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The triangle-sailed felluca is an icon of the Egyptian Nile. |
On the map, Egypt looks like a hefty yellow block, roughly as wide as it is long. But so central is the Nile River to life there that nearly all 99 million Egyptians live in just four percent of the country's land, within the two narrow ribbons of habitable green space that flank the Nile along its final 1,600 km course from the Sudanese border to the Mediterranean. (Because the river flows from south to north, geographic references are reversed, with "Upper Egypt" below "Lower Egypt" on the map.) Habitable points in the surrounding desert are few and far between.
The Nile has been the epicenter of Egypt's unusually one-dimensional, inverted geography for millennia. Traditionally, summer floods brought an influx of nutrient-rich waters from the Nile's source in central Africa each year, enabling the ancient Egyptians to plant the crops that sustained some of humanity's greatest empires. To set taxes each year, the pharaohs used specially designed "Nilometers" to measure the high-water mark of the annual floods; higher flood levels meant higher crop yields, and thus higher taxes. In Cairo, I visited the Nilometer at the southern tip of Rawda Island, descending narrow stairs down into a dark well past rings of discolored stone that marked long-ago flood waters.
The Nile doesn't flood anymore. Since 1970, with the completion of the Aswan
High Dam, the Egyptian government can set the water levels, preferring a steady flow that enables predictable power generation and irrigation. Older Egyptians can still recall memories of the flood, however, and even my first Arabic teacher, Margaret Nydell, recounted to our class what life was like in the last years of the summer flooding, during her earliest days in Cairo.
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For first-time visitors, the Nile serves as an essential landmark in the chaos of Cairo. |
During our year-end holiday, Nina and I and our families took a three-day Nile cruise from Luxor to Aswan, where I got a whole new view of the river. At many points along our route, the brilliant band of green flanking the river narrowed dramatically, yielding abruptly, just a stone's throw from the shallows, to the yellow wasteland beyond. We passed numerous ancient riverside ruins, stopping at the largest temples for guided visits. Near Aswan, we visited a site where the ancient Egyptians used little more than wooden pegs and river water to split solid granite and extract colossal pillars, which they carved into obelisks to be floated downriver on barges. Again, the modern intruded in unexpected ways on the ancient: Some mornings, we would wake and climb to the ship's viewing deck to find that during the night we had been lashed to other cruise ships in a huge flotilla, their early morning muzak tunes competing with one another to spoil the day's tranquil early hours.
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Passengers wait to board a cruise ship near Luxor. |
My Rolleiflex photos from Egypt are available in two albums: 2017 Rollei - Egypt I and 2017 Rollei - Egypt II. Nina's photos from our first trip are here: 2017.07 Egypt.
Coming next: My conclusion to this Egypt series with reflections on the country's political economy.
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Pharaonic ruins flank the Nile, a reminder of the civilizations it has supported for millennia. |
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