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TAKEN IN THE FLOOD
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The re-erected obelisk of Domitian in the Piazza Navona in Rome rises from a fountain designed by the masterful Baroque sculptor and architect, Bernini. One of the four river-themed sculptures that adorn the fountain is the Nile, shown as a bearded man perched on a cliff near a palm tree. With his raised left arm, he struggles to lift the cloth that covers his head and face. Only from a vantage point beneath the sculpture can viewers glimpse his flowing beard and the lower half of his veiled face. Representing the Nile as a mature, well-muscled man was a style inspired by ancient Roman statues of the river-god Nilus (in Greek, Neilos), while the cloth that conceals his face is a symbol of the Nile’s source, which was then unknown to Europeans.
Ancient Greek and Roman writers were likewise intrigued by the source of the Nile and its annual flood. To them, it symbolized the ultimate mystery of the universe, an idea not far removed from the ancient Egyptians’ own reverence for the Nile. One ancient Egyptian vision of the Nile’s geography imagined caverns far to the south where the swelling flood waters gathered before bursting past the cataracts around Aswan and gradually filling the flood plain all the way to the Delta and the Mediterranean Sea. The south in general, and the Nile in particular, was thus the font of all creation. The flood started each year in July, when Sirius, the dog star – in ancient Egyptian, Sopdet (or Greek, Sothis) – reappeared on the dawn horizon. Since the flood deposited the rich silt in which Egyptian farmers planted their crops, the success of the next year’s agricultural cycle depended on an adequate, but not excessive, flood. The waters were life, and their rhythmic recurrence offered a ready metaphor for creation and rebirth. The disappearance of Sopdet, and other stars, for seventy days before rising over the horizon again, helped define the seventy-day period of embalming and mummification for the dead.
Taking the Nile as its theme, this chapter looks at the importance of the river and the riverscape to ancient Egyptian thought, as well as the ways in which the Nile and its annual flood shaped other cultures’ ideas about Egypt. The topic remains timely in light of ongoing disputes over water rights in northeast Africa, not to mention the impact the Aswan High Dam has had on agriculture and rural life in Egypt since it was constructed in the 1960s. Herodotus famously described Egypt as ‘the gift of the Nile’, and since the development of mass tourism in the nineteenth century, the river has inspired other travellers with its picturesque scenery and romantic associations. Over the centuries, however, the Nile riverscape has changed more substantially than tourists imagine. Grazing water buffalo, felucca sailboats and a shore lined with ruined temples may evoke a sense of timelessness, but even before twentieth-century damming projects put an end to the annual flood, human minds had imagined the river in several different ways, and human actions had measured its waters and managed its banks to suit the needs of many different regimes.
Rivers and floods were powerful themes in the dry ancient cultures of the Middle East, where settled agricultural communities first formed along waterways such as the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates. From the Babylonian and biblical accounts of a great flood that nearly destroyed the world, to Moses’ magical control of the Red Sea, which drowned the army of pharaoh in the Book of Exodus, water represented moments of crisis – and opportunity. According to Exodus, Moses himself had gained a new, more prosperous start in life when his Hebrew mother placed him in a pitch-tarred basket and floated him on the Nile, where pharaoh’s daughter found the baby and raised him as her own. ‘Moses’ is an ancient Egyptian name, most often used with the name of a god to mean that the person is ‘born of’ that god and under divine protection. The baby in the basket seemed to be born of the river itself.
Despite, or perhaps because of, its centrality to Egyptian life and thought, the Nile was not worshipped as a god per se, but the Nile in flood was referred to as Hapi, a divine figure who personified its life-giving character.1 There were no temples dedicated to the Nile, and no cycles of myths that turned Hapi into a human protagonist, the way that stories were told about Osiris’ sister-wife Isis and their son Horus; in fact, the goddess’s tears for her dead husband were sometimes said to be the source of the flood. When Hapi himself is represented or named in hieroglyphs, the sign for ‘water’ (three wavy lines: 
) often acts as the determinative at the end of his name, rather than the usual determinatives for gods and goddesses (another indication that although Egyptians associated the river and its flood waters with the sacred, they were too vast to be contained easily by a single deity). Images of Hapi did appear in the visual arts, however, sometimes on his own but more often as a pair or series of figures that used the same body form – a man with a generous belly, drooping chest, and blue or green skin colour – to represent the idea of a fertile natural world, well nourished by the flood-fed land. Egyptologists refer to these as ‘fecundity figures’; they often carry trays of offerings, including jars of Nile water and stems of papyrus and water lily. Fecundity figures adorn the square sides of the thrones the Egyptian king sits on, and the lowest bands of decoration on temple and tomb walls. Through these figures, the Nile quite literally supports state and society in ancient Egypt.
Flowing downstream towards the Mediterranean basin, the Nile current made for easy sailing from south to north. A prevailing wind from the north also helped sailors navigate upriver, and from the earliest days of Egyptian history the Nile was the primary means of communication and transport. The river and its banks provided a habitat for many animals, including birds and fish (the latter being the main source of protein in the ancient diet). In the Delta, multiple tributaries created a marshy environment that was the most productive agricultural region in Egypt. In the Nile Valley, flood plains on either side of the river received rich, silty soil in which farmers could plant two cycles of crop per year, such as flax for linen and wheat and vegetables for food. Natural pools and man-made basins or canals could help store river water for the dry season, or create better access by boat to important structures, like temples. The fulcrum-balanced shaduf (its Arabic name) could help lift water on a modest scale, but mechanized means of irrigation, such as the water wheel and the Archimedes screw, were only introduced much later, in Ptolemaic and Roman times.
Bronze plaque, perhaps from a shrine, showing the god of the Nile flood, Hapi, c. 600 BC.
The impact the Nile flood had on day-to-day life arguably encouraged cooperation and bureaucratic organization, since people living upriver would be able to tell weeks in advance of those downstream if the flood was going to be higher or lower than average. Poor floods threatened famine, while excessive floods would destroy settlements along the plains. This could not be controlled, except by divine will. At best, it could be managed by advance planning, for instance using measuring devices to judge the river level (known as Nilometers) and keeping meticulous records of past floods, to try to predict patterns or recall what precautions were taken. Commanding the chaos of the natural world was a recurring theme in Egyptian literature and art, and many of the artworks we admire today for their poise or charming details in fact betray an anxious concern with keeping nature in check. Carved into the limestone block walls of his tomb’s offering chapel, the Dynasty 5 official Ti stands serenely on a small skiff made of bound papyrus stems, which itself rests on the zigzagged surface of the water – not the Nile itself, but the kind of swampy stream typical of the Delta. The stems of a papyrus thicket tower over this scene, creating a rhythmic pattern of striations in the background. Yet amid this balance and beauty, danger lurks: nests of birds in the thicket are threatened by mongooses climbing the plant stems, and in the water hippopotamuses threaten to overturn the boats of Ti and his boatmen, who aim spears at the animals and grapple them with ropes. By representing these dangers, and his calm mastery over them, in the offering chapel of his tomb, Ti invited the image to protect his burial place, even as he communicated his own status near the top of a social order that sustained itself with such assertions about how privilege and power could keep Egypt safe.
A nobleman named Ti, shown larger-than-life in a marsh landscape. From his tomb at Saqqara, Egypt, c. 2400 BC.
The riverscape was not only a place of lurking disaster, of course. Its marshlands teemed with life, moisture and dense greenery that brought pleasure to mind. The banks of streams in the Delta, or the marshes of the Nile Valley, gave Egyptian poets and artists a setting in which to imagine flirtations and other forms of recreation enjoyed by the leisured elite. Here was humour and amusement in a holiday atmosphere – one went to the marshes to enjoy a ‘beautiful day’, code for drinking and love-making – but with a serious undercurrent in the core belief that the Nile was the origin of all life and all creation. Nor did the ancient Egyptian people go to excessive lengths to try to control the uncontrollable river: some monuments and temples were designed to embrace the flood, letting the Nile waters flow around and even through them. Better known today as the Colossi of Memnon, two colossal statues of King Amenhotep III bathed in the life-giving flow of the Nile when it was in flood, as did the entire temple (now destroyed) that they once fronted.2 A picturesque view of this scene at sunset, painted in the early twentieth century, gives a rather romantic impression of the effect this intentional flooding had. It was an apt solution, given that the purpose of the now-lost temple was to help keep the spirit and memory of the dead king alive. The Nile held the power of both life and death, making it as mysterious as its source to the ancient Greeks and Romans who visited Egypt or simply imagined it from afar.
David Roberts, Statues of Memnon at Thebes, 1846–9, lithograph. The ‘Colossi of Memnon’ – quartzite statues of King Amenhotep III, c. 1375 BC – are shown here at sunset, Luxor, Egypt.
The wind-eroded, water-lapped statues of Amenhotep III on the West Bank of Thebes (modern Luxor) earned a new name, the Colossi of Memnon, when Greek visitors identified them with the Trojan War hero Memnon, an Ethiopian king and son of Eos, the goddess of dawn. The historian Strabo, writing in the late first century BC, described visiting the statues at dawn with his friend Aelius Gallus, the Roman Prefect (governor) of Egypt.3 The statue on the north side, which stands to the right when facing the pair, was believed to make a singing sound after sunrise, as if Memnon were greeting his mother. Most likely, an earthquake in 27 or 26 BC had further damaged the quartzite blocks that comprise the statue, and moisture evaporating in the early sunshine made a soft whistle or whine. In his Geography, Strabo confirmed that he heard a noise ‘like a slight blowing’, but he was less convinced that it came from the colossus. Nonetheless, the impressive statues remained a must-see for visitors in Roman times, as more than a hundred Greek and Latin inscriptions on the lap and legs of the statues attest. Although known as graffiti, most of these inscriptions are not hastily scrawled tags but carefully composed and carved records of a visit. Some are poems, like the two credited to Julia Balbilla, a Roman noblewoman who accompanied the emperor Hadrian and his wife Sabina to see – and hear – the statues in AD 130.
Balbilla seems to have shared with Hadrian an interest in the distant past, in particular the history of Egypt and the Near East; she herself was the descendant of Hellenistic kings in Syria. But for Hadrian, his interest in Egypt took on particular significance when his boyfriend, a handsome young man named Antinous, died during the journey.4 The circumstances are unclear, but Antinous is thought to have drowned in the Nile. In Egypt, at least in Ptolemaic and Roman times (earlier evidence is mixed), victims of drowning were thought to become divine. For example, the tomb of a young girl named Isidora, which resembles a miniature Greek temple at the cemetery of Tuna el-Gebel, includes a long poem in Greek composed by her father, mourning her loss but taking comfort from his belief that drowning has turned his daughter into a water nymph with the gift of eternal life. Perhaps inspired by such ideas, Hadrian declared that Antinous was a god and that statues and cults for him should be set up throughout the Roman Empire. At his villa outside Rome, Hadrian recreated part of their Egyptian journey by building a long, ornamental pool called the Canopus, after the seaport near Alexandria.
For visitors who came to Egypt in Roman times, predominantly from the eastern Mediterranean, any risks posed by Nile travel were far outweighed by the appeal of seeing such sights as the Colossi and royal tombs at Thebes, and temples at Abydos and Philae, which were a focus of religious pilgrimage thanks to the worship of Egyptian gods throughout the empire.5 The Nile cataracts at Aswan, including the islands of Philae and Elephantine, likewise appealed to travellers, who were impressed by the force and roar of the rushing water. The river originated in caves or grottoes somewhere in distant Ethiopia, it was thought, but its ultimate source remained a mystery akin to the other mysteries that ancient Egyptian priests kept secret among themselves. At the city of Praeneste, or Palestrina, in the hills east of Rome, a man-made cave housed a spectacular floor mosaic that represented the Nile from its secret source to its Delta mouth.6 The mosaic was discovered and removed in the early seventeenth century, leaving scholars today uncertain about its specific setting, but it appears to have been part of the city’s thriving forum in the second or early first century BC, at least several decades before the Roman conquest of Egypt. Water may have been channelled to drip over the mosaic, emphasizing its watery theme, and the details of the monuments, people, flora and fauna the mosaic represents must have struck Roman viewers as exotic yet informative at the same time. The curved part of the mosaic sat in the most distant part of the cave and represents the Ethiopian mountains. Sailboats, temples in both Greek and Egyptian style, and hippopotamuses and crocodiles mark the course of the river, seen at flood height, as it winds its way to the front edge of the mosaic, where it meets the sea. Soldiers in Greek or Roman helmets gather under a draped, columned hall, while white-robed, shaven-headed Egyptian priests carry divine emblems.
Floor mosaic depicting life along the Nile River, from a grotto at Palestrina, Italy, c. 100 BC.
The enticing details of this riverine world captured the Roman imagination of Egypt – and later imaginings as well, for the bird’s-eye view of the Nile’s course finds an echo in the engraved frontispiece to the Description de l’Égypte. The river and the ancient monuments along its banks epitomized an unchanging Egypt. Surely the Nile had always flooded, farmers had always sown and ploughed the land, and boats had always drifted downstream and sailed upstream with ease? This idealized view glided over changes in how the land and water were managed, however, and the question of who owned them, not to mention changes in the environment as the course of the river shifted or its tributaries silted up. By the time the first volume of the Description appeared in 1809, even more changes were underway as Egypt’s new ruling dynasty turned to Europe to help navigate Egypt into the modern, industrial age.
After Napoleon’s defeat by the British, an Ottoman general of Albanian parentage, named Mohamed Ali, stepped in to fill the power vacuum left in Egypt, which remained part of the Ottoman Empire. Under his long period of rule as governor (wali) of the country, Mohamed Ali introduced substantial changes to develop Egypt’s infrastructure, often by inviting European expertise and investment. He assumed ownership of almost all the arable land in Egypt and sought ways to maximize its output. In particular, he followed French advice to plant a variety of long-staple cotton in the Delta, laying the foundation for Egypt’s important textile industry. Under Mohamed Ali, a new canal was also dug between Cairo and Alexandria, making it easier for boats to transport goods between the two cities and thus facilitating ever-increasing exchanges with Europe and the rest of the Mediterranean.
After his death in 1848, Mohamed Ali’s nephews, sons and grandsons carried on with programmes of modernization, which allowed European powers like Britain and France to gain a colonial toehold in the Egyptian economy. British firms contracted to build railways in Egypt, while the French architect Ferdinand de Lesseps, whose father had supported Mohamed Ali’s dealings with the French government, won a contract (over British protests) to build the Suez Canal that would link the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. By the 1860s Egypt was booming. The cotton crop turned a substantial profit when the American Civil War disrupted supply from the southern plantations, and work on the Suez Canal and its new port city of Ismailia blazed ahead, in time for the grand official opening in November 1869. But behind these outward successes lay a system of state monopolies, heavy taxation and forced or exploitative labour, requiring peasants to work on state-funded projects like new irrigation channels, the Suez Canal itself and the expanding railway network. In the south of the country, irrigation projects focused on providing water for sugar cane crops, which fed the sugar factories owned by Egypt’s rulers (now upgraded to khedives, viceroys) and their families. A similar pattern of intensive farming and industrial monopoly shaped cotton agriculture in the north, although the cotton industry declined in the 1870s when better-quality American cotton returned to the market. Coupled with the usual worries about flood levels – 1863 saw the worst flood of the century – these changes to water and land management made the lives of Egypt’s rural population even harder, and their subsistence more tenuous.
That is why there is an uncomfortable irony in the way Western visitors to nineteenth-century Egypt insisted on the timeless character of the river views they enjoyed. Tourism itself was a product of modernization and growing colonial influence. European and American advisers, industrialists and investors based themselves for short or long stays in the country, as did Greek and Levantine merchants and bankers, including many Jewish firms. Steamship services cut the journey time across the Mediterranean, while improved rail links made it straightforward to reach Cairo from Alexandria or Ismailia. On the Nile itself, tourists could travel by dahabiya, a sail-rigged boat with a few cabins, usually hired privately with its own Egyptian crew, or from the 1870s by steam-driven paddleboat. The British firm of Thomas Cook led the way in organized tourism, using paddle steamers to take larger numbers of visitors up and down the Nile. So reliable and well established were Cook’s Tours that in 1884 the British Government asked the company to organize the expedition to relieve General Gordon in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Cook’s moved 18,000 troops, 40,000 tons of supplies and 40,000 tons of coal from Newcastle to Egypt to supply the 27 steamers that made the journey to Khartoum. Some 650 sailboats and 5,000 Egyptian men were also involved in the expedition, which ended in a major setback for the British army when Gordon was killed, but which is a salient reminder that tourism in Egypt was a sideline to the colonial exploitation of Egypt and Sudan for military, commercial and industrial purposes.
Many of the sites Victorian and later tourists visited are the same ones tourists have continued to visit ever since, especially in Upper Egypt: Aswan (where the Cataract Hotel was a favourite of Agatha Christie) and, time permitting, travel beyond the first cataract to sites like Abu Simbel and Wadi Halfa; the Graeco-Roman temples at Edfu, Esna and (north of Luxor) Dendera; and the sites on both banks of the Nile at Luxor, where the Winter Palace Hotel was the most prestigious address. Stopping along the Nile in Middle Egypt – Mallawi, Amarna, Asyut and Abydos – was also recommended, but since the 1980s tourism in the region has been disrupted due to security concerns relating to sectarian violence between its Muslim and Christian populations. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tourists devoted more time to Alexandria and Cairo than many do today, including the mosques, medieval gates and churches of Old Cairo. And whereas river travel, sometimes combined with a rail journey, defined the tourist experience for a century, air travel means that tourists can now reach Luxor and Abu Simbel without setting foot on a boat or even stopping over in Cairo. Nile cruises remain a popular option, but most only ply the stretch of river between Aswan and Luxor. Overnight journeys by small felucca sailboats, pictured in the advertising for many Nile cruises, are a more basic option, suited to adventure-minded travellers.
If these changes to tourism have made the Nile something to look at from the banks or cruise in a short burst, rather than travel along at a leisurely pace, the river itself has been changed by a series of engineering works, culminating in the construction of the Aswan High Dam, which began operating in 1970. When the British occupied Egypt in 1882 and took control of the country’s finances, one of their priorities was being able to regulate the Nile flood waters, minimizing the risk of damage or drought and thus maximizing agricultural revenue. In the first decade of the twentieth century they built barrages at Esna and Asyut to assist with irrigation in Upper and Middle Egypt. These lock systems followed on from the first dam project at Aswan, which was completed in 1902. When the height proved inadequate to handle high floods, it was raised again between 1907 and 1912, at which point a survey of archaeological monuments was also undertaken. The timing was apt, because the British government was reasserting its control (at the time, jointly with Egypt) over neighbouring Sudan. Egyptologists, artists and writers of the day spoke out against the effect the higher dam would have on archaeological sites in the area when its reservoir reached peak levels, submerging the temples on the island of Philae, for instance.7 British engineers underpinned the worst-affected structures, but long exposure to water was bound to erode the sandstone and wash away vividly painted details.
Antonio Beato, photograph of a tourist steamboat on the Nile, c. 1898.
In the 1950s, with the confidence of a revolutionary regime, President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government began planning a new, much larger Aswan dam project to generate the levels of electric power Egypt needed to continue its post-war development. The impact of the High Dam, as it became known, exceeded the concerns that previous dam projects had caused. Not only were temples like Philae and Abu Simbel, and hundreds of other known archaeological sites, due to be submerged under the lake the new dam would create, Lake Nasser would also cover long-established towns and villages, leading to the displacement of tens of thousands of people known collectively as Nubians, after the region of Nubia encompassing the southern border of Egypt and northern Sudan. To rehouse indigenous Nubians, new villages were built around Aswan, but far from the river. Communities lost their cohesion and their livelihoods, since many had relied on income from date harvests but lost their mature trees to the backed-up Nile. The knock-on effects of the forced migration are still felt among Nubians in Egypt today.
Rehousing the region’s ancient temples proved to be a more straightforward operation, despite the tremendous costs and engineering feats involved. The Egyptian and Sudanese governments turned to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to coordinate an international effort that involved surveying endangered archaeological sites in the area, conducting test excavations where possible and, most spectacularly, executing the wholesale removal of eighteen endangered temples dating from the 18th Dynasty to the Roman period. The largest and most famous were the adjacent temples honouring Ramses II and his queen, Nefertari, cut into the cliff face at Abu Simbel – the same temples depicted in the lithograph that hung over Freud’s consulting couch in Vienna. The temples were sawn into blocks weighing up to 30 tons and re-erected against an artificial mountain on higher ground, some 65 metres above and 200 metres behind their original location. Their original alignment was maintained as much as possible, so that the rising sun can reach the inner chapel of the Ramses II temple on two days each year, illuminating a statue of the king and the gods, their arms entwined, for a few hours in February and October. The project was completed in 1968, having cost the then-staggering sum of $40 million.8 Five other groups of relocated temples were also created in the region and, for smaller chapels, in the gardens of the Khartoum museum. As a thank you to nations that had contributed funds and expertise, Egypt donated four small temples to the United States, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain, each of which now stands in a museum or, in Madrid, a park near the Plaza de España. The rescued Nubian temples feature on the list of world heritage sites maintained by UNESCO – but impressive as their rescue was, they draw attention to some of the more troubling aspects of the ‘world heritage’ concept. What made the temples more valuable than villages and date palms, and to what extent has ‘world heritage’ favoured sites and monuments with particular meaning for Western culture?
Today, visitors to Abu Simbel who enter the false mountain behind the temples will confront the contrast between old and new. From the front, however, the temples appear to have been sited beside the modern lake forever, looking just as they did in 1817 after Italian engineer-turned-archaeologist Giovanni Belzoni bartered with local officials to secure the services of workmen. At least eighty men laboured to clear tons of drifted sand away from the temple facades, a task that remained incomplete until Belzoni could return to finish the work the following July, which that year corresponded to the holy month of Ramadan, marked by a daytime fast. Belzoni, at least, considered the physical strain worthwhile, for when he entered the main temple he marvelled at its vast halls and impressive supporting pillars in the form of royal statues. It was difficult to make drawings because the stifling heat made sweat pour onto the paper and ink, but Belzoni described walls covered with battle scenes and hieroglyphs, ‘the style of which is somewhat superior, or at least bolder, than that of any others in Egypt’.9 This task complete, Belzoni and his companions sailed downstream, where they would undertake other clearance work (including the transport of the Kingston Lacy obelisk) over the next two years, before crossing the Mediterranean en route to London. There, Belzoni’s published words and engravings made from those sweat-stained illustrations brought Abu Simbel to the attention of European audiences primed for news of all things ancient Egyptian.
To other cultures, from ancient Greece to the days of Belzoni and beyond, the Nile and its once-predictable flood seemed to summarize all that was distinctive about life along the great river in Egypt. Since the 1960s the Aswan High Dam has changed that significantly. The end of the annual flood has forced farmers to rely on expensive chemical fertilizers, which leave deposits of salt in the agricultural land; with no inundation to wash the salt away, ever more fertilizer is required to maintain productivity. Other changes extend further back in time, such as the British-built barrages of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the system of irrigation canals that enabled intensive agriculture on lands that Mohamed Ali had turned into his family’s private property. Tourists may enjoy the romantic fantasy that their Nile journeys are a timeless legacy of the distant past, but history tells us that much has changed. Rather than assume that the past and the present are one unchanging stream, we should look with even more attention to how the ancient Egyptians represented their world.
