When the Roman emperor Titus (ruled ad 79-81) was portrayed on a temple wall in Egypt, one of the provinces of his empire, he was shown standing with a mace raised menacingly in his right hand. An earlier ruler of Egypt, king Narmer, had been portrayed in the same pose some 3,000 years earlier. The worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis can be traced back to 2400 bc, 2,000 years before the rise of Rome. The cult still had enough vitality for worship of the goddess to spread throughout the Roman empire (there was a temple to Isis as far west as London), with her temple at Philae on the upper Nile closed by the emperor Justinian as late as ad 536, sixty years after the Roman empire had ‘fallen’ in the west. Egyptian religion, in short, entered its most expansionist phase when it was already far older than Christianity is now. Many of the distinctive features of Egyptian civilization were in place a thousand years before the pyramids were built. These are striking reminders of the longevity and continuity of early Egyptian history. This does not mean that Egyptian society was always stable—behind the ordered fa9ade there were often moments of panic or disarray—rather there were consistent forces that gave enduring vigour and prosperity to Egyptian life.
The most persistent of these forces was the unique set of circumstances arising from the ecology of the Nile valley. While rainfall across the region had once been abundant, by 3000 bc the valley had virtually none. The water for its irrigation came down the Nile in annual floods, most of which originated in summer rains in the Ethiopian mountains. With the floods came silt, and the combination of fertile soil and ready water could produce yields of crops three or four times those from normal rain-fed soil. As important as the wealth of water and soil was the regularity with which the floods came. The Nile started to rise in May, and from July to October was high enough to flow out over the flood plain of the valley. This was akhet, the time of inundation. Four months later, by the beginning of November, the waters had begun to fall. The refertilized land could be marked out and ploughed and sowed. This was peret, the time ‘when the land reappeared’. The final four months of the year, shemu, from March to June, brought the harvest. The peasants of Egypt would wait to see the height and extent of each flood with some anxiety—it might be insufficient or overflow and flood their villages—but when they were lucky the fields along the Nile produced a large surplus of grain, probably three times as much as was needed for a healthy diet. Effectively gathered up this surplus could be used to sustain rulers, palaces, craftsmanship, and great building projects and these are the achievements of the early kingdoms of Egypt, maintained, despite periods of breakdown, over twenty centuries.
To visit Egypt today remains an extraordinary experience. The pyramids are, of course, well known from illustrations and film but their size and even more so an entry to one of the inner chambers still provides as much resonance as it has done for visitors over forty centuries. Travelling up the Nile gives the feel that the land along the banks is still being worked as it has always been although now the dam at Aswan has brought the annual floods to an end. The great temples of the south, at Luxor, Edfu, and Abu Simbel, and the tombs of the Valley of the Kings or of queen Hatshep-sut, have their own awe-inspiring quality. The impact is even greater if also experienced through the eyes of the nineteenth-century explorers. Amelia Edwards’s A Thousand Miles up the Nile (published in London in 1877) is particularly evocative.
World History
