Egypt’s landscape is determined, even in the desert areas, by the presence of the river. Distantly it may be seen glinting suddenly as the sun strikes it through a gap in the hills: close to, it surges or flows imperceptibly, depending on the course through which it runs. No one stretch of the river is quite the same as another: at one moment it may be bound by high limestone rocks, at the next it will open out until it seems as though the traveller is sailing on a boundless lake. At one point the desert will run menacingly down to the river’s edge; then, the river turns and the land is fertile, full of small villages and the shouts of children. No representation of Eden is so telling as the banks of the Nile in the richly cultivated areas where the grass, cropped by patient donkeys, runs right to the water’s edge.
A prodigality of adjectives, of scale, quantity and drama, has been expended recklessly on descriptions of the Nile. All are vain: the Nile is, simply, itself, unique. It is, of course, very much more than a river; the Egyptians knew it to be the prototype of all streams. As it races or meanders, depending upon its mood and the nature of the landscape through which it flows, it draws into itself all the elements of nature: earth, air, and sky. It is one of the earthly manifestations of the sun in splendour, capturing the sun’s rays so that they are spun out across the Two Lands of which it is the one unifying and eternal connection. The Nile is the real, eternal king of Egypt; is Egypt.
The Nile is the first and greatest of all rivers. To the Egyptians it was, simply, The River; all other rivers were counterfeit, pretenders never wholly to be trusted. Some rivers of which they had knowledge were to the Egyptian mind demonstrably perverse; of these the Tigris and Euphrates in neighbouring Sumer were the most reprehensible for they flowed from north to south whereas the Nile had made it evident for all to see that a proper river should only flow from south to north. The rivers of Mesopotamia were thus flowing upside down, wholly frivolous and irresponsible riverine behaviour indeed, to the Egyptian way of thinking. This fact merely went to confirm the Egyptian view of foreigners and of everything to do with them.
That Herodotus’ observation about the Nile has become a cliche employed by every writer who comments on the Egyptian landscape does not diminish its essential truth: ‘the Nile is the gift of Osiris, but Egypt is the gift of the Nile’. The Nile is the most paradoxical of rivers for it flows imperturbably through a great desert, its waters rich with life rushing through a landscape that is mostly barren and scoured, typical desert terrain.
Egypt is unchanging in beauty and in the ways of its people; it is like no other land. Nowhere does the contrast between rich cultivation and the parched aridity of the desert strike more forcefully. The river, when it returned at the time of the inundation to renew the land, was until very recent times greeted joyfully as a beloved god, come back to assuage the pain of his people and to bring comfort and prosperity to them. To this day the river is a living creature for the country people and it gives life to the eternal quality of the land so that there is continuity between ‘now’ and ‘then’; desert and sky, the land and the river, birds, animals, and men are brought into a perfect synthesis and express, as nowhere else on earth, the unity and perfection of all life and all creation. The miracle of birth, the cycle of the seasons, the fusion of earth and sky are accomplished in Egypt as they seem hardly to be anywhere else on earth; the gods always seem very close, even today.
The inundation was always magical to the Egyptians, a testimony to the covenant between them and the gods and a guarantee of the gods’ concern for the people of the land of Egypt. From the time of Akhenaten, the Eighteenth Dynasty religious zealot, a eulogy survives which praises God and expressed the pious and complacent thought that God had, with singular compassion, placed a Nile in the sky to provide the flood for those who could not enjoy the benefit of the rich deposits which the Nile’s waters left on the banks and marshlands which bounded it.
This was the particular miracle which the Nile delivered every year, unless the whim of the gods or the failure of the proper observances interrupted it. The river rose in the summer, the water spread across the banks and fields, filling the canals and allowing the farmers to distribute it even to distant cultivable areas. The earth was black and fertile: blackness was so much a part of the image of Egypt that it was called Kemi, the black land. Then, with what seemed extraordinary swiftness, the land was green, giving with abundance and sustaining a large, contented, and well-fed population. To paraphrase Dr Pangloss, all was undoubtedly for the best in the best of all possible lands.
To say that the Nile is Egypt is no more than to express a simple, selfevident truth. The Nile bears Egypt in its flood and over the millennia has laid down and then made fertile by its inundation the black earth from which Egypt is made. To the eye of Horus, floating in the sky high above the land of which he was the divine patron, protector, and, in a sense, the embodiment, Egypt is a slender strip of cultivation, two narrow banks divided by the river.
The Nile pours through the Valley which it has made for itself, on its journey from the remote Ethiopian highlands, far beyond the southern confines of Egypt, to the broad, reed-infested waters of the Delta, where it debouches into the Mediterranean, through its several mouths. In length the river journeys some four thousand miles; this was the torrent which was required to bring to fruition the most remarkable manifestation of social creativity yet achieved.
So profoundly ingrained in the Egyptian consciousness was the presence of the Nile that it even determined elements in the Egyptian vocabulary. Thus ‘north’ signified ‘to go down stream’ whereas ‘south’ meant ‘to go up stream’. ‘Right’ and ‘left’ were equated with ‘east’ and ‘west’, the orientation being determined by standing on the river’s bank and facing in the direction of its flow. ‘South’ also meant ‘face’ whereas ‘north’ seems to have been identified with the back of the head. Everything was oriented to the river and to its flow northwards to the sea.
For the whole extent of human history until the present day and from far into the period before man came both to harness and to glorify the Valley, the melting of the snows in the Ethiopian highlands precipitated the Nile’s paradoxical inundation, for the flood reached Egypt during the harshest, most deadly months of summer. This fact alone, the mysterious rising of the river’s waters when everywhere and everything around its banks was desiccated and in a state of profound exhaustion (like Osiris the Dead God before his revival) gave an uncanny, supernatural quality to the river and the life which it demonstrated, so clearly independent of and, in a sense peculiarly mysterious, superior to the life of the land around it.
At the time of the inundation the waters flooded back over the land, drawn to areas distant from the river by canals and by the immemorial device, the shaduf, the comfortingly repetitive creaking of this ancient device was always one of the sounds most evocative of the Egyptian countryside. The water was rich in life and revived the dead land; soon the whole land would be green.
The Nile is a huge, perpetually moving road, the supreme conveyor of historic experience: it is also a stupendous theatre. Not only was the longest of all recorded histories played out along its banks, with actors and settings of colossal proportions, it was ever capable of remarkable coups de theatre, of wonderful effects of light and drama: such effects it can still produce, with the splendid prodigality of an Edwardian actor-manager.
World History
