Empire of Ancient Egypt
EGYPT, THE WORLD’S FIRST SUPERPOWER, WAS BORN ABOUT 5000 B.C.E. in the valley of the
Nile River
in northeastern
Africa. Tucked into a long, narrow gorge threaded by the river and bounded by steep cliffs,
Egypt enjoyed a predictable, mostly pleasant climate and natural barriers against invasion. To the west lay the
Sahara Desert, to the east a harsh, mountainous wasteland. To the south, a series of six great rapids (called cataracts) obstructed the river. To the north was the “Great Green:” the
Mediterranean Sea
.
An Egyptian called his homeland Kemet. His world was divided into lowland kemet (“black land”), the narrow ribbon of rich, black earth on the valley floor, and highland deshret (“red land”), the pale, reddish sand of the forbidding desert plateaus. Foreigners were “highlanders.”
“Going up” meant leaving the valley; “descending” was returning home.
Egypt was a long, narrow oasis carved by the Nile River through the harsh desert. “The Egypt to which we sail nowadays is… the gift of the river,” said Greek historian and traveler Herodotus. The Nile, one of the world’s longest rivers, flows more than 4,200 miles north from central Africa to the Mediterranean. The name “Nile” comes from the Greek word Neilos, but the Egyptians called it simply iteru, “the river.”
Because all life came from the Nile, geography was everything in ancient Egypt. The narrow valley through which the Nile ran, and the wider Delta where it flowed into the sea, were known as the “two lands” of ancient Egypt. Upper Egypt, Ta-Shomu (“narrow land”), was a long, narrow, lime-stone gorge, 10 to 30 miles wide, stretching from the first cataract at Aswan to the edge of the Delta, 500 miles to the north. It was bounded by cliffs that rose from a few hundred feet to almost 1,000 feet high. In ancient times,Upper Egypt’s floodplain totaled 42,500 square miles. Cultivated lands ex-tended from just over one and a half miles wide at Aswan to about 13 miles wide on the west bank opposite modern Tell el-Amarna.
About 100 miles south of the Mediterranean, the Nile split into two streams and many smaller tributaries. It formed the fan-shaped Nile Delta, an 8,500-square-mile region of marsh and heavily silted land called Lower Egypt, Ta-Mehu (“water-filled land”).
The ancient
Nile had at least five, and as many as 16, outlets to the sea. (The modern Nile has only two, Rosetta and
Damietta.) About 50 miles southwest of the Delta’s apex lay the Faiyum. Connected under-ground to the
Nile, the ancient Faiyum was a wetlands paradise, thick with lotus and
papyrus
plants and teeming with birds and animals. Birket Qaran, a lake in the northern Faiyum, was a favorite hunting spot.
The Nile (then and now) blends two major streams. The White Nile rises from the clear waters of Lakes Victoria, Albert, and Edward in central Africa. As it flows north, it gathers water from over 1,500 miles of tributaries. The Blue Nile rises in Lake Tana, in the highlands of Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia). It flows more than 1,000 miles before joining the White Nile. The two streams join at Khartoum, capital of the modern Republic of the Sudan, and flow another 1,900 miles to the sea. About
140 miles north of Khartoum, the Atbara River, rising from the Ethiopian highlands, joins the Nile.
Near
Khartoum, the
Nile enters a region of hard sandstone. As it runs through this difficult land, there are six lengths—the cataracts—where it has been unable to carve a clear channel. Stony outcroppings, rapids, and small but treacherous falls obstruct navigation. The northernmost cataract (the first) is closest to
Egypt. Once past the first cataract, near the modern city of
Aswan
, sandstone gives way to softer limestone. This made it much easier for the
Nile to carve a relatively straight channel.
After passing the island of Elephantine, the Nile enjoys a 675-mile, un-obstructed passage to the Delta and the Mediterranean Sea.
demonstrates the extent to which technology can have practical social and religious bases.
engineering and science, and the storehouse of knowledge in 
history of ancient 
and the Badarian Culture who came into the Nile region from the southwest, were cultivating crops6 (Davidson 14-15). By 3,500 BCE they had formed themselves into early states, by 3,200 BCE the nomadic Upper Egyptians and the agriculturalist Lower Egyptians were unified by the 
Menes, and soon after 2,600 BCE the Pharaoh Khufu, whom the Greeks called Cheops, ordered the building of the Great Pyramid at 
’ between environment, biological evolution, and cultural change. The settled life enabled the 
to be handier, more skillful, and better able to think and to act by thought than their ancestors
has a long and complex history. Combining those two topics produces a subject well beyond the scope of one amateur’s paper. The botanical classifications, irrigation techniques, sacred and medicinal uses of plants, all could be separate papers, and some have occupied whole books. This article attempts only a quick overview.
, recording their great deeds, listed gardens they had created and expeditions they had sent to far-o
