The River Nile

[مروان زين]

"Egypt the Gift of the Nile"
Once, no doubt, this Ancient Egypt Delta was a bay: patiently the broad stream filled it up, too slowly to be seen, with detritus carried down a thousand miles.Now from this little corner of mud, enclosed by the many mouths of the river Nile, millions of peasants grow enough cotton to export millions of dollars' worth of it every year.There, bright and calm under the glaring sun, fringed with slim palms and grassy banks, is..the most famous of all rivers in ancient Egypt. The NileWe cannot see the desert that lies so close beyond it, or the great empty wadis-river-beds where once its fertile tributaries flowed.We cannot realize yet how precariously narrow a thing this Egypt is, owing everything to the river, and harassed on either side with hostile, shifting sand.Now we pass amid the alluvial plain of Ancient Egypt.The land is half covered with water, and crossed everywhere with irrigation canals.In the ditches and the fields black fellaheen labor, knowing no garment but a cloth about the loins.The river has had one of its annual inundations, which begin at the summer solstice and last for a hundred days;Through that overflow the desert became fertile, and Egypt blossomed, in Herodotus' phrase, as the "The Gift of the Nile."It is clear why civilization found here one of its earliest homes; nowhere else was a river so generous in irrigation, and so controllable in its rise; only Mesopotamia could begin to rival Ancient Egypt.For thousands of years the peasants have watched this rise with anxious eagerness; up to the 1950s public criers announce its progress each morning in the streets of Cairo.So the past, with the quiet continuity of this river, flows into the future, lightly touching the present on its way.Only historians make divisions; time does not.

But every gift must be paid for; and the peasant, though he valued the rising waters, knew that without control they could ruin as well as irrigate his fields.So from time beyond Ancient Egypt history he built these ditches that cross and recross the land; he caught the surplus in canals, and when the river fell he raised the water with buckets pivoted on long poles, singing, as he worked, the songs that the Nile has heard for five thousand years.For as these peasants are now, sombre and laughterless even in their singing, so they have been, in all likelihood, for fifty centuries.This water raising apparatus is as old as the Pyramids; and a million of these fellaheen, despite the conquests of Arabic, still speak the language of the ancient monuments.Here in the Delta, fifty miles southeast of Alexandria, is the site or Naucratis, once filled with industrious, scheming Greeks.Thirty miles farther east, the site of Sai's, where, in the centuries before the Persian and Greek conquests, the native civilization of Egypt had its last revival; and then, a hundred and twenty-nine miles southeast of Alexandria, is Cairo.A beautiful city, but not true Egyptian; the conquering Moslems founded it in A.D. 968; then the bright spirit of France overcame the gloomy Arab and built here a Paris in the desert, exotic and unreal.

Egypt "The Gift of Nile".. "to daron tou Nilou"


Let's follow the river Nile from its source to the civilisation it built across its banks. A very enjoyable journey!