Throughout history humans have been fascinated with the Nile River, especially the Egyptian part of the Nile. The birth of this great civilization has been traced back to a time between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago. Around five thousand years ago this civilization started depending entirely on the Nile River and its annual inundation. This chapter traces the history of water engineering in ancient Egypt starting with the uses of water from the annual inundation of the Nile River for natural irrigation in the Predynastic period to the development of methodologies to advance the use of the Nile River for irrigation.
For thousands of years the people of Egypt have owed their very existence to a river that flowed mysteriously and inexplicably out of the greatest and most forbidding desert in the world (Hillel, 1994). Herodotus (Book II.5,440 B. C.) in Book II.5 stated
That they said of their country seemed to me very reasonable. For any one who sees Egypt, without having heard a word about it before, must perceive, if he has only common powers of observation, that the Egypt to which the Greeks go in their ships is an acquired country, the gift of the river. The same is true of the land above the lake, to the distance of three days' voyage, concerning which the Egyptians say nothing, but which exactly the same kind of country.
The ancient Egyptians depended upon the Nile not only for their livelihoods, but they also considered the Nile to be a deific force of the universe, to be respected and honored if they wanted it to treat them favorably. Its annual rise and fall were likened to the rise and fall of the sun, each cycle equally important to their lives, though both remaining a mystery. Since the Nile sources were unknown up until the 19th century, the Ancient Egyptians believed it to be a part of the great celestial ocean, or the sea that surrounds the whole world.
L. W. Mays (B)
School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287-5306, USA e-mail: Mays@asu. edu
L. W. Mays (ed.), Ancient Water Technologies, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-8632-7_3, © Springer Science+Business Media B. V. 2010
Fig. 3.1 View of the Nile River in Egypt (courtesy of NASA)
The Nile River (shown in Fig. 3.1), nearly 6,650 km in total length, draining an estimated 3,350,000 km2, which is about one-tenth of the African continent with catchments in nine different countries. In contrast the Amazon River has a length of 6,400 km with an estimated drainage area of 7,050,000 km2. There has been disagreement as to which of these two rivers is the longest. The annual discharge of
The Nile is only 84x109 m3 as compared to 5,518x109 m3 for the Amazon River. The Nile Delta, which is also known as Little Egypt, is a giant triangle of land, as shown in Fig. 3.1, and is approximately 200 km wide along the Mediterranean Sea with the apex at Cairo, about 160 km inland. To the south of the delta apex and to the west of the Nile is the Faiyum Depression, discussed later. Main sources of the present-day Nile are the Sudan basin and the Ethiopian Highlands. Being one of the most predictable rivers in the world, the Nile flood is seldom sudden or abrupt and is timely, in contrast to the floods of the Tigris and the Euphrates which have more abrupt floods. Average duration of a flood was about 110 days. The beginning of the rise of the Nile begins in June, with the maximum rise of the river usually occurring in the later part of September and the early part of October.
World History
