Egypt assertively projected its cultural renewal outward through extensive foreign sea trade, military conquests of the Levant to the Euphrates and of Nubia in the south, and monuments of its native culture, such as the outsized temples at Luxor and Karnak, the modern Thebes. The New Kingdom renaissance coincided with three centuries of good Nile floods.
Harvests were increased by the intensive use of an ancient water lifting device, the shadoof. The shadoof, which likely originated in Mesopotamia centuries earlier and reached Egypt gradually, could raise 600 gallons of water per day. The device itself was a long pole on a fulcrum counterbalanced by a bucket at one end and a stone weight at the other. Two men operated it. One filled the bucket while the other leaned on the stone to lift the bucket and pour its contents into an irrigation channel that carried it to small plots. The shadoof allowed Egyptian farmers to irrigate a supplemental crop outside the main flood season.
In subsequent centuries, more powerful water-lifting devices were applied to the Nile. Archimedes’ screw, invented by Greek polymath Archimedes and introduced by Hellenic rulers in the century following Alexander the Great’s conquest in 332 BC, was a giant corkscrew encased in a long, watertight tube that raised river water through its grooves by hand cranking. Most important was the noria—a chain of pots attached to a large wheel turned by tethered oxen marching in a circle—which had arrived with the Persian conquerors in the sixth century BC. Noria pots filled up through dipping in the river and emptied their water into a pipe or channel as they descended from the apex of th
eir arc. In first millennium BC Egypt, a single noria could raise water as much as 13 feet and irrigate 12 acres of a second crop in the off-season. It was also used to drain swamps for reclamation. By raising and redirecting heavy and bulky water, water-lifting technologies increased irrigated cropland by as much as 10 to 15 percent through the Greek and Roman occupations. The noria was so successful that it remained in continuous use until the twentieth century and the advent of electric and gasoline pumps. The noria was the water-lifting precursor of the seminal waterwheel, a transformative innovation that automatically harnessed power from flowing stream to ground flour and drove the first industries.
The New Kingdom also derived great wealth from Egypt’s full embrace of foreign sea trade. Egyptians had been one of the first peoples to regularly sail the shorelines of the eastern Mediterranean. Old Kingdom vessels had regularly sailed to Byblos to secure precious, high-quality timber—so scarce in tree-poor, rainless Egypt—from the fabled cedar forests of Lebanon, to make boats, plows, and other vital tools of civilization. Pyramid illustrations show that as early as 2540 BC they ferried soldiers to Levantine ports in square-sailed ships that were simple adaptations of the river vessels that plied the gentle winds and currents of the Nile. Yet only with the reuniting of Egypt in the New Kingdom did sea trade become much more extensive. The spirit of the age was expressed by Queen Hatshepsut, one of the rare Egyptian female sovereigns and the first important queen of ancient history. Shortly after the start of her twenty-year reign in 1479 BC, inspired by an oracle of the god Amun, Hatshepsut launched a maritime trading expedition via the treacherous Red Sea to restore trade with Punt in the Horn of Africa, which was one of the two sources in the ancient world for prized, exotic luxuries like frankincense and myrrh, used for religious ceremonies and embalming mummies. The expedition returned with live frankincense trees that were transplanted in the queen’s gardens and inaugurated three centuries of thriving shipping and trade extending from Punt to the eastern Mediterranean. Cedars from Lebanon, copper from Cyprus, silver from Asia Minor, and fine crafts and Asian textiles arrived from the north. Invariably, Egyptian military campaigns in the Levant accompanied the increasing overlapping of economic interests. Yet although Egypt profited handsomely from this sea trade, it never transcended its Nile-centric legacy to also become a true Mediterranean maritime civilization. Light, oversized Nile boats never were built to venture far beyond the safe, known shoreline routes. To transship larger cargoes across the open waters, the Egyptians instead relied upon abler vessels and seamen from Crete, where the Minoans presided over the Mediterranean’s first great seafaring civilization.
The Mediterranean provided the highway for three waves of raiders that began to attack Egypt at the end of the thirteenth century BC. The Sea Peoples were an eclectic collection of seafarers put to flight as refugees from their homelands by the invasion of Iron Age barbarians from inland mountains who disrupted Bronze Age civilizations throughout the Middle East. After about a century, following a campaign that included one of history’s early naval battles, the Egyptians finally repelled the last of the Sea Peoples, whose allies, the Philistines, settled in Palestine and would soon engage in battle with the Hebrews, who had earlier fled Egypt under Moses in search of new lands. Ultimately, however, the cyclic ebbing of good Nile floods marked a century of internal disorder and disintegration, while history’s ever-expanding geographic overlap of regional empires brought new waves of foreign invasions that ushered in the longest and bleakest of Egypt’s intermediate periods. For nearly four centuries, Egypt was subjugated by foreigners. Libyans, Nubians, and, briefly, the fierce, iron-weapon-armed Assyrians put their imprint on the Nile and its lands.
A brief resurgence of native Egyptian rule occurred in the late seventh century BC. Under the ambitious Pharaoh Neko II (610–595 BC), Egypt established a powerful navy, while its armies won battles and seized land in the war-torn Levant as far as the Euphrates River. Neko followed a policy of opening Egypt to the thriving Greek world and sea trade. He is most renowned in water history for excavating the first documented “Suez Canal,” which he hoped would help Egypt compete in the Mediterranean. Neko’s canal did not follow the same route from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean as the celebrated nineteenth-century canal. Instead, it connected the Red Sea to a branch of the Nile, and thus could unite Egypt’s Mediterranean and Red Sea fleets of Greek-style galleys propelled by three banks of oars, known as triremes. It was dug wide enough to allow two vessels to pass each other. According to Herodotus, 120,000 died constructing it. Neko reportedly stopped work before completion when an oracle warned him that it would work to the advantage of his foreign enemies.
In fact, the canal was completed after the Persian conquest under King Darius I, who ruled from 521 to 486 BC, to facilitate shipping from Egypt to Persia. The new Hellenic dynasty of Ptolemies that assumed power after Alexander the Great’s conquest hastened to dredge and extend the canal in the early third century BC. It was revitalized again in the early second century AD, under Emperor Trajan, during the height of the Roman Empire, but silted up under the Byzantines. The canal may have been opened and then later filled in by early Muslim rulers. In the early sixteenth century, the Venetians and the Egyptians discussed reopening the Red Sea to a Mediterranean connection in response to the Portuguese creation of the all-water spice trade route to India that broke the long, profitable Venice-Alexandria stranglehold on the region’s trade with the East. But nothing came of it. Also fruitlessly, the Ottomans considered such a project during the sixteenth century; the sultan and the Christian king of Spain instead struck an armistice that allowed each side to focus its energies on fighting its own religion’s heretics. Thereafter, the water link between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean remained closed until 1869, when the world-changing geopolitical and engineering marvel of the modern Suez Canal was opened to world commerce and naval forces.
Control of the Nile, and the caprices of its high and low floods, remained vital to the fortunes of all of Egypt’s subsequent occupiers. The Greek and Roman overlords from Alexander’s conquest in 332 BC to the fourth century AD, were blessed by good Nile floods and even rainfall, which facilitated an impressive expansion of cultivated land and intensified irrigation. For Rome, which took control in 30 BC, Egypt became the empire’s export grain breadbasket, vital to maintaining its armies as well as the daily bread dole for Rome’s legions of restive poor. The collapse of Byzantine rule to the Arab invaders in AD 640 followed a century of poor flooding. Three centuries of full Niles nourished Islam’s heyday. Recurrent low Niles during the tenth to eleventh centuries, however, ultimately undermined the rule of the Fatimid founders of Cairo.
Due to its geostrategic centricity at a key crossroads of world commerce and politics, Egypt and its arterial river remained a pivotal theater in the struggle among the great powers through the centuries to modern times, including the nineteenth-century contest for global empire between England and France, and the twentieth-century Cold War between America and the Soviet Union over the Aswan Dam and regional influence in the oil-rich Arab Middle East.
Ancient Mesopotamia faced far more complex and adverse hydrological environmental challenges than those posed by the Nile. Yet even earlier than Egypt, it developed a hydraulic-model civilization that reflected the resources, cycles, and flow signatures of its flooding, silt-spreading twin rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, that coursed through the heart of the Fertile Crescent in modern Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. The rivers of Mesopotamia—which in Greek means “the land between the rivers”—helped create the ancient world’s most precocious large civilization, featuring the wedge-shaped cuneiform that was mankind’s first written language, the first large cities, sophisticated water-lifting and irrigation technologies, the wheel, towering spiral-shaped ziggurat temples, and dynamic, expansive empires.
Unlike the Nile, the twin rivers’ distinguishing characteristic was that their floods spilled and receded unpredictably, often violently—an
d always out of rhythm with the needs of the farming cycle. When water was needed most, during autumn planting and plowing, the rivers were at their lowest. In the late spring, the nearly full-grown plants were imperiled with ruin from swollen rivers that flooded suddenly from torrential rainstorms of thunder and sheet lightning. Having two rivers with many branches complicated the hydraulics of the farming floodplain. Spillover from the higher yet slower-moving Euphrates, for instance, often drained easterly into the larger Tigris. Due to their shallow gradients, both rivers were prone to meander and, during big floods, to cut new courses to the sea, stranding existing cropland and entire communities of their life-giving water supply.
The key to civilization in Mesopotamia, therefore, rested upon skillful, year-round regulation of the twin rivers through extensive waterworks. Large reservoir dams stored water that was released in the growing season. Water was lifted to levels required to flood the furrowed fields. Strong protective dikes were needed to prevent flooding at the wrong time. A drainage network of sluices and diversion ditches was needed to combat waterlogging in the flat, poorly draining cropland. In short, if natural hydraulics made Egypt a gift of the Nile, Mesopotamia was an artificially contrived civilization whose success was achieved in defiance of the design of nature through the water-engineering ingenuity and willful organization of society.
In every way, Mesopotamia’s material, social, and political existence was more volatile and uncertain than Egypt’s. Instead of being protected behind a waterless desert barrier, its region was a natural crossroads of peoples, ideas, and goods, surrounded by potential raiders and rivals who lived in the rainy hills whose tributaries fed the twin rivers’ plains. Extensive commerce and conflicts between city-states, and constant invasions by ever-larger empires, marked Mesopotamia’s history. As the rivers’ resources came under better control, moreover, political power tended to move upstream, where cropland was unspoiled and strategic command could be exerted over the rivers’ unidirectional transport navigability and the region’s water supply. “A society dependent on water coming from a canal that could be blocked several miles upstream from the fields it served was extremely vulnerable to warlike attack,” writes historian William H. McNeill. “A position upstream was therefore always of supreme strategic importance in Mesopotamian politics and war, while downstream populations were always and inescapably at the mercy of whoever controlled the water supply.” From Sumer in the fourth and third millennia BC to Akkad under Sargon I in 2334 BC, Babylon under Hammurabi in about 1792 BC, Assyria by 800 BC, and the Persians by 500 BC, the preeminent centers of Mesopotamian civilization moved generally upriver and its irrigation zone widened.