Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River 9781474458627

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NILE

NILE Urban Histories on the Banks of a River

Nezar AlSayyad

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholar­ship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Nezar AlSayyad, 2019 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun—Holyrood Road 12 (2f ) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Garamond by R. J. Footring Ltd, Derby, UK, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 5860 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 5862 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 5863 4 (epub) The right of Nezar AlSayyad to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

List of Figures vi Prefacexi Road Map xv Supporting Visual Material xxi Prologue. The Urban Life of a River   1. Finding the Source of the Nile: Centuries of Discovery

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  2. The Birth of the Nile: Water Carves a Path through Rugged Land 29   3. The Nile of Lower Egypt: Memphis, the First Capital City

47

  4. Thebes of the Pharaohs: The Nile of Upper Egypt

61

  5. Avaris and Akhetaten: Temporary Capitals on the Nile

77

  6. Nubia on the Nile: The Kingdom of the Black Pharaohs in Napata and Meroe

91

  7. Alexandria: Greeks and Romans on the Western Edge of the Nile Delta

107

  8. A Nile Oasis in the Sahara: Fayoum of the Ptolemies

125

  9. Cairo: The Thousand-year Capital on the Nile

139

10. Crusaders on the Nile: Damietta and Mansoura

163

11. Cities of the Blue Nile: Lake Tana and the Ethiopian Empires

179

12. Rosetta and the Discovery of Ancient Egypt: Where the Nile Meets the Sea

195

13. Khartoum and Omdurman: An Islamic State on the Nile in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan

211

14. A Pyramid for the Living: The Nile at Aswan

229

Epilogue. On the Possible Death of the Nile and the Life of its Cities 245 Index255

Figures

Photographs and maps accompanying the text are all by Nezar AlSayyad except where specified otherwise. P.1 P.2 P.3 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 4.1

Statue of the Nile at the Vatican. Photograph by F. Bucher, distributed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Publicly available  Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (Fountain of the Four Rivers), Rome. Photograph by Alvesgaspar, distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Publicly available Cities of the Nile The pyramid built by B. Waldecker to commemorate what he considered the ultimate source of the Nile The plaque in Latin stating “Caput Nili”  A fifteenth-century map of the Nile within the Greek world by Nicholas Germanus, based on Ptolemaeus’s second-century Geographia. Public domain The Nile has more than 100 sources Map of the entire Nile basin Lake Victoria The start of the Victoria Nile at Jinja Blue Nile Falls Lake Tana Profile of the Blue Nile and the White Nile to the delta The meeting of the White Nile and Blue Nile at Khartoum The movement of the Nile in Egypt over the past 5,000 years, based on Lutley and Bunbury (2008), “The Nile on the Move.” Egyptian Archaeology, 32, pp. 3–5 Map of the Memphite region Plan of the Temple of Ptah at Memphis The Sphinx of Giza and the pyramid of Khafra in the nineteenth century. Weghat Nazar Magazine Archives. Publicly available in Egypt The pyramids at Giza. Weghat Nazar Magazine Archives. Publicly available in Egypt Map of the Theban region

1 2 7 12 12 15 27 34 36 37 38 38 38 39 49 50 52 54 54 65

Figures 4.2 Pylon and obelisk at the Luxor temple. Photograph by Ad Meskens, distributed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Publicly available 67 4.3 The palace of Amenhotemp III 69 4.4 Map of Deir el-Medina 70 4.5 View of the Deir el-Bahri temple. Photograph by Nowic, distributed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license 71 4.6 Colossi of Memnon. Photograph by MusikAnimal, distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Publicly available 72 5.1 Plan of Avaris during the Hyksos period, based on Bietak (1981), Avaris and Piramesse: Archaeological Exploration in the Eastern Nile Delta. Oxford: Oxford University Press 79 5.2 Image of Akhenaten. Photograph by Gérard Ducher, distributed under a CC BY-SA 2.5 license. Publicly available 81 5.3 Bust of Nefertiti. Photograph by Philip Pikart, distributed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Publicly available 81 5.4 The Amarna area, showing Akhetaten 83 5.5 Plan of the Long Temple 85 5.6 Plan of the central area of Akhetaten 86 6.1 The island of Philae. Photograph by Zakaria Rabea, distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Publicly available 91 6.2 Many Nubian settlements were displaced by the construction of the Aswan High Dam 93 6.3 Relocation of the Abu Simbel temple complex required elaborate new construction. From the report The Salvage of the Abu Simbel Temples, Arab Republic of Egypt Ministry of Culture, December 1971, p. 114. Publicly available in Egypt 94 6.4 Principal sites of the Kushite kingdom 95 6.5 The pyramids at Napata 99 6.6 The Napatan kings continued to wear the double crown even after being expelled from Egypt 101 6.7 The pyramids at Meroe 102 7.1 The ancient branches of the Nile delta 108 7.2 The connection between the Nile, Lake Mareotis, and the Mediterranean Sea during the Greco-Roman period 109 7.3 Map of Ptolemaic Alexandria 112 7.4 The library of Alexandria as portrayed by O. Von Corven in the nineteenth century. Public domain 115 7.5 The Pharos lighthouse as depicted by the Austrian architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach. Public domain 118 7.6 Satellite view of contemporary Alexandria. Photograph by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Public domain123 8.1 Bahr Yusuf (Canal of Joseph) 126

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River 8.2 Birket Qarun (Lake Moeris)  127 8.3 The Hawara pyramid, built by Amenemhat III  129 8.4 The Labyrinth as reconstructed by Athanasius Kircher in the seventeenth century. Public domain 130 8.5 Ptolemy II Philadelphus. Photograph by Marie-Lan Nguyen, distributed under a CC BY 2.5 license. Publicly available133 8.6 Map of the Arsinoite region 133 8.7 The mummy portrait of a young woman in Arsinoe, Fayoum. Photograph courtesy of the Egyptian Museum. Publicly available 136 9.1 Remains of the Babylon fortress 141 9.2 The mosque of ‘Amr ibn al-‘As 143 9.3 The Ibn Tulun mosque and its spiral minaret 145 9.4 Map showing Fustat, al-Askar, al-Qata’i, and al-Qahira 147 9.5 The mosque of al-Hakim 150 9.6 The Bab al-Zuwayla gate in Cairo 151 9.7 The complex of Qalawun 155 9.8 The mosque and madrasa of Sultan Hasan 156 9.9 The mosque and madrasa of Sultan Barquq 157 9.10 The complex of Sultan al-Ghuri 159 9.11 The mosque of Mehmed Ali atop the citadel 160 10.1 Map of the Nile delta at the time of the Crusades 164 10.2 Waterfront of present-day Mansoura 166 10.3 The citadel at Damietta as it appears today 167 10.4 Interior of the mosque of ‘Amr (Abi al-Maa’ti) as it appears today 168 10.5 Sixteenth-century portrait of King Louis IX, by El Greco. Public domain  169 10.6 The house of Ibn Luqman as it appears today. It served as a jail for Louis IX during his captivity in Egypt 175 11.1 The Tissisat Blue Nile Waterfall. Photograph by Peter Jeschofnig, distributed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Publicly available 179 11.2 Settlements of the Blue Nile region 183 11.3 The Aksum Obelisk. Photograph by Ondřej Žváček, distributed under a CC BY 2.5 license. Publicly available 184 11.4 Bete Giorgis (the Church of St. George) at Lalibela. Photograph by Bernard Gagnon, distributed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Publicly available 186 11.5 The Fasiladas castle (Fasil Ghebbi) at Gondar 189 11.6 The Fasiladas Bath 190 12.1 The fortress at Rosetta where the Rosetta Stone was discovered 196

Figures 12.2 Map of Rosetta on the Nile delta and its connection to Alexandria197 12.3 View of Rosetta around the time of the Napoleonic campaign. Publicly available 198 12.4 Rosetta’s distinctive residential architecture 201 12.5 The Rosetta Stone. Photograph by Hans Hillewaert, distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Publicly available 208 13.1 Qaddafi’s Egg: the Corinthian Hotel in Khartoum 212 13.2 The meeting of the Blue and White Niles 212 13.3 Charles Gordon. From Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, General Gordon, London: Chatto & Windus (1918). Public domain 213 13.4 The Mahdi, as portrayed in the nineteenth century. Public domain213 13.5 The Mahdi’s house 219 13.6 Plan of Khartoum and Omdurman during the time of Gordon and the Mahdi 223 13.7 The killing of Khalifa Abdullahi. Photograph courtesy of Abel-Rahman al-Tohami, private collection of Al-Mahdi family estate 225 13.8 The Mahdi’s tomb after shelling by the British. Photograph courtesy of Abel-Rahman al-Tohami, private collection of Al-Mahdi family estate 226 13.9 The current tomb of the Mahdi after restoration 226 14.1 Monument to Russian–Egyptian friendship near the Aswan High Dam. Photograph by Sara Nabih, distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Publicly available 230 14.2 Nasser at the Aswan High Dam site during the diversion of the course of the Nile in May 1964. Gift with permission to reprint from Al Ahram Newspaper Archive 231 14.3 The Old Aswan Low Dam 231 14.4 The island of Elephantine. Photograph by Zureks, distributed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Publicly available 232 14.5 Sahara City, a residential enclave built for Soviet engineers and their families. Gift with permission to reprint from Al Ahram Newspaper Archive 238 14.6 Locations of the old Aswan dam and the Aswan High Dam 240 14.7 The Cataract Hotel on the Nile 242 E.1 Locations of dams, barrages, and canals along the Nile. Photograph by Marc Ryckaert, distributed under a CC BY 3.0 license. Publicly available 252

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To the memory of my father, Dr. M. M. AlSayyad, whose books The Immortal River and The Master of Rivers, written in Arabic more than 50 years ago, inspired the idea of this current book.

Preface

E

gyptians have a famous proverb, “Whoever drinks from the Nile’s water will always come back.” Well, I left Egypt almost 40 years ago and have been back many times, but never to stay, so perhaps this book is my tribute to this idea. I grew up in an academic family, surrounded by books of every sort, but none ever fascinated me as much as the books about the Nile. My father was an important literary figure in Egypt who was also a geographer by training and profession. He studied in the U.K. right after World War II, did his fieldwork in Africa, and submitted a dissertation on what was then called the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. As an Africa specialist, his collection of books in many languages and stretching back to the nineteenth century was bound to attract the attention of anyone, let alone a curious child. As I moved in life and acquired degrees in different disciplines, from architecture to planning to history, my interest in the Nile never waned. I am an urban historian, and my stock in trade is the study of cities and settlements. Much of my research has been about how cities have been shaped by their rulers and inhabitants over time. But I have also focused on how the human and natural forces that surround them have equally shaped them, and how in turn they have shaped their people. Many colleagues have asked me, then, why would I write a book about the Nile? This book is not really about the Nile as a water body; nor is it about the environmental history of the Nile. It is instead a series of vignettes that attempt to narrate the urban life that has sprung up along the Nile’s banks over five millennia. The book attempts to tell the urban histories of the river, treating the Nile, its tributaries, and lakes as actors on the stage of the Nile basin. Rather than viewing historic events as unrelated occurrences, the book will present them as interconnected elements linked and influenced by the river, which has in turn been transformed by them. The book draws upon literature concerned with transformations in the social and cultural constitution of the Nile basin throughout history, and highlights the historical figures who shaped specific sites. In this regard, I have been influenced by many previous authors who have written about the Nile, including Robert Collins, Israel Gershoni, Gianni Guadalupi, Emil Ludwig, Rushdi Said, John Waterbury, and Toby Wilkinson. Their books have exposed me to the archaeology, geography, history, hydrology,

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River and politics of the Nile, making the task of writing its urban history poss­ ible. While this book may also be a cultural and historical guide for those interested in the Nile valley, it is nonetheless anchored in specific cities, and will offer descriptions of individual buildings, archaeological sites, and urban areas that in some cases are still in use. In identifying some of these places, I have used the names given to them during colonial times, as with Lakes Victoria and Albert, despite my discomfort with them, because in many cases these names have been accepted by the indigenous residents of the region, or because the original or new names given to them have not yet been accepted internationally. I also recognize that there comes a time in the life of all colonized peoples when they cease to think of their history and possessions as colonial and adopt them as their own. The Nile river system, which spans multiple cultures and ethnicities, is the primary force that structures and gives life to human settlements in the region. Nowhere else in the world is the relationship between agriculture and the emergence and decline of human settlement more evident. Grounded in specific sites along the Nile, this book focuses on the events and encounters connected to the evolution and development of these settlements. Drawing on my previous books related to the study of urban history, the primary focus of this book is built form, and it anchors specific events in specific urban spaces in selected cities along the Nile. It starts from the conviction that it is difficult to understand the urban ecology of the Nile by using the nation-state as a unit of analysis. Narrating the encounters between groups of people of various religious, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, the book describes the visions and actions of historical personages who shaped not only the river’s geography, but also the political configuration of the Nile basin, and, as a result, the writing of the region’s history. Through such historical excavations, this book treats the Nile as an actor and a site of history. Simultaneously, the book emphasizes the fact that the diversity of actors, civilizations, spatial scales, temporalities, and other forces that come together in the Nile basin defies the privileging of any single analytical lens—whether natural, cultural, or economic—to narrate the histories of the river. Hence, the book presents multiple, contested, and often invented histories of the Nile, each with its own claim to a place in a larger narrative of one of the world’s longest river systems. Additionally, we must remember that history is always written in the present moment, and is possibly in the service of it. Hence, this book is as much a reflection of our lives as it is of the places that are narrated in it. In the making of this book, I owe much gratitude to a number of institutions and individuals—too many to mention them all here. A gener­ous fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation allowed me the time and the funds to travel for six months in Africa and to visit eight

Preface of the 11 countries that presently occupy portions of the Nile basin. I was fortunate enough to visit every single ruined or surviving city that I cover in this book. This would not have been possible without the support of the Guggenheim. The initial idea behind the book emerged from a dis­cussion I had at one of the conferences of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments with Dr. Shamila Sen of Harvard University Press. I am grateful for her advice. I also wish to acknowledge Dr. Elena Ion, who was then my research assistant and worked on the book proposal. Ms. Walaa al-Khulaitit was also a very able research assistant who spent six months doing library research, and who was so thorough in her work that she generated three bins of rare articles and other material beyond library books. Professor Dalila ElKerdani, Dr. Ahmed Refaat and Ms Hanan Hagag traveled with me to some of the sites in Egypt and introduced me to several sources; I am grateful for their help. Several interns who worked for me during the summer of 2016 also helped me with individual chapters, and I would particularly like to mention Giovanna Casagrande, Larissa Galdino, Mariana Luna, Reem Makkawi, and Talita Rosa. Dr. Amir Gohar was my fieldwork research assistant and traveled with me to five African countries. He kept track using his GPS equipment of every spot we visited, dating and locating it, even when we traveled on the waters of Lake Victoria and Lake Tana. I am thankful for his companionship and boundless energy, which kept me going. My executive assistant, Victoria Duong, kept most of my records, did much of the correspondence related to the research, and kept me informed despite my travels for one whole year. Dr. Sujin Eom served as my research assistant in the final stages of the project and helped me wrap up all its loose ends. I have benefited intellectually from her dedication and insights, and I am very grateful for her contribution. David Moffat has been my in-house editor for three decades. I have rarely published anything without having him go through it first. His fingerprints on this narrative are evident, and I am grateful for his friendship. I had initially planned to publish this book with another press, one with which I had published before. But after I completed the writing, I was fortunate to be introduced to Nicola Ramsey at Edinburgh University Press. Nicola was an amazing editor who immediately adopted the project with great enthusiasm. I am grateful for her and her staff at EUP, particularly Eddie Clark, Rebecca Mackenzie, and Kirsty Woods, for their work in the final stages of production. I also wish to acknowledge Annabelle Ison and Stuart Chan for exploring with me a few options for the general look of the book, and Ralph Footring for final copyediting and book design. Finally, and as may be the case with all books, I may have omitted what others may consider an important city or event in my coverage. My

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River only consolation is that the writing of history is always selective. I can only hope that the choices I have made will clearly resonate with those interested in this great river, the Nile. Nezar AlSayyad Berkeley, 2019

Road Map

The tables on the following pages set out a road map to the book, by sketching the contents of the ensuing chapters.

Ancient Egypt (3100–332 bc) Greco-Roman period (332 bc–641 ad)

Chapter 1 Finding the Source of the Nile: Centuries of Discovery

Alexandria; Mountains of the Moon; Nile valley

The Nile

Location/cities

Figures and actors

–

al-Baghdadi; Ibn Batuta

El-Musta’ala Bellah; al-Masudi; al-Khawarizmi; Suhrab; ibn Hawqal; al-Idrisi Pedro Paez; Jeronimo Lobo; Jacques-Charles Poncet; James Bruce Mehmed Ali; Khedive Ismail Pasha; Charles Gordon; Burkhart Waldecker

–

Richard Burton; John Hanning Speke; Samuel and Elizabeth Baker

James Bruce

Herodotus; Strabo

–

Travelers or commentators

Caesar; Cleopatra; Claudius Ptolemaeus

Festivities are held by the Nile Pharaohs

Main event(s)

Greeks and Romans travel the Nile; geographical maps of the Nile are created Middle Ages Ruwenzori Egypt dispatches messengers (641–1517) Mountains to Ethiopia; Arab geographers produce Nile maps Portuguese exploration Lake Tana; Portuguese explorers arrive in (15th to 18th centuries) Gondar Ethiopia; discovery of the sources of the Blue Nile 19th and 20th centuries Sudd swamps; Discovery of the sources of Lakes Victoria, the White Nile; Albert, Tanganyika, southernmost source of the and Edward; White Nile in Burundi Burundi; Rwanda Chapter 2 Prehistory East Africa Formation of Pangea; Birth of the Nile: (225 million years ago) creation of the Water Carves a Path Ruwenzori Mountains through Rugged Ice Age East Africa Formation of glaciers Land (30,000 years ago) Holocene Wet Phase Sahara Desert Rise of global temperatures; (7500–3900 bc) birth of the Nile

Time frame

Chapter

Chapter 5 Avaris and Akhetaten: Temporary Capitals on the Nile

Chapter 4 Thebes of the Pharaohs: The Nile of Upper Egypt

Chapter 3 The Nile of Lower Egypt: Memphis, the First Capital City

Chapter

Aswan

Modern Egypt (1805–present) Early and Old Kingdoms of Egypt (3150–2181 bc) New Kingdom of Egypt (1549–1077 bc) New Kingdom of Egypt (1549–1077 bc)

Second Intermediate Period of Egypt (1650–1540 bc) New Kingdom of Egypt (1540–1077 bc)

20th century

18th and 19th centuries

Memphis

Ancient Egypt (3100–332 bc)

Akhetaten

Avaris

Thebes

Memphis

Memphis; Saqqara; Giza

Location/cities

Time frame

Menes; Djoser; Khufu; Khafra; Menkaure Khaemwaset

Figures and actors

Ahmose I; Amenhotep I, III; Thutmose III; Hatshepsut; Ramesses II Napoleonic expedition Napoleon; Giovanni Belzoni Discovery of the tomb of Lord Carnarvon; Tutankhamun Howard Carter The Hyksos invade Egypt and The Hyksos; found their capital, Avaris Kamose; Ahmose I Founding of Akhetaten; Thutmose III; worship of the sun god Aten Amenhotep III; Akhenaten; Tutankhamun; Ay; Horemheb

Thebes becomes the capital of Egypt; temples built on the banks of the Nile at Thebes

Memphis becomes the first capital of a single Egypt; pharaohs build pyramids Archaeological discovery of ruins and relics in Memphis

Development of human settlements along the Nile valley Construction of dams

Main event(s)

Manetho

Dominique Vivant Denon

Auguste Mariette

Herodotus

Travelers or commentators

18th and 19th centuries

Middle Ages

Chapter 7 Greco-Roman period Alexandria: Greeks and Romans on the Western Edge of the Nile Delta Alexandria; Rosetta Alexandria; Rosetta

Rhakotis; Lake Mareotis; Alexandria; Actium; Rome

Aswan

20th century

19th century

Ancient Egypt (3100–332 bc)

Prehistory (c. 5000 bc)

Chapter 6 Nubia on the Nile: The Kingdom of the Black Pharaohs in Napata and Meroe

Location/cities Banks of the Blue Nile (present-day Sudan) Nubia; Napata; Meroe Egypt and Sudan

Time frame

Chapter

Mamluk rule ends with the Ottoman conquest of Egypt Napoleonic expedition; construction of Mahmoudiyah Canal

Migrants from south of the Sahara settle in present-day Sudan to become Nubians Conquest of Nubia by Egypt; founding of the Kushite kingdom Ruins of the Kushite kingdom discovered; Condominium Agreement establishes the boundary between Egypt and Sudan Aswan High Dam displaces the Nubians Founding of Alexandria; construction of Pharos lighthouse

Main event(s)

Alexander the Great; Ptolemies; Cleopatra; Caesar; Antony; Octavius ‘Amr Ibn al-‘As; ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab Napoleon Bonaparte; Mehmed Ali

–

Thutmose I; Ramesses II; Kashta; Piye –

Nubians

Figures and actors

Napoleon Bonaparte

Ibn Battuta

Herodotus; Diodorus Siculus; Strabo; Philo

–

Johann Ludwig Burckhardt; Frédéric Cailliaud

–

–

Travelers or commentators

Damietta; Mansoura

Axum; Lalibela; Gondar Rosetta; Alexandria; Cairo

Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Crusades (1213–21; 1228–9; 1248–54)

15th to 20th centuries

18th and 19th centuries

Chapter 10 Crusaders on the Nile: Damietta and Mansoura

Chapter 11 Cities of the Blue Nile: Lake Tana and the Ethiopian Empires Chapter 12 Rosetta and the Discovery of Ancient Egypt: Where the Nile Meets the Sea

Fayoum; Philadelphia

Fustat; Al-Qahira

Ancient Egypt; Ptolemaic period

Chapter 8 A Nile Oasis in the Sahara: Fayoum of the Ptolemies

Location/cities

Chapter 9 Middle Ages Cairo: TheThousand Year Capital on the Nile

Time frame

Chapter

Napoleonic expedition and the discovery of the Rosetta Stone

Establishment of Gondar as a permanent capital

Crusaders attack Egypt and seize Damietta

Arab conquest of Egypt; building of cities with mosques at their centers

Canal of Bahr Yussef

Main event(s)

Horatio Nelson; Jacques-François Menou; Jean-François Champollion

Joseph (in the Bible); Amenemhat III; Alexander the Great; Ptolemy I, II; Arsinoe ‘Amr Ibn al-‘As; Ahmad Ibn Tulun; al-Mu’izz; Jawhar al-Siqeli; al-Hakim; Badr al-Jamali Jean de Brienne; al-Kamel; Louis IX of France; al-Salih; Shajar al-Durr. Lalibela; Fasilads; Haile Selassie

Figures and actors

Napoleon; al-Jabarti

Pedro Paez; Jacques-Charles Poncet; James Bruce

al-Maqrizi; de Joinville

Ibn Hawqal; al-Maqrizi; Nasir-i Khusraw

Herodotus; Manetho; Strabo

Travelers or commentators

Time frame

Chapter 13 1879–99 Khartoum and Omdurman: An Islamic State on the Nile in the AngloEgyptian Sudan Chapter 14 20th century A Pyramid for the Living: The Nile at Aswan

Chapter

Aswan

Khartoum; Omdurman

Location/cities The Mahdi establishes an Islamic state; Abdullahi invades Ethiopia; General Gordon killed; Herbert Kitchener captures Khartoum Construction of both the old dam and the High Dam at Aswan

Main event(s)

British engineers; Gamal Abdel Nasser; Soviet engineers

Mohamad Ahmad (the Mahdi); Charles Gordon; Khalifa Abdullahi

Figures and actors

–

Herbert Kitchener; Francis Reginald Wingate

Travelers or commentators

Supporting Visual Material

A

s part of the field work for this book, the author embarked on an eight-month trip visiting most of the countries that constitute the main Nile basin, aided by a Distinguished Guggenheim Fellowship. He produced hundreds of photographs and many video clips (of 30–60 seconds) during the site visits. Only a few of the photographs made it into the book. Readers interested to see more of this visual material are welcome to refer to the blog “Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River | Explorations by Nezar Alsayyad” at .

Prologue

The Urban Life of a River

I

n the Vatican Museum in the heart of Rome sits a famous statue called “The Nile” (Figure P.1). It takes the form of an old man surrounded by 16 children who supposedly represent the 16 nomes, or administrative districts of ancient Egypt that the Nile fed. Some believe the infants also represent 16 cubits (around 7.5 meters), which is the level to which the Nile must rise annually to guarantee enough water to irrigate the fields and ensure the continuous fertility of the land. The statue is actually a replica of an original that was made of black marble and that was probably sculpted in Alexandria, Egypt, under Roman rule. The statue was

Figure P.1 Statue of the Nile at the Vatican

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River

rediscovered around the fifteenth century and brought to Naples, Italy, where it was placed in a public square. Not far away from the Vatican, in the Piazza Navona, also in Rome, is the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (Figure P.2). It is a beautiful fountain representing four rivers, built in the seven­teenth century and designed in 1648 by the famous Renaissance architect and artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini following a commission from Pope Innocent X. It is a sophisticated sculpture that represents the Nile, the Ganges, the Danube, and the Rio de la Plata, all as figures placed around an ancient Egyptian obelisk that occupies its center. The figure that presents the Nile has a head that appears faceless or partially covered, in reference to the fact that the source of the Nile, on what Europeans considered the dark and pagan continent, had yet to be discovered. The Nile has captured the imagination of the world since ancient times. It has been researched, traveled, controlled, harnessed, mythologized, and spiritualized. It has also found its way into some of the world’s greatest religions. The Nile is mentioned in the Bible by name several times in references that describe it not only in religious terms but also in terms Figure P.2 Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi of the life it gave or denied to people (Fountain of the Four Rivers), Rome along its banks. From the Bible we are told that Pharaoh and Moses battled on the Nile as Moses was turning water into blood; but we also learn how Joseph saved Egypt from famine. Other references appear in Isaiah and Jeremiah: The waters of the sea will be dried up, and the river will be dry and parched, and its canals will become foul, and the branches of Egypt’s Nile will diminish and dry up, reeds and rushes will rot away. There will be bare places by the Nile, on the brink of the Nile, and all that is sown by the Nile will be parched, will be driven away, and will be no more. (Isaiah 19: 5–8)

Prologue Egypt rises like the Nile, like rivers whose waters surge. He said, “I will rise, I will cover the earth, I will destroy cities and their inhabitants.” (Jeremiah 46: 8)

The Nile also makes an appearance in the Quran. While the river is not mentioned specifically by name, many of the biblical stories are repeated with reference to the river and its streams. Thus we are told: Pharaoh proclaimed to his people “Oh my people! Does not the domain of Egypt belong to me with all of the Rivers that flow under me? Can you not see?” (Surah l-Zukhruf number 43, verse 51)

The Nile has been celebrated by its surrounding inhabitants since the time of the ancient Egyptians, a tradition that continues today. And contemporary Egyptians celebrate many occasions related to the Nile, some of which may have started as the religious practices of one group or another but evolved over time into general cultural practices or national festivals. One major celebration in Egypt related to the Nile used to be Wafa al-Nil, meaning “Gratitude to the Nile.” It occurred every summer in August, around the time the annual flood reached its peak. But because Egypt has now controlled the flow of the Nile by means of the construction of the Aswan High Dam, the celebration has ceased, as Egyptians, now feeling secure from floods and with a reliable source of water, have started to take the Nile for granted. Throughout history, the Nile has played a major role in the lives of its surrounding communities. Hapi, the ancient Egyptian god of the Nile, was represented as a strong-bodied man with a prominent chest and a huge belly, symbolizing fertility. Because the level of the Nile fluctuated and the floods were not always guaranteed, Hapi was considered a temperamental deity, and a myth later emerged that Hapi was not satisfied, and that Egyptians should present him with sacrificial gifts. In particular, the legend mentioned that Egyptians should sacrifice a living bride to the Nile once a year. There is absolutely no evidence that ancient Egyptians ever made such offerings of living persons. Although the practice continued in Egypt all the way through the Middle Ages, the sacrificial bride was typically replaced by a wooden life-size doll. So where does the Nile really start? This is a question that remained unanswered for many years. In a huge area whose center is likely on the Equator, and from many different highlands and plateaus, the great river is born in the form of little streams. The Nile, which travels thousands of miles before it ultimately reaches the sea, has been the source of great fascination for many peoples and individuals, and not only those who have inhabited its banks. Over millennia, millions of people have lived and died on its fertile banks, and hundreds of others have died

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River trying to reach its sources. Dozens of explorers, adventures, colonizers, soldiers, geographers, historians, geologists, archaeologists, hydrologists, and political scientists have also written books about it over the centuries. But very little has been written about the Nile by architectural or urban historians interested in its relation to built environments. It is the intention of this book to remedy this deficiency by narrating the rise and fall of the cities that have appeared and disappeared along its banks, either for environmental or political reasons, as it has changed its physical course and character through history. Herodotus’s famous statement that “Egypt is the gift of the Nile” has been the most common saying about Egypt since Classical times. But Egypt is not the only gift of the Nile, for the Nile has many gifts beyond Egypt. Perhaps one if its greatest gifts is the urban life that has sprung up along it and its tributaries, from its sources in Burundi, Rwanda, and Ethiopia all the way to the harsh deserts of the Sudan and Egypt. Because it gave rise to one of the oldest and the greatest civilizations of the ancient world, the Nile can be seen as the gift of Egypt because it was Egyptian civilization and its efficient use of the river that made the Nile known to the rest of world. But it is also clear that Egypt has taken more from the Nile than it has given back. It is important to remember that this river, which may be considered the longest in the world (if one includes all of its tributaries), travels through a host of different countries, and that its journey through Egypt occupies less than one-fifth of its total course. Today, 11 countries are at least partly included in the Nile basin, starting with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and South Sudan in Central Africa; including Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Eretria in East Africa; and finally Sudan and Egypt to the north. Moreover, the Nile was not the always the same river it is today — indeed, it did not even always flow in the same direction. Through history, there have been many ancient Niles. For example, the Sudd area (a word which in Arabic means “the obstacle” or “the dam”) in contemporary South Sudan is today one of the largest swamps in the world. But in prehistory it formed a very large lake that was the endpoint into which both the White Nile and the Blue Nile deposited their waters. If held against other rivers, the Nile has three peculiar qualities. First, it is a river with a singular profile, in that it flows from south to north, unlike most rivers in the world. Second, although it is one of the longest rivers, possessing one of the largest catchment areas in the world, the amount of water it discharges to the sea is minimal compared with the Amazon or the Mississippi, which discharge 80 times and six times more water, respectively. Third, the Nile loses 60 percent of its water that originates in Central Africa in the Sudd swamps, and another 60 percent of what arrives in lower Egypt to evaporation. The amount that ultimately

Prologue reaches Egypt is, however, well used, with less than 20 percent eventually flowing into the Mediterranean. Because of the diversity of lands in its basin, the Nile passes through very different climatic zones and natural areas, allowing it to support many types or species of plant life, birds, fish, animals, and peoples. There are actually three geographical areas from which the Nile springs. First are the highlands of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi, where are located the Mountains of the Moon, or the Ruwenzori, and the Kikizi range. A second important region is the Lake Plateau, a large catchment area containing Lake Edward, Lake Albert, Lake Victoria, and Lake Kyoga, which ultimately feeds many tributaries, including Bahr al-Jabal, Bahr al-Arab, Bahr al-Ghazal, and Bahr al-Zaraf, which converge to produce the White Nile. Third are the mountains of Ethiopia, which produce many rivers and streams that flow into Lake Tana and give us the Blue Nile. The use of color to describe the Nile is complicated. Ironically, the waters of the Blue Nile are not really blue, and actually start out green. Then, for much of its distance the river descends steeply, carving into the earth and carrying silt and black soil downstream, which turns its color reddish or chocolate brown. The White Nile, too, is misnamed, because for much of its journey its water has a yellowish-greenish color, acquired as a result of its passage through the Sudd swamps. Indeed, its color becomes creamy white only when it meets the Blue Nile at Khartoum, in Sudan. At Khartoum, the contrast between the two rivers is remarkable, as the originally reddish-brown waters of the Blue Nile, then carrying a bit of a bluish hue, meet the originally yellowish-green of the White Nile, by then creamy white. From Khartoum, the Nile flows as a single river until it reaches Cairo in Egypt, where it broadens out into the Nile delta, where its historically shifting branches release what is left of its flow into the sea. In fact, the Nile is only truly blue as it travels through the desert from Khartoum down the Nile valley to Cairo. As it branches into the delta, it becomes greenish-grey until it merges with the Mediterranean. Most cities in early times avoided being located directly on the Nile, possibly because of the unpredictability of its flow and the destructive power of its floods. However, most of these early cities also had to be close enough to the Nile to benefit from its life-giving waters. It was for this reason that most early Nile cities were sited on or close to tributaries whose connection to the Nile could be controlled. Within the last five millennia, however, human events such as wars, military occupations, colonial dominance, imperial regimes, independence movements, migration, urbanization, and the constructions of dams have affected the fate of Nile cities and the nations they belong to possibly more than natural disasters, floods, famine, fires, and earthquakes. Thus, this book is about the history of the cities that have sprung up along the Nile, and about how the Nile has affected their form, and through urban culture the

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River politics of various states and dynasties. But it is also about how these cities have, in turn, affected the Nile, its path, and its nature. Throughout recorded history, the Nile has witnessed the rise and fall of many great cities. Geographically, going from south to north, the Nile has sustained cities like Kampala in Uganda; Juba in South Sudan; Gondar and Bahr Dar in Ethiopia; Khartoum, Omdurman, Meroe and Napata in Sudan; and Aswan, Thebes (now Luxor), Akhetaten (now Amarna), Fayoum, Memphis, al-Qahira (now Cairo), Avaris, Mansoura, Damietta, Rosetta, and Alexandria, all in Egypt (Figure P.3). Gondar in Ethiopia, that country’s first permanent capital, built north of Lake Tana in the early seventeenth century, is the most southeastern city in the Nile basin. From it, the Blue Nile flows first south and then northwest to merge with the White Nile at Khartoum, a city that was once the locus for an anticolonial uprising against the British Empire at its peak. Then, after the Nile departs Khartoum, it passes Meroe and Napata, whose pyramids and ruins allude to the glorious days of the Kushite kingdom, before it continues northward through harsh desert. As it passes the impressive Abu Simbel temple in Upper Egypt, the Nile winds its way toward Aswan, whose namesake High Dam displaced the Nubians in the second half of the twentieth century. As the life-giving river approaches Luxor, those following its story must travel back in time to the ancient capital, Thebes, which was the Nile’s most important city during the five centuries of ancient Egypt’s New Kingdom. The Nile then continues to flow northward to Amarna, or Akhetaten as it was called during the reign of Akhenaten — a city whose ruler mandated a single religion for his people. On its way further to the north, the generous river fills a number of canals, one of which creates the oasis settlement of Fayoum, which was of great importance to the Ptolemies, who built it, and the Romans, who later relied on the Fayoum oasis as a breadbasket of their empire. The Nile soon then passes Memphis, its first historically significant city, which gave birth to the unified civilization of ancient Egypt. And not far from Memphis, the Nile arrives in Cairo, the Islamic capital of Egypt, whose core was built by the early Arab dynasties. After its departure from Cairo, it bifurcates into two major branches at the start of the delta. To the east, the river’s flow travels through the Damietta branch to the cities of Mansoura and Damietta, sites of major battles during the Crusades in the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. Meanwhile, another major branch, the Rosetta branch, directs much of the rest of the river’s flow westward, to the city of Rosetta, where the discovery of the Rosetta Stone during the Napoleonic expedition electrified Europe. To the west of Rosetta, the Nile also gives life, through Lake Mareotis and a series of channels and canals, to another great city born in antiquity, Alexandria, much beloved by Antony and Cleopatra.

Prologue

Figure P.3 Cities of the Nile

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River This book views the Nile as both the stage for the enactment of important human events and an actor in their unfolding history. It examines the intersection of natural forces and human intervention to take readers on a series of historical journeys — from the river’s highland sources, through the desert, to the Mediterranean Sea. Most major river systems are associated with a particular nation-state. For example, the Volga is associated with Russia, the Ganges with India, the Rhine with Germany, the Yangtze with China, and so on. However, this book adopts the position that it is difficult to understand the urban ecology of the Nile by using the nation-state as a unit of analysis. The Nile river system, which spans multiple peoples and ethnicities, has been the primary force structuring and giving life to a variety of settlements, cultures, and dynasties. And nowhere else in the world is the relation between agriculture and the emergence and decline of human societies more evident. Grounded in specific sites along the Nile, the book thus attempts to describe the river’s changing presence as a force for human settlement. Narrating the encounters between groups of people of various religious, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, the book attempts to highlight some of the most important cities and settlements along the Nile over its long history. It also describes the vision and actions of historical figures who shaped not only the river’s geography, but also the political configuration of the Nile basin — and as a result, the writing of its history. Most books concerned with the Nile separate the natural, cultural, and economic aspects of the Nile basin into distinct spheres. This book departs from this approach by attempting to describe the interplay between them, and by examining their effect on the lived experiences of multiple populations in geographically dispersed sites. Through such historical excavations, it proposes to treat the Nile as both an actor and a site of history, and it emphasizes the diversity of historic figures, civilizations, spatial scales, temporalities, and other forces that have come together in the region. Such an approach defies the privileging of any single analytical lens to structure the narration of the river’s many histories, and as a result the book may sometimes present multiple, contested, invented, and even contradictory accounts of Nile settlements. But its premise is that each of these may rightfully claim a place in the larger story of one of the world’s great river systems. The book also recognizes that history is always written with regard to the present — and possibly in the service of it — and can thus never be innocent of contemporary demands. In a sense, this book is the story of the cities created, nourished, and destroyed under the auspices of the Nile. Chapter 1, “Finding the Source of the Nile: Centuries of Discovery,” first traces attempts to discover the sources of the river, especially during the emerging scientific era of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And Chapter 2, “Birth of the Nile: Water Carves a Path through Rugged Land,” introduces the reader to the

Prologue river’s millennia-long natural history, and explains how its special hydrological features have defined cultures since prehistoric times. Chapters 3 and 4, “The Nile of Lower Egypt: Memphis, the First Capital City” and “Thebes of the Pharaohs: The Nile of Upper Egypt,” then illuminate the rise and fall of two of the greatest capitals of ancient Egypt and how the Nile figured prominently in their development. Chapter 5, “Avaris and Akhetaten: Temporary Capitals on the Nile,” compares and contrasts the fates of two temporary capitals built on the Nile by a colonizing presence and by a god-king. And Chapter 6, “Nubia on the Nile: The Kingdom of the Black Pharaohs in Napata and Meroe,” sheds light on the Kushite kingdom, or the civilization of the kingdom of the Black Pharaohs, who controlled Egypt from the Upper Nile region of Nubia, now located in the Sudan. In the following two chapters, the reader travels to two of the most important cities developed by the Ptolemies. Chapter 7, “Alexandria: Greeks and Romans on the Western Edge of the Nile Delta,” presents the story of probably the most-beloved Egyptian city in the Greco-Roman period, which served as a crossroads between the Nile and the Mediterranean. The Ptolemies also built many settlements in the desert using the water network of the Nile, however, and Chapter 8, “A Nile Oasis in the Sahara: Fayoum of the Ptolemies,” discusses one of these, a city that is deeply engrained in myth. Chapter 9, “Cairo: The Thousand-Year Capital on the Nile,” brings the reader forward to the medieval era to discuss the founding of the Nile’s greatest and largest city for more than the last millennium and the impact of the Arab-Muslim takeover of Egypt. And Chapter 10, “Crusaders on the Nile: Damietta and Mansoura,” describes the fates of two cities at the northeastern corner of the delta and the effect of the European Crusades on Egypt. Moving southward, Chapter 11, “Cities of the Blue Nile: Lake Tana and the Ethiopian Empires,” then introduces the reader to the cities in the important Lake Tana region in Ethiopia, settlements of a Christian empire long at the center of a myth regarding that land’s formidable power over the Nile. The last three chapters move the book’s focus into more modern times. Chapter 12, “Rosetta and the Discovery of Ancient Egypt: Where the Nile Meets the Sea,” relates the story of another important Nile delta city, Rosetta, whose fate has traditionally been determined from Cairo. And Chapter 13, “Khartoum and Omdurman: An Islamic State on the Nile in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan,” tells the story of the cities of Khartoum and Omdurman in the Sudan, where the Blue and the White Nile converge; the chapter revisits the historical moment when the Mahdi, a charismatic religious leader, established an Islamic state there that challenged the mighty British Empire. Chapter 14, “A Pyramid for the Living: The Nile at Aswan,” then describes the circumstances behind the construction of

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River two important dams on the Nile and how the river and the people of Egypt have been changed as a result. Finally, the Epilogue, “On the Possible Death of the Nile and the Life of Its Cities,” brings the reader fully into the present to discuss the problems of climate change and currently planned development projects and strategies for the Nile. Specifically, it points out that while an earlier era of climate change resulted in a culture centered and dependent on the river, in the twenty-first century a new era of climate change of similar or greater gravity will have regional consequences no one can really foresee.

Ch a pter 1

Finding the Source of the Nile: Centuries of Discovery We let the streams run on, and we do not enquire whence they rise or whither they flow. — Chief Kasembe, 1872, as told to David ­Livingstone (quoted in Jeal 1973: 367) Facilius sit Nili caput invenire. [It would be easier to find the source of the Nile.] — Roman proverb

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n the African state of Burundi, hundreds of miles from its largest and most important city, Bujumbura, in a remote location in the hills of Mount Kikizi in the Lake Plateau region, lies a small, obscure pyramid. Four meters in height, the four-sided structure bears a copper plaque which reads, in Latin, “Caput Nili”—“Source of the Nile.” The plaque thus declares the end to thousands of years of exploration to determine the ultimate origin of the longest river on earth (Figures 1.1, 1.2). The Nile flows majestically south to north approximately 6,825 kilo­meters, over 35 degree of latitude, passing through many antique civilizations. At the moment, its broad basin includes at least part of 11 independent states: Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Sudan, Sudan, and Egypt. Most rivers around the globe flow from multiple sources, and a river as great and long as the Nile could never be imagined to have only one. But the fact that the Nile travels more than 2,000 kilometers in Egypt’s hot, arid climate, through one of the driest and most desolate deserts in the world—without ever receiving a single additional source of water—must have been one reason people from the ancient world through the nineteenth century have become obsessed with determining its origin. Yet today we know for a fact that there are more than 100 sources for the Nile, and that most of them converge to create the river’s two main tributaries; these have been known to societies that have inhabited its basin for millennia. Within this vast environment, humans since Paleolithic times have watched the waters of the Nile flow northward to the Mediterranean Sea, providing water for a region that might otherwise be uninhabitable.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River

Figure 1.1 The pyramid built by B. Waldecker to commemorate what he considered the ultimate source of the Nile

Figure 1.2 The plaque in Latin stating “Caput Nili”



Finding the Source of the Nile

At times, the river was too generous, and disastrous floods swept away habitations huddled by its banks; in other years, the water was so low that its absence brought drought and hunger. It was a particular characteristic of the Nile that its flow rose in a flood every summer, and the level of this flood determined which years were lean and which were bountiful. Until the construction of massive dams in the modern era, communities along its banks have watched the Nile’s unpredictable rise and fall and demanded that their leaders find the means to predict its behavior so they could cultivate their fields and feed themselves. Indeed, the life and death of the inhabitants along its banks—and, by extension, the fate of entire civilizations for millennia—were so dependent on the Nile’s bounty that pharaohs and peasants alike considered its formidable power the manifestation of a god. Dependence on the Nile required the development of rituals, and even the great pharaohs of ancient Egypt relied on its mastery to legitimize their power. While still considered one water system, however, the Nile is also far from a homogeneous entity. It is, rather, a complex entanglement of nature and culture, and differing environmental conditions have historic­ ally allowed communities along its banks to develop different cultures and diverse identities. By both uniting and dividing the regions flanking it, the Nile created multivalent meanings. And its enigmatic nature—its capricious flow, changing course, and mysterious source—only reinforced its mythological presence, attracting and mesmerizing visitors. The vital, potent influence ascribed awe to the river, which turned itself into a symbolic fount of meanings. In ancient Egypt, myths regarding water in general, and the Nile in particular, proliferated. Indeed, myths about the river were so deeply ingrained that one cannot easily distinguish today what might have been tall tales from assertions of actual belief. However, the importance of Nile water in the everyday life was evident in the regularity of festivities held in honor of the river’s bounty, which all had to be performed to perfection. To ancient Egyptians, the Nile offered twin blessings. Not only did it bring water, but it provided fertile silt, which contributed significantly to the productivity of the Nile valley. Beyond its role in agriculture, the Nile also occupied a symbolic place in the cosmological imaginary of Egypt. From art and religion to mathematics and geometry, the development of Egyptian culture and science was highly dependent on the Nile and its floods. The role of the Nile in shaping the character of Egypt was always understood to distinguish its civilization from that of other African countries. Thus, while the Nile itself was deified and personified for its creative power, even creatures relating to its waters—birds, crocodiles, fish—also carried sacred status. Dependence on the Nile naturally brought the question of where its waters originated. Ancient Egyptian myth had it that the Nile gushed

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River out of a bottomless cleft in the earth. This source was first believed to be located at modern-day Aswan, but its location was shifted south as Egypt expanded. Different pharaohs sent expeditions southward, but they were typically more focused on measuring the river’s flow in preparation for its over- or under-abundance. The ancient Egyptians also had a strong interest in penetrating Africa and controlling the strategic region of Nubia beyond their southern boundary, which they did for many centuries. Before Ptolemaic times, the Greek historian Herodotus traveled as far south as Elephantine, believing that he would be able to find the river’s source. His journey down the Nile in 460–455 bc was recorded in his book Histories. Based on firsthand observations of Egyptian institutions and people, Herodotus provided in-depth anthropological accounts of sites, but these accounts exhibit his gullibility and which are largely in­ accurate. Due to the arduous nature of the caravan journey, visitors often followed the well-established route from Alexandria to the First Cataract at Aswan. Yet, while Herodotus recorded that the ancient Egyptians believed that melting snow was among the causes of the annual floods of the Nile, he did not take it seriously, claiming instead that the Nile flowed from one of the hottest regions on earth. The secret of the Nile also fascinated other Greeks, such as Alexander the Great and Aristotle. And the Greeks and Romans continued their explorations of the Nile after Herodotus. Notable among these were the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (70–20 bc) and the geographer Strabo (64 bc–23 ad). In particular, Strabo’s book Geographika contained a great amount of geographical information about the Nile valley. During Roman rule, the expansion of roads and sailing routes, accompanied by the long period of peace and economic prosperity, made travel across the Mediterranean safe and speedy, and such journeys gained in popularity. Egypt attracted a wide range of visitors, from Julius Caesar to Pliny the Elder. Eventually, new roads built alongside the Nile, as well as boats on it, connected Alexandria—a cosmopolitan city which had already acquired a reputation for scholarship and medicine—to many parts of Egypt. The exotic landscapes and monuments of the Nile valley were there­ after visited by a large number of tourists. Popular sites included the ancient town of Memphis, the pyramids at Giza, the temple of Apis, the Labyrinth at Fayoum, and the Valley of the Kings. The purpose of such visits was varied, from education to entertainment. But the secret origin of the mysterious river remained. In 66 ad the Roman Emperor Nero (37–68) sent two centurions to Egypt, which had come under his jurisdiction, to trace its source. They managed to reach the African interior, but were ultimately deterred from proceeding further when they could not navigate the mosquito-infested Sudd swamp. Another figure who became interested in the Nile was Claudius Ptolemaeus (100–70 ad), a major scholar at the Library of ­Alexandria



Finding the Source of the Nile

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Figure 1.3 A fifteenth-century map of the Nile within the Greek world by Nicholas Germanus, based on Ptolemaeus’s second-century Geographia

specializ­ ing in astronomy, geography, and mathematics. His book Geographia included one of the earliest attempts to create a complete geographical map of the Nile (Figure 1.3). In it, he described “the snowy range of mountains” from which the twin sources of the Nile originated. These peaks were later popularly called the “Mountains of the Moon” because moonlight was said to gleam off their snow-clad summits. Although nobody from the Mediterranean world had ever made it far enough south to actually glimpse this sight, the mythical presence of the Mountains of the Moon, along with its poetic name, would captivate explorers for centuries. Not unexpectedly, some parts of Ptolemaeus’s map were based merely on conjecture. Thus, beyond Nubia, the river was depicted as originating from two lakes possibly fed from the melting snow of the Mountains of the Moon. In Ptolemaeus’s map, the two lakes, south of the Equator, were likewise depicted as the sources of two separate rivers, which united to form the Nile, which thereafter received the tributary waters of the Astapus (Blue Nile), originating from Lake Coloe (Tana). Since ancient times, Egyptians had known that the Nile floods resulted from heavy seasonal rainfall in Ethiopia. Egyptians had trading posts on

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River the Red Sea coast, which they extended into Ethiopia during Ptolemaic times as far as the capital of Axum. In 330, Frumentius, a Syrian merchant from Alexandria, introduced Christianity to Ethiopia, creating a further bond between the two countries. The practices of Christianity were maintained in Ethiopia even after the introduction of Islam to the region. And during this time Egypt used to dispatch messengers to Ethiopia to discover the annual condition of the Nile’s headwaters. For instance, in 1106, during the time of the Fatimid caliphs, el-Musta’ala Bellah asked the king of Ethiopia to estimate the size of the flood that would later arrive downstream in Egypt. During medieval times, after the Islamic conquest of Egypt, the Nile map was produced in different ways by Arab geographers. Among these figures was Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn al-Husayn al-Masudi (896–956), a Baghdad-born scholar residing in Cairo. A traveler himself, al-Masudi was often called the Arab Herodotus, thanks to his massive contribution to the history and geography of the Middle East and North Africa. In his book The Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems, he provided accounts relating to the sources of the Nile—in particular, how 12 streams flowed down the slopes of Jabal al-Qamar (meaning “Mountain of the Moon”) to converge into two lakes to create the Nile. Though somewhat inaccurate in detail, this description largely conforms with modern knowledge of the Rwenzori Mountains, from which 60-odd streams flow down to Lake Edward and Lake Albert. Among medieval Muslim scholars committed to describing the geography of the Nile were the Persians Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khawarizmi and Suhrab, who worked during the golden age of Abbasid Baghdad. They were primarily mathematical geographers, meaning that their descriptions of the Nile were based on a grid system of latitudes and longitudes. Abu al-Qasim Muhammad ibn Hawqal is another figure regarded as influential during the medieval era. A merchant and missionary born in Nuraybin in Upper Mesopotamia (modern-day Turkey), he traveled the entire Islamic world, including Egypt, around 943. And his account of the Nile in his book Kitab surat al-ard [The Face of the Earth] provided a discursive description, partly based on direct observation, which was absent in the mathematical geographic tradition of al-Khawarizmi and Suhrab. In 1154, the Andalusian geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi then published Nuzhat al-mushtaq fi ikhtiraq al-afaq [Delight of Whoever Wishes to Cross the Horizons, or The Book of Roger]. In it, he extended the notion of the two lakes as as sources of the Nile, originally found in Ptolemaeus’s account. By stating that 10 sources come out of the Mountains of the Moon to converge into two lakes, he reiterated the age-old myth that the Mountains of the Moon harbored the long-pursued sources of the Nile. According to al-Idrisi, however, outflows from each lake met in another great lake, separated by a mountain into two parts; and from there one



Finding the Source of the Nile

river flowed eastward to Nubia and Egypt, while another flowed westward in the direction of modern-day Congo. Two such rivers do indeed flow from different sides of Mount Kikizi in the range that separates the Nile basin from the Congo basin. However, contrary to al-Idrisi’s account, these rivers are known today to be two entirely separate entities. Starting in the fifteenth century, a new era in African exploration arrived when the Portuguese began their circumnavigational voyages. Part of their motivation was to find a new trade route to India by circling the southern tip of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope. Such an alternate route would avoid having to journey overland through Egypt. The Portuguese also took the opportunity to settle at strategic points along the African coast, and through the creation of fortified trading posts they gained knowledge of the interior and forged relations with African rulers. Christian Abyssinia was one country that particularly welcomed the coming of the Portuguese. Since Christianity had become isolated there after the Arab conquest of much of the region, it appeared strategic to seek the military support of the Portuguese. In particular, the Abyssinian emperor invited a Portuguese military mission to help him repulse an invasion by the Somali leader Ahmed Garran during the years 1528 to 1540. Thereafter, until 1633, the Portuguese played an influential role in Abyssinia and were allowed to travel and trade freely in the country. The contact also enabled missionaries to explore the interior and discover the Ethiopian sources of the Blue Nile. In particular, in 1618, the Jesuit fathers Pedro Paez and Jeronimo Lobo reached Abay Wenz (“the Great River”) which flowed out of Lake Tana to become the Blue Nile. And in the mountains above the lake, Paez reported in an exaggerated tone of wonderment, “I saw two round springs, each of a diameter of about four palms, and I admired with immense joy that which neither Cyrus, King of Persia, Cambise, nor Alexander the Great, and not even the famous Julius Caesar ever saw” (as quoted in Guadalupi 1997: 50). In the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, there followed a long absence of Europeans from the region of contemporary Ethiopia. The exception was a French doctor named Jacques-Charles Poncet, who went to the Abyssinian capital of Gondar to treat the emperor in 1701. Yet he did not get to see the source of the Blue Nile, despite an offer made by the emperor. Instead, it was the Scottish explorer James Bruce who visited and first documented Lake Tana. Bruce was initially appointed British consul at Algiers in 1762, but his real aspiration lay in tracing the course of the Nile. And in 1768 he began a journey to ascend the Nile from Cairo. Obstructed by hostile natives along the river, however, he eventually opted for a sea route, traveling up the Red Sea coast through Quseir, Jegah, and Musawa. With his companions, Bruce then crossed the coastal plain, passed through the high mountains of Ethiopia, and finally arrived in Gondar, the home of the Abyssinian court.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Due to his medical skills, which were considered advanced by the Abyssinians, Bruce was received with the utmost favor by the court. And after obtaining permission to visit the source of the Blue Nile, he departed for Lake Tana in 1770, ultimately reaching Tissisat Falls. From his journey, Bruce concluded that he had found and confirmed the source of the Nile, and he dismissed the previous accounts provided by the Portuguese missionaries. He also believed that the White Nile was none other than a tributary of the Blue Nile. When Bruce returned to England in 1774, however, he discovered that the French geographer Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville had already published a map of Ethiopia and the Blue Nile based on the detailed description of the Portuguese explorers. In addition to this unfortunate circumstance, his account of Abyssinian culture and people was considered exaggerated, and thus received little support—which discouraged him from publishing his notes. Deeply hurt and offended, Bruce retreated to his estate and focused on writing. And it was only in 1790 that he finally published his travel accounts. Among other accounts, his five large volumes contained a descrip­tion of the Agous of Damot, a group of Abyssinians who worshipped the Nile—or the spirit that was said to reside at its source. The group was divided into clans or tribes, among whom the division of power was based not on their size, but on the number of springs they controlled that fed the great river. Once again, however, Bruce’s account was not well received—indeed, it was met with incredulity. Bruce would eventually die alone in 1794 following a tragic accident at his home. Lake Tana was next visited by a British general named Robert Napier, who commanded a military expedition to Ethiopia in the mid-nineteenth century. European diplomats and missionaries, including the British ambassador John Cameron, had recently been imprisoned by the emperor, Tewodros II. The emperor had requested that the British government send skilled workers in return for the release of the hostages. The British instead sent a punitive expedition. Starting from the Gulf of Zula on the Red Sea, it finally reached Magdala, near Lake Tana, in 1867, where Tewodros II had built a fort. After the British captured Magdala and the hostages were released, the city was looted and burned. While the Blue Nile, which originates from Lake Tana, thus became known to the Europeans, the secret of the far longer White Nile remained unsolved. The difficulty of navigating the river, infectious diseases, and warring tribes had always made it impossible for explorers to penetrate upstream past the Sudd swamps. Indeed, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the origins of the White Nile were revealed to the outside world. At this time, the ruler of Egypt was Mehmed Ali (1769–1849). For more than 40 years he played a significant role in making exploration of the White Nile possible as he also pursued a military mission to control its waters. It was commercial agriculture—in particular, the production



Finding the Source of the Nile

of cotton—that opened Ali’s eyes most to this necessity. And it was his opening up of the Sudan, more than any other factor, that allowed expeditions to travel upstream in search of the source of the White Nile. Throughout the European colonial era, the myth of the Nile’s headwaters had continued to spur an insatiable curiosity to discover the truth of the great river. The colonial mindset of conquest and an aspiration for fame, however, cannot explain fully how the undiscovered source of the Nile attracted, haunted, and propelled many individuals in the age of science and reason to take grave risks in Africa. The English explorers Richard Francis Burton (1821–90) and John Hanning Speke (1827–64) were among those who sought to discover Ptolemaeus’s Mountains of the Moon—what they believed was the starting point of the mysterious river—even at the risk of their own lives. Discovering the source of the Nile, after all, provided a rare chance to seek glory, which was otherwise unattainable in the monotonous everyday life back in England. A linguist who mastered tens of languages and translated several books, including A Thousand and One Nights, Burton first received permission from the East India Company in 1854 to travel south from Egypt to explore the African interior. But his real intention was to find the source of the Nile. Along with two other expedition members, Burton was supposed to take his friend John E. Stocks on the journey. But Stocks’s sudden death forced Burton to seek a replacement in the Indian Ocean port of Aden. It was here that he serendipitously met Speke, an officer in the British Indian Army, who would later become his nemesis. After an attack by Somalians, during which one of their companions was killed and Burton and Speke were injured, Burton returned briefly to England in 1855. And it was then that the Royal Geographical Society decided to support his more ambitious proposed expedition to find the source of the Nile. Burton again chose Speke as his companion for what would probably become the most important exploration in his life. More often than not, however, Burton described Speke, who had never attended a university, as an illiterate subordinate. Speke was aware of Burton’s denigration of his character, but even as Burton’s condescension offended him, he did not reveal his feelings. After all, he was about to set out on a life-changing journey to discover the mystery of the great river, and he did not want to ruin his prospects. After arriving in Zanzibar on the Indian Ocean coast of Africa in December 1856, Burton and Speke tried to approach the sources of the White Nile together from the east. In search of a mysterious lake they believed to be its source, Burton and Speke reached the interior town of Kazeh in contemporary Tanzania in November 1857. Later named Tabora, the town was an Arab trading settlement located in what local people called the Unyamwezi (“Land of the Moon”)—which hinted at the mythical Mountains of the Moon. In Kazeh, however, local Arabs

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River informed Burton and Speke that there were actually three lakes in the region instead of one: Nyasa to the south, Tanganyika to the west, and Ukerewe to the north. In consideration of their relative positions, Speke had a hunch that Ukerewe was the most probable source of the White Nile. However, the two men headed west to Ujiji, an Arab trading post on Lake Tanganyika, at Burton’s insistence. Lake Tanganyika is very long, measuring over 600 kilometers from north to south. If they had been able to explore its potential connection to the White Nile and relation to the Mountains of the Moon, their mission would have marked a turning point in history. But on their arrival at the Arab trading station there, Burton fell seriously ill, which deterred him from exploring the lake’s northern shoreline. Instead, the two explorers returned to Kazeh in June 1858 to allow Burton to rest, and Speke alone resumed the journey, intending to visit the immense lake he had previously been interested in, which the Arabs called Ukerewe. As Burton worked on his book in Kazeh, on July 30, 1858, Speke reached the waters of Ukerewe, which he named Victoria Nyanza, after the British queen (the local word nyanza indicating “a large body of water”). He also claimed it as the source of the White Nile. Well grounded, his claim never­theless lacked scientific proof. And Burton contended that Speke could not absolutely prove his claim until he had circumnavigated the lake and properly measured its size. Nor had Speke actually discovered the actual point of outflow from the lake that connected it to the Nile. Upon his return to England, Speke hurriedly reported to the Royal Geographical Society that he had discovered a lake that was the source of the Nile. However, this act apparently contradicted the agreement made with Burton that no official report would be published until Burton’s return. Nonetheless, the Society organized a second expedition for Speke—not Burton, who had been the official leader of the first expedition—so he could acquire better information on Lake Victoria and its potential connection to the Nile. Despite Burton’s claim that, contrary to Speke’s argument, the Nile had more than one lake as its source, Speke then set out on a new expedition to Lake Victoria in April 1860 in search of the Nile outlet. This time, he was accompanied by his former hunting companion, the Scot James Augustus Grant. They sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, landed again in Zanzibar, and, in October 1860, departed Bagamoyo for the interior. Sidi Mubarak Bombay (1820–85), who had been part of Burton and Speke’s first expedition, joined Speke and Grant as a native guide, along with other veterans. They again followed the Arab trade route, until they arrived at Kazeh in January 1861, where they encountered a variety of tribes at war. Speke and Grant then turned north to reach Ukuni. After observing a great deal of conflict among the local tribes, Speke and Grant decided to separate, forcing them to make separate payments



Finding the Source of the Nile

to tribal chiefs, who now considered them two different caravans. But after their reunion, in October 1861, Speke and Grant traveled northward to the kingdom of Karagwe, west of Lake Victoria. And during their stay there, they heard that King Mutesa of Buganda, a kingdom located on the northern shore of Lake Victoria, was eager to greet them. Leaving behind the ailing Grant, Speke began a march northward alone to seek Mutesa’s help in his search for the lake’s outflow. He reached Mutesa’s palace in February 1862. When Grant eventually caught up with Speke in Buganda, Mutesa finally permitted each of them to travel through his lands in search of the lake’s outlet. And upon seeing the Ripon Falls near the lake, Speke was confident he had found the missing connection to the river. He then ­traveled downstream to Bunyoro, where he was expecting to meet with Grant again. Yet, because hostile natives obstructed his passage, Speke could not follow the river and had to take an alternate route northward. In Bunyoro, Speke and Grant did, however, meet up and begin their journey downstream to Gondokoro, a known settlement in contemporary South Sudan. But the two explorers were forced to give up on the river route at the Karuma Falls, a crucial point that, if passed, would have allowed them to reach Lake Albert, where the Victoria Nile and the White Nile meet. Thus, not only did they technically fail to locate the precise point where Lake Victoria flows out into the Nile, but they also missed the opportunity to map the entire course of the river through Lake Albert. After his return to England, Speke published a paper in 1863 that confirmed that he had discovered the source of the Nile. But this paper, too, was received with skepticism—mainly by Burton. At the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Bath on September 16, 1864, Burton and Speke were expected to present their respective papers. But Speke did not show up at the meeting, and he was later found dead from a gunshot. Whether it was an accident or suicide remains unknown. Speke had a good hunch that the lake he had named Victoria Nyanza fed the great river, yet he lacked conclusive proof. Speke might also have held reservations about his claim that Lake Victoria was the sole source of the Nile. Although the Nile is now known to originate from many sources, not one, Speke’s finding of Lake Victoria was acknowledged by most geographers of his time and later commemorated with a statue at his tomb. In the meantime, Lake Albert was being explored from the north by Samuel and Elizabeth Baker. In 1861, the British couple started their journey in Egypt. After leaving Cairo, they crossed the Sudanese desert, riding on the backs of camels with the help of Egyptian escorts guided by natives. They then traveled along the Atbara River to reach the Blue Nile, and in 1862 they arrived in the Ethiopian town of Gallabat. They then

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River reached the White Nile at Wadi Medani, and finally entered Khartoum from the east. The Bakers’ plan was to buy boats and hire men to go upriver with them from here. And their party left for Gondokoro the same year, accompanied by the German explorer Johann Schmidt. In the following year, 1863, the Bakers had the fortune of meeting Samuel’s friend Speke there, who was traveling northward at the time. After a month of planning their expedition to the unexplored source of the Nile, the Bakers finally left for Bunyoro. After stopping in the Latuka area for several months, in 1864 they pressed on to a point near the Karuma Falls. At that point, they met some natives who helped to take care of Samuel, who was very sick with malaria. He was eventually carried to the local king, Kamrasi; after giving gifts to the king, he asked for his help to reach Luta Nzighe, which was said to be far larger than Lake Victoria. It excited the Bakers to discover more about these unknown lands, but the natives told them the lake was too far away for a sick person to reach. The king would instead provide supplies and take care of Baker until he felt better. And the king also continued receiving Baker’s gifts. The Bakers had almost given up when one of the natives revealed that the lake was really only about 10 days away. Samuel immediately prepared to depart, and the king, realizing he could no longer keep the Bakers in his territory, decided to grant them permission to leave. Elizabeth then also fell ill for a few days, but their caravan finally sighted the lake. The Bakers thus became the first Europeans to see this body of water, and they named it Lake Albert in 1864 as a tribute to Queen Victoria’s late consort. When they discovered the lake, the Bakers were unclear about its relation to the Nile. However, using canoes they eventually found the point at which the Victoria Nile, flowing north and then west from Lake Victoria, entered it. Furthermore, they arrived in Magungu, the village at the exact point where the river flowed out of Lake Albert, forming the Albert Nile. The Bakers followed the channel of the Victoria Nile upstream as far as the Kabarega (Murchison) Falls, where they realized they had solved an age-old mystery. The couple then returned to Gondokoro in 1865, after two years of exploring in which they had endured many attacks by and episodes with the natives. Meanwhile, their compatriots had assumed them to be dead, and their unexpected return to England proved a sensation, especially considering the exploits of a heroic woman traveler who possessed unprecedented rigor and an adventurous spirit. However, the Bakers in reality had not circumnavigated Lake Albert, and their notes were fuzzy on its headwaters. Despite their efforts, therefore, it appeared the Nile mystery had once more escaped final resolution. A year later, in 1866, the Royal Geographical Society therefore sent the Scottish missionary David Livingstone (1813–73), who had just returned from a trans-African journey two years earlier, on a new expedition



Finding the Source of the Nile

to Lake Tanganyika. From his previous expeditions, Livingstone was convinced that the lake was the true source of the Nile, and that there was a link between it and Lake Albert that the Bakers had not been able to discover. And he was selected by the Society to explore the connection because he was an able and celebrated explorer who had already led multiple expeditions to the African interior. He was also the first European to have crossed the entire African continent from east to west. After setting foot again on the coast of East Africa in March 1866, Livingstone arrived at Lake Tanganyika a year later. From there, he headed west to Lake Mweru and then south to reach Lake Bangweulu in July 1868, where he became the first European the local people had seen. He then resumed the trip back to Lake Tanganyika, convinced it held the key to a mystery that no explorer had been able to resolve. However, the trip did not provide him with a sufficient answer. He finally arrived at the Arab settlement of Ujiji on the east coast of Lake Tanganyika in March 1869. But it was there that Livingstone lost his means of contact with the outside world at the hands of local Arab settlers who feared that word of their brutal treatment of African slaves would be spread through his letters. By this time Livingstone was considered dead, and another explorer, Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904), was approaching Ujiji to find out what had happened to him. Born John Rowlands in Wales to impoverished parents, Stanley had emigrated to the United States at the age of 18, changed his name, and become a reporter for the New York Herald—a profession that allowed him to travel widely in Africa and elsewhere. In 1869, Stanley had been commissioned to locate the lost explorer, Livingstone—or at least unearth the enigma surrounding his disappearance. In November 1871, Stanley finally found Livingstone in Ujiji. And it was there that he reportedly asked the celebrated question “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Together, the two men subsequently set out to explore the northern part of Lake Tanganyika. However, they were ultimately prevented from completing this goal when they ran out of supplies. At this point, they decided to pursue separate paths. Stanley departed for Zanzibar, to make arrangements to send Livingstone the items and porters he needed to continue his lifetime mission. It was the last time Stanley saw Livingstone alive. Stanley arrived back in England in May 1872, and the news of his encounter with the extraordinary British explorer electrified the world. In the meantime, in August 1872, with the supplies provided by Stanley, Livingstone pressed ahead with his plan to investigate a river entering Lake Bangweulu, which he erroneously believed was the true source of the Nile. Yet his untiring endeavors to unravel the age-old mystery of the longest river in the world came to an end when he died in the midst of the

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River adventure in 1873. His African companions dried his body with great care, and it was sent to Zanzibar and then to Westminster Abbey, London. It was there that the body of the well-traveled Livingstone was finally put to rest. The encounter with Livingstone had a huge impact on Stanley. And after his death, Stanley led a well-organized expedition in 1874 with the financial help of two newspapers, the New York Herald and the Daily Telegraph, to trace his journeys. However, Stanley’s three-year survey, during which he circumnavigated both Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika, finally proved that Speke was right and Livingstone wrong. Lake Victoria was indeed connected by a river that flowed north into the White Nile, whereas no outlet was found from Lake Tanganyika that connected it to Lake Albert. In 1888, on the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, Stanley then visited the African interior again, and became the first non-African to see another large lake near the Ruwenzori Mountains, which he later named Lake Edward, after the Prince of Wales. Another key figure to these explorations was Khedive Ismail Pasha (1830–95), the ruler of Egypt in the 1860s and 1870s. An avid proponent of Egypt’s modernization, especially as this regarded the exploration of the Nile, one of his great accomplishments was to open the Sudd swamps to navigation. Many foreign, mostly European, experts were invited to Egypt during this time to help accomplish Ismail’s modernization project. Samuel Baker, who had already come to fame by discovering Lake Albert, joined this new generation of European colonialists. Eager to expand the territory of the Egyptian empire, Ismail offered to Baker the position of governor of Equatoria, near the Nile’s headwaters. And it was in this capacity that Baker would later lead an expedition to equatorial Africa in the name of abolishing the slave trade. Baker also helped annex lands from Uganda near Lake Albert and Gondokoro for Egypt. In 1874, Samuel Baker was succeeded as governor of Equatoria by General Charles Gordon, who advanced the exploration of the Nile even further and employed a number of people of various nationalities in the project. One of these was the American soldier Charles Chaillé-Long (1842–1917), who explored the Nile downstream from Lake Victoria’s exit to Lake Kyoga and finally Lake Albert. He was the first Western visitor to see Lake Kyoga. Chaillé-Long’s journey put the final piece of the puzzle together by providing the much-needed evidence that Lake Victoria was connected to the Nile. In 1876, the Italian explorer Romolo Gessi (1831–81), also employed by General Gordon, then succeeded in circumnavigating Lake Albert, complementing its discovery by Baker by determining its size. He was later appointed governor of the Nile province of Bahr el-Ghazal by Khedive Ismail. We should, however, never forget that the impetus for the exploration of the Nile in the nineteenth century was never truly innocent. While the



Finding the Source of the Nile

vanity and persistence of some of the explorers may have played a role in the success of the process, it was actually money that made it happen. Funding for exploration came from rich individuals, wealthy industrialists, and scientific organizations like the Royal Geographical Society of Britain. But, more importantly, it often came from governments interested is colonizing the heart of Africa under the guise of a civilizing mission. Thus European explorers brought back accounts of primitive peoples, cannibalism, the slave trade, and strange traditions. Joseph ­Conrad’s controversial 1902 novella Heart of Darkness was written by an author who had firsthand experience of the colonial project. And the accounts of Burton, Speke, and Stanley of their encounters with the people of the Nile during their explorations do not differ substantially from Conrad’s imaginary. The findings of these explorers and others eventually allowed the Belgians, Dutch, French, and English to gain a foothold in Africa, and ultimately led to the success of the colonial enterprise there. It is also paradoxical that all the great explorers who ventured out to discover the sources of the Nile fell victim to what may be regarded as the curse of the Nile. Bruce died alone after he tumbled down the stairs, with his accomplishment surrounding the Blue Nile unacknowledged by the world. After years of hardship spent in the search for the Nile’s headwaters, Burton suffered the indignity of losing out to Speke, whom he had previously denigrated as a subordinate. Meanwhile, Speke, after his extraordinary discovery of Lake Victoria, came to a tragic end, the cause of which remains conjectural. Almost a decade later, in 1873, after his wife Mary died of malaria in Africa while accompanying him on an expedition, Livingstone also died there during his final journey to solve the Nile mystery. Neither could Gordon avoid an untimely death. In 1885, he was killed by the Mahdi’s warriors at his palace in Khartoum and hacked to pieces. Did the Mahdi also fall under the same curse that afflicted the European explorers? He died of typhus months after the death of Gordon, but the British general Herbert Kitchener, eager to avenge Gordon’s death, desecrated his tomb in 1898 and ordered his body to be thrown into the Nile. The British then went on to kill Khalifa, the Mahdi’s successor. Although by the beginning of the twentieth century much was known about the various rivers that converged to make up the Nile, the precise locations of the springs in the different mountains from which it origin­ ated were still unknown. And despite the adventures of all the famous explorers described so far, it was a hitherto unknown traveler who eventu­ ally succeeded in discovering the most southern source of the Nile. In 1937 a German named Burkhart Waldecker was wandering in the Kikizi hills in what is now the Republic of Burundi when he found an almost imperceptible spring whose water turned out to flow northward to become the Luvironza River. The water continues on its course to reach

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River the Ruvubu River, which meets the Kagera River near the Rusumo Falls after passing north and east into Tanzania. The water then turns abruptly eastward, flowing through the rapids at Banyankole before entering Lake Victoria. Waldecker, who appears to have been in Africa to escape Nazi persecution, built his pyramid at the spring not only as a homage to his discovery but also as a gesture to the great pyramids of Giza in Egypt, which for him were where the Nile reached its end. But even Waldecker was not entirely correct in his claim that he had found the Nile’s ultimate source. All he had actually found was the Nile’s southernmost source. As stated earlier, a river as great and long as the Nile must almost by definition have many sources. Indeed, all the Europeans who sought to discover the “source” of the Nile failed to identify whether they were looking for the farthest point from the Mediterranean (hence establishing the longest distance the Nile travels), the most southern origin for its water (which may not be the point that establishes its length), or the highest elevation from which its water springs. But all these mysteries are now solved (Figure 1.4). From the first perspective, the source of the Nile that is the farthest from the Mediterranean, and hence establishes the river’s length as 6,760 kilometers, is in the Nyungwe Forest. This spring is at an elevation of 2,500 meters, in the mountains of Rwanda, and water from it flows into the Rukarara River. This determination of the origin of the world’s longest river was made only in 2006, by a team led by the New Zealand explorer Cameron McLeay. Using modern technologies such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), they traced the Nile from the Mediterranean to reach the farthest source of the river. The most southern source of the Nile, as mentioned, remains the spring that Burkhart Waldecker discovered in 1935 on Mount Kikizi in Burundi. This is the source of the Kasumo River, which then becomes the important Ruvyironza River. At approximately 2,700 meters above sea level, this spring is also the highest known elevation from which a source of the White Nile descends. Ultimately, then, one might claim that it is from the origins of these two rivers, the Rukarara and the Ruvyironza, in Rwanda and Burundi, whose waters meet at the Rusumo Falls, that the White Nile originates. Meanwhile, the source of water in the Blue Nile is generally accepted to be Lake Tana in Ethiopia. The elevation of the lake is 1,788 meters above sea level, as James Bruce discovered. The lake, however, is fed by many small tributaries from the steep Ethiopian highlands that surround it, some of whose mountain peaks exceed 4,000 meters in height. But the most well-known source of water for the lake is the Gish Abay Rriver, which starts from an altitude of 2,744 meters, making it possibly the highest elevation from which the Nile springs.



Finding the Source of the Nile

Figure 1.4 The Nile has more than 100 sources

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Bibliography Bruce, James. 1964 [1790]. Travels to Discover the Source of Nile. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cooper, John P. 2014. The Medieval Nile: Route, Navigation, and Landscape in Islamic Egypt. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Erlikh, Hagai, and I. Gershoni. 2000. The Nile: Histories, Cultures, Myths. Boulder, CO: L. Rienner. Fagan, Brian M. 1992. The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Archaeologists in Egypt. Wakefield, RI: Moyer Bell. Guadalupi, Gianni. 1997. The Discovery of the Nile. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang. Jeal, Tim. 1973. Livingstone. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Jeal, Tim. 2011. Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ludwig, Emil. 1960. The Nile. London: George Allen & Unwin. Said, Rushdi. 1993. The River Nile: Geology, Hydrology, and Utilization. Oxford: Pergamon. Stanley, Henry M. 1988 [1878]. Through the Dark Continent. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Udal, John O. 1998. The Nile in Darkness. Wilby: M. Russell. Waterbury, John. 1979. Hydropolitics of the Nile Valley. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Wilkinson, Toby A. H. 2014. The Nile: Downriver through Egypt’s Past and Present. London: Bloomsbury.

Ch a pter 2

The Birth of the Nile: Water Carves a Path through Rugged Land It is hard to know how to begin and where to end an account of the vast waterway of North-East Africa. — F. A. Dickinson (1910)

T

he Nile is the world’s longest river, covering a journey of 6,825 kilometers. Its name originated from the Greek nelios (Latin: nailus), which may have had the Semitic root nahal—meaning “valley” or “river valley.” The Nile valley is today among the world’s most interesting and intriguing landscapes. Carved into the African plateau approximately 5–8 million years ago, it was subsequently refilled with sediments. Running through 10 countries while following a straight, gentle, and relatively stable course, the Nile valley is for the most part cliff bounded, flat bottomed, and a majestic 10 kilometers wide. The river itself is 7.5 kilometers wide at the Silwa gorge near Aswan and has an average depth of 10 meters after its unification at Khartoum. From the African Lake Plateau, the Nile itself travels north up this valley to its outlet on the Mediterranean, its drainage producing a yearly average of 30,000 cubic meters of water per square kilometer. For such a long river, this amount is relatively small—equivalent to about 2 percent of the water in the Amazon, 12 percent of that in the Congo, 15 percent of that in the Yangtze, 30 percent of that in the Mississippi, and 70 percent of that in the Danube, Indus, or Columbia. But for much of its course the Nile flows through arid and semi-arid lands, which makes its flow critical to the sustenance of civilizations there. The exact route of the Nile through the ages is poorly known, which is why many Egyptologists plot its present-day course differently than on maps of archaeological times. This changing course may have led to misinterpretations of ancient monuments and settlements bordering the river. Indeed, changes in the course of the river provide a major aspect of the historical and actual scenario of the northeast region of Africa. But a discussion of the Nile requires us to explore the history of water in the region. Planet Earth is appropriately called “the blue planet.” Water systems are what made life possible on the planet and what continue to make it habitable. All living organisms and the ecological system itself have been

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River sustained by the cyclical movement of water. Unlike other elements found in nature, water has contributed to the making and unmaking of societies at all times. Water has long been humankind’s principal inanimate power source. All societies have been affected by the way it flows through landscapes, by different types of rivers and characteristics of evaporation, and by rainfall and snow, including its duration and intra-annual variation. Societies have adapted their cultural traditions, technologies, and ideological and religious worldviews to the water in their surroundings. With the control of water through artificial irrigation, civilizations could increase their agricultural productivity and, as a consequence, create the necessary food surplus to enable state administration and the division of labor. A secure and permanent supply of water and its distribution through human-made systems have been the main aspect of all urbanization processes. Hydrologists speak of “water systems”—which can be understood as human interference in and control of water—when describing the world and its history as a product of both human and natural factors. The concept emphasizes the establishment of autonomy or causality in understanding hydrological configurations. Water systems may thus be seen to consist of three different analytical layers. The first and most fundamental is the physical form and behavior of water, which includes the natural processes of precipitation and evaporation; the way rivers run and create landscapes such as lakes, glaciers, underground aquifers, and so on; and, when applicable, the particular interface between rivers and seas. The second layer involves human modifications to this physical water landscape. It thus reflects the ability or determination of societies to manipulate water by processes of damming, draining, canalizing, embanking, piping, storing, and so on. This layer opens the possibility of understanding any given society in terms of how it treats water through technologies and administrative structures. The third and last layer is concerned with this institutional and conceptual dimension, including practices and ideas about managing and controlling water and the mythologies and social traditions they create. In prehistory, the world had only one continent: a single landmass called Pangea, which formed around 225 million years ago. During the last movements of this giant landmass, narrow zones called rifts came to divide what is now East Africa along parallel lines. The crust beneath these rifts was thinner, allowing hot lava-bearing flows and volcanic eruptions to raise the terrain at their edges. These rifts played a vital role in the birth of the Nile, as they allowed the creation of the Ruwenzori Mountains and Mount Kilimanjaro at their edges, while the depressions at their centers filled with water and formed lakes. The Nile as we know it today did not exist 600,000 years ago. The area now covered by the Sudd swamps in South Sudan was then an immense



The Birth of the Nile

lake, of more than 200,000 square kilometers, which collected water from all directions, including the north. North of Nubia, a shorter, quite distinct river, the Prenile, flowed to the Mediterranean. And between the time of the Prenile and that of the contemporary Nile there were a series of other Niles, none of which connected to the present source in the mountains of Central Africa; instead, they were all born in the mountains bordering the Red Sea. Except the Prenile, the exact route of these ancient Niles north of the Nubian arc is still a matter of conjecture. Sediments from the Prenile, however, have been found to the north of the Tushka depression, which suggests the river once linked the oases of the Libyan desert before returning to the northern part of its present course. With the onset of the last great ice age, about 30,000 years ago, huge glaciers were formed on the high mountains of present-day Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda. During the ice age, temperatures around the earth were, in most places, several degrees cooler than nowadays, and the sea level dropped in proportion to the growth of the ice sheets. This was also a time when the Sahara was as dry as it is today—or even drier. The glacial period, however, came to an end with a period of global warming around 12,000 years ago. During this time, the ice sheets melted and the world’s oceans rose to a level approximately 120 meters higher than today. In Egypt, the warming of the global climate resulted in the Saharan Warm Period, when what is now the Sahara Desert was covered by tropical vegetation. The current Nile was born around this time, at the beginning of the Holocene Wet Phase (7500–3900 bc). Also known as the Saharan Wet Phase, it brought seasonal rainfall to North Africa, allowing tropical grasslands to spread over the Sahara. A final pulse of sea-level rise then inundated the Nile’s delta, and, in response, the delta was extended seaward through processes of progradation, while it was simultaneously tilted as a result of tectonic action so that its west rose and dried out while its east sunk and turned into a marsh. At the same time, rising global temperatures brought a new period of change to the vegetation of the Sahara, transforming it from tropical grasslands and trees to Sahel-type vegetation and then desert plants. The general retreat of vegetation in the area also released sand grains, which were entrained by the wind and deposited in the Nile valley. This period lasted until 6,000 years ago, when the global temperature fell again and the Sahara assumed its present, largely barren condition. Demography and settlement patterns are two areas of study that contribute greatly to the understanding of human populations. Unfortunately, in Egypt there is insufficient information of this nature from the Protodynastic and Archaic periods (i.e., before 3100 bc). As a consequence, the nature of late prehistoric and early historic Egyptian populations has remained in the realm of guesswork. Based on inscriptional and archaeological information from Dynastic times, however, the

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Egyptologist Barry Kemp has introduced a model that describes the workings of Egyptian towns and their relationship to the institution of the temple, and this model has implications for late prehistoric settlements. It is further known that the New Kingdom’s towns and cities seemed to have a two-tier structure based on farm centers around a temple and the private estates of individual landholders. Based on the archaeological evidence, the Egyptologist John Wilson has characterized ancient Egypt as a “civilization without cities” (quoted in Kraeling and Adams 1960). For him, a city is a settlement (such as those found in Mesopotamia) that aggregates a dense cluster of residents within walls that enforce a boundary with the countryside. Defined in this way, ancient Egypt had only small towns. However, one needs to understand that the social and environmental preconditions for what we today consider “urban” did not necessarily exist in ancient Egypt. Accordingly, it is not that ancient Egypt had no cities—rather, it had its own history of urbanization distinct to its time and place. Much of this character derived from the existence of a river that could be either a life-giver or a source of disaster. From Paleolithic times to the present, the Nile has flowed northward to the Mediterranean Sea. The seasonal rise and fall of its water created the basis for ancient Egyptian civilization. In particular, its seasonal flood brought nutrient-rich soil from upstream that made intensive organized agriculture possible. Yet at times the river also caused disastrous floods that swept away human habitations by the river banks; and at others the waters were nonexistent, which led to crop failures and hunger. It was a matter of course that people would begin to wonder how to control the flow of the Nile. Ancient Egyptian society thus developed around a regional water system that addressed a lack of rain, a high evaporation rate, and the behavior of the Nile. This led to the development of flood irrigation, or basin irrigation—a technology that would dominate Egyptian culture for thousands of years. For power, ancient Egypt also had water mills. But the only place in the entire country where these were found in the nineteenth century was the Fayum depression, outside the Nile valley proper, where they were driven by the Nile flood, which formed a seasonal and sometimes year-round lake. Egypt has no coal, so power had to come from sources different than those which would later drive the industrial revolution in continental Europe. Dependence on the flow of the river, however, stimulated science and administration, because the need to anticipate its cycles was of absolute political and economic importance. Measurement of river flow became the main instrument to fix the appropriate level of taxation. Due to the importance of the Nile as Egypt’s main, and often only, source of water, scholars agree that any change in its patterns of flow had deep



The Birth of the Nile

implications for local social structures, settlement patterns, and political organizations. A sudden rise or fall in the waters of the Nile could have destructive consequences. And to determine the timing of planting and the extent of cultivation, the flood had to be measured properly. Early pharaohs thus began to record poor and plentiful years of river flow, and they built several Nilometers in Memphis and on Elephantine Island near Aswan. In 715 ad the first Islamic-era Nilometer (still in existence) was built on the island of Roda in Cairo. This device took the form of a white marble column at the center of a square well, by which the river’s level could be measured during the flood season. The great dependence of their settlements on the Nile also led the ancient Egyptians to question where its water came from. Some pharaohs sent out expeditions to search for its source, but to no avail. Even to ancient Greeks, this was an unsolved mystery. It is a matter of course that a river descends from a source in the mountains to the sea. But the Nile is quite different: it proceeds according to a number of steps, a geographical anomaly that shows it was once two separate rivers that have only recently been joined to one another. The Nile has been extensively studied, mainly because of its importance for irrigation, but also out of general scientific interest. There has likewise always existed an ambition to establish the “source” of its flow, although the ancient mystery of its origins is nowadays well understood. From geological and other evidence, it is also clear that the Nile basin has gone through considerable change over time. But this area is so vast, with large areas so little explored, that detailed studies have historically described only relatively small areas of it. The Nile basin can be divided according to several distinct river segments: the main Nile, which runs from Khartoum to the sea; the Atbara River, which rises in northern Abyssinia, providing one-seventh of the Nile’s water; the Blue Nile, which provides four-sevenths of the Nile’s water; and the White Nile, coming from the great lakes of Central Africa and providing two-sevenths of the Nile’s water. Current claims point to the river’s ultimate southern “source” at a spring in Burundi. The water of the Nile then flows northward, fed by various other streams, until it becomes the Luvironzia River, which passes through an area of hills before reaching the Ruvuvu River, which flows out of the highlands of northwest Burundi. The Ruvuvu is an ample river that passes into Tanzania, where it meets with the Kagera River above Rusumo Falls. To the north, in Rwanda, two other important tributaries, the Nyavarongo and Akanyaru, flow down from the hill country, collecting the waters of hundreds of streams and rivers from the lush valleys there to add to the Kagera flow. The Kagera then turns northward along the fault line marking the border between Tanzania and Rwanda before angling abruptly eastward and flowing into Lake Victoria (Figure 2.1).

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Figure 2.1 Map of the entire Nile basin



The Birth of the Nile

Although the spring above the Luvironzia may be its ultimate source (because it is the farthest point from the river’s mouth), the Nile has many others. North of Rwanda, the Mfumbiro (Virunga) Mountains of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda cross the great trench of the Rift Valley, blocking off areas that would otherwise lie in its watershed. The Great Rift Valley is one of Africa’s most dramatic features, beginning out to sea in the Mozambique channel and slicing northward across the continent. After forming the valley of the lower Zambezi River up to Lake Malawi, the Rift then bifurcates so that its eastern branch runs through Kenya and Ethiopia to the Red Sea, while its western branch arcs to the west before finally dis­appearing into the swamps of the central Nile. All the great lakes of Central and East Africa, except Lakes Kyoga and Victoria, lie at the bottom of these two trenches. Sometime in the geological past, however, volcanic activity threw up the Mfumbiro range, running 100 kilometers east to west across the western Rift. The effect was to divert waters that had previously flowed north into the Nile into Lakes Kivu and Tanganyika to the south, where they presently contribute to the Congo watershed. Meanwhile, waters from the northern slopes of the Mfumbiro range continue to form another source of the Nile, incorporating the flow of thousands of streams into Lake Edward at the bottom of the Rift. Northward from Lake Edward, the Semliki River follows the Rift Valley around the Ruwenzori Mountains, before ending in Lake Albert, which was first discovered by Europe when Samuel Baker arrived there in 1864. Named after an English queen who had never seen the lake herself, Lake Victoria, the greatest of African lakes, has provided people with an area for stable settlements for thousands of years. But along with the historical and archaeological record, evidence from lake sediments indicates a changing human influence on the local environment through time. While Sudanic-speaking people settled the western shores of the lake about 3,000 years ago, a different group of Bantu peoples had arrived there by 500 bc. As agriculturalists, the Bantus started clearing the forests along the lake to enable a more intensive form of farming, and they began to smelt iron there between 500 bc and 0 ad. During the next 500 years, this population, as well as their use of local resources, expanded extensively, eventually leading to soil erosion and a decline in soil fertility. As people moved then away from the lakeshore beginning in 600 ad, the forests recovered gradually for the next 400 years. But, around 1000 ad, the forests were cleared again, as agricultural populations resettled the region. Lake Victoria (Figure 2.2) is the second most expansive body of fresh water in the world, covering about 67,000 square kilometers and occupying portions of three countries: Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Its level is partially regulated today by the Owen Falls dam. Below the dam, the Victoria Nile starts at Jinja, where one of the first of many hundreds of

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Figure 2.2 Lake Victoria

bridges across it was constructed (Figure 2.3). The Victoria Nile then flows northwest into Lake Kyoga, discovered by Europeans in 1874 by Charles Chaillé-Long. The river’s current then passes along the western edge of Lake Kyoga, through open water, before disappearing over the edge of the Rift Valley at Murchison Falls. From there, the Victoria Nile flows north and then west before emptying into Lake Albert in western Uganda. The outlet from Lake Albert, which also provides a terminus for the Semliki river system, is located just north of the entrance of the Victoria Nile. It is here known briefly as the Albert Nile before it turns dramatically left and assumes another name, Bahr al-Jabal, the “Mountain River,” which flows between rock walls. The Bahr al-Zaraf, the “Giraffe River,” next branches from the Bahr al-Jabal at the south end of the Sudd swamps. It is a slow stream that travels 340 kilometers through the Sudd, where it ends at Lake No, a reservoir collecting the flow of all the rivers rising in the Nile’s great southern basin. This includes those feeding into it from the west, through the Bahr al-Ghazal, the “Gazelle River.” The Bahr al-Ghazal is a much smaller river; however, it drains a basin that is one of the most extensive in the Nile system. Its flow includes that of the Bahr al-’Arab, which rises on the frontier between Sudan and the Central African Republic to flow eastward in a great arc to its confluence with the Bahr al-Ghazal. The arid watershed of the Bahr al-’Arab represents a volatile frontier between the Africans of southern Sudan and the Arab-Muslim peoples of Darfur and Kordofan. Arabs and Africans have long competed for grazing lands north and south of the Bahr al-’Arab. In the area of the Sudd swamps, as soon as marshes begin to displace the forest surrounding the river, the river itself largely disappears. This



The Birth of the Nile

Figure 2.3 The start of the Victoria Nile at Jinja

region is often considered a wasteland and difficult to travel through. An absence of landmarks, channels clogged by clusters of rotting vegetation, and confusingly circuitous routes have long rendered continued passage by water here problematic. Probably for this reason, only the most dedicated naturalists have studied the rich life of the Sudd, which is a crucial breeding ground for fish and a nursery for many other water-loving species. Water flowing from the basin of the Sobat River to the east completes the formation of one of the two major branches of the Nile—the White Nile. The Sobat is formed by two rivers, the Baro and the Pibor, which originate in the highlands on the border between Sudan and Ethiopia. This flow joins the White Nile above Malakãl in Sudan. The White Nile, itself, technically begins at the outlet of Lake No, from which it flows 1,000 kilometers to Khartoum and its confluence with the Blue Nile. The Blue Nile begins to the east of the Nile valley, at the spring of Skala, reached by the Portuguese Jesuit Pedro Paez in 1613. As a stream, it tumbles over rapids and waterfalls through the valley of Gish to Lake Tana, which lies in the heart of Ethiopian highlands. Lake Tana, however, provides only 7 percent of the Blue Nile’s total flow. The rest is gathered from the surrounding mountains through a variety of other rivers and streams (Figures 2.4–2.6).

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Figure 2.4 Blue Nile Falls

Figure 2.5 Lake Tana

Figure 2.6 Profile of the Blue Nile and the White Nile to the delta

At the meeting of the White Nile, which has already traveled 2,500 kilometers, and the Blue Nile, which has already traveled 1,450 kilometers, the final Nile is born, which still has 3,000 kilometers to run before reaching its outlet to the Mediterranean. Khartoum, where the White and Blue Niles converge to create the main Nile, is 370 meters above sea level (Figure 2.7). In contrast, Lake Tana, the primary source of the Blue Nile, lies 1,800 meters above sea level and 1,450 river kilometers away from Khartoum. This creates the steep slope from which the Blue Nile runs down to reach Khartoum. Interestingly, despite its shorter length and smaller watershed, the Blue Nile provides on average 68 percent of



The Birth of the Nile

Figure 2.7 The meeting of the White Nile and Blue Nile at Khartoum

the maximum monthly discharge of the main Nile. But it provides only 17 percent of the main river’s minimum monthly discharge, highlighting the seasonal variation in its flow. The White Nile, on the other hand, provides only 10 percent of the maximum monthly discharge but a vital 83 percent of the main Nile’s minimum monthly discharge. Some 320 kilometers north of Khartoum the Nile is joined by its final major tributary, the ‘Atbara River, which contributes 13 percent of its total annual flow. Altogether this means that some 86 percent of the Nile’s flow passing through Egypt originates in Ethiopia, by means of the Sobat, the Blue Nile and its tributaries, and the ‘Atbara. Only 14 percent comes from the Lake Plateau to the south and the arid lands to the west via the Bahr al-Jabal, Bahr al-Zaraf, and Bahr al-Ghazal. This indicates that Ethiopia is the principal source for the river’s great historic fluctuations—and also the natural place to regulate its flow. From its confluence with the ‘Atbara, the Nile then makes its great S-bend, rolling over three cataracts to flow placidly into the enormous reservoir behind the high dam at Aswan. From there, the river flows another 1,180 kilometers through Egypt to reach the Nile delta and the Mediterranean. As mentioned, the amount of water in the Nile has always fluctuated greatly even over spans of decades, but the different colors of its waters is another of its distinctive characteristics. The two main originating branches, the White Nile and the Blue Nile, do not accurately correspond to the real colors of their waters. During the flood season, the White Nile is actually greenish-yellow, while the Blue Nile is reddish-chocolate in color. As mentioned, the amount of water in the Nile has always fluctuated throughout the year. But the different color of its waters is another distinctive characteristic of its flow. The two main branches of the Nile are the White and the Blue Niles, but these descriptions do not accurately represent the color of the river: it is actually green, red, and white. Early

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River European travelers were well aware of the changing colors of the Nile as well as the remarkable contrast between the Blue and the White Niles during the flood season. When it is low, the water of the Blue Nile is remarkably clear and limpid. But during the flood season it becomes turbid and heavily charged with deposits of a deep chocolate color. Meanwhile, the White Nile is normally yellow-green, but acquires a creamy-white tinge during the flood season. This white color is actually a result of sediment carried by the Sobat River, formed by its two headstreams—the Baro and the Pibor—at the Ethiopian border. The annual flood of the Nile has been watched and recorded since antiquity; however, many of these records have been lost. Present-day knowledge of the Nile’s fluctuations comes from fragmentary records of measurements from Nilometers, geological evidence (primarily from the study of terraces left behind as the river has excavated its course), and eyewitness accounts of conditions in Egypt at different periods of time. The study of these fluctuations also helps unveil the climates of the past, just as lake levels rise when rainfall increases and fall when it decreases. Prior to the building of modern irrigation works during the nineteenth century, the prosperity and survival of Egyptian society depended on the height of the flood, which had to be within a limited range and endure for a specific period to facilitate maximum agricultural production. A change of 1.5 meters in the level of the flood could make the difference between a low Nile, which would not overflow onto the land and allow its cultivation, and a disastrously high Nile, which could wash away the entire irrigation system. These conditions within the lower Nile basin were first established some 10,000 years ago, at the onset of the Holocene Wet Phase. Conditions then seem to have affected the sources of the Nile, increased its flow, and established the river’s present downstream flooding cycles. During this phase, gradients of rainfall initially shifted northward 8–10 degrees of latitude in the Sahel belt, increasing precipitation over a wide front and making large areas of desert more verdant. As a result, the discharge of rivers increased, and the levels of lakes rose higher. Evidence today indicates that during the Holocene Wet Phase, the Nile cycled through several periods of high flow, each lasting between about 1,300 and 1,500 years, separated by periods of low flow, each of which lasted between 500 and 800 years. Ancient Egyptians regularly measured the maximum height of the yearly flood, and recorded these levels in their royal annals. On the whole, this information shows a subsequent decrease from an average flood height of 2.8 meters during the years 3050–2813 bc (the First Dynasty and the first 80 years of the Second Dynasty), to an average height of 1.6 meters during the years 2813–2672 bc (the remainder of the Second Dynasty). The lower level must have left large areas of previously productive land uncultivated during the Second Dynasty, since no water-lifting



The Birth of the Nile

devices were known and no elaborate system of irrigation was yet in existence. This period of low flow was then followed by a small increase, to 1.8 meters, during the succeeding four dynasties. The Holocene Wet Phase reached its end around the end of the Fourth Dynasty, when patterns of rain in northern Africa fell to their present level. Subsequently, periodic fluctuations took place in the amount of rainfall, which affected the Sahelian region and the sources of the Nile; but there was no repeat of the great and sustained rains of earlier times. The Nile discharge was thereafter reduced to averages hovering around those of the present day. This decline seems to have had an adverse effect on the economic output of many civilizations in an area extending from Greece to Mesopotamia. In North Africa, it was accompanied by a drastic change in fauna and flora, and the Sahara Desert started to assume its present character. However, the greatest effect of the end of the Holocene Wet Phase was on the discharge of the Nile, which seems to have declined until it reached a minimum circa 2200 bc. From then on, for a period of 200 years, the Nile fluctuated frequently, and it dropped sharply for a number of successive years at least twice during this period. According to the British historian Arnold Toynbee, a dynamic process of response to environmental challenges has characterized the history of civilizations, and water has been a major element of these environmental challenges. As seen in the landscape of natural and human-improved water­ways, the control of water has been central to the development of many civilizations. Throughout history, societies have tended to last and prosper where water resources could be increased, effectively managed, navigated, and made potable. Most mythologies also link the origins of life to water. The Nile valley provided humans with a refuge from the surrounding deserts, whether during wetter or drier periods, and the first agriculturalists planted crops where the water naturally flooded the land between July and September. Artificial irrigation to augment such practices first appeared around 3000 bc. Egyptians of that time worshipped Hapi as the God of the Nile, because the river provided a source for life in the desert. This is the also the reason Herodotus recorded that “Egypt is the gift of the Nile.” This early, river-based irrigation civilization became the foundation of one of history’s first great empires. Slash-and-burn farming on hillsides was vulnerable to irregular rainfall. But basin irrigation, according to which water might be diverted from the river through canals to flow into a series of basins, allowed food production to be greatly increased and populations to grow throughout the Nile valley. Located in an otherwise nearly rainless environment, ancient Egypt was the prototype of a hydraulic civilization. Its development was almost entirely dependent on what happened on and around its great river, which

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River was the only large source of irrigation water. Furthermore, the Nile’s annual flood carried thick black silt that increased the fertility of local soils. Yet even though the annual flood coincided with the agricultural cycle of planting and harvesting, Egyptian farmers had to build embankment breaches, sluice gates, and extension channels to take advantage of it. In addition, since the river’s current and local winds moved in opposite directions most of the year, the river was navigable in both directions. Powered by oar and sail, the development of reed and wooden rafts converted the Nile into a highway for trade, communication, and political integration. The bounty of the Nile, however, depended upon one variable beyond the pharaohs’ control—the unpredictability of the river’s annual flood. Although the rhythms of the Nile were the essential parameters of history and life in Egypt, its flood was dependent upon weather conditions far beyond Egypt—on Ethiopia’s Abyssinian plateau and in the mountains of equatorial Africa. During periods of excessive flooding, entire villages might be inundated and croplands wiped away. And extended years of low flood brought dark ages of privation, disunity, and dynastic collapse. Indeed, it was only during periods of good flood that there would be food surpluses, dynastic restoration, political unity between Upper and Lower Egypt, expansions of waterworks, and construction of the glorious temples and monuments that today we associate with ancient Egyptian civilization. In ancient Egypt, the flood of the Nile was also important to tax revenue and governance. And its cyclic oscillations determined the fates of Egypt’s subsequent occupiers. Greek and Roman overlords, in particular from Alexander’s conquest in 332 bc to the fourth century ad, were blessed by even floods, which allowed a profound expansion of cultivated land and an intensification of irrigation practices. Of the pharaohs, Menes—the King Scorpion, or Egypt’s founder—was the first to wear the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. A prince of Upper Egypt, he conquered the delta around 3150 bc and made Memphis, near present-day Cairo, his capital. The legend of Menes—his close personal identification with irrigation waterworks, for instance—reflects the essential origins of Egyptian civilization. Menes made it the fundamental obligation of an ideal pharaoh to control the flow of the Nile. Such control allowed him to regulate the transport of people and goods as well as to exert effective rule over all Egypt. The hydraulic nature of ancient Egypt was also evidenced by the world’s first recorded dam, which was supposedly built around 2900 bc to protect Memphis from floods. Egypt’s great structures, such as the pyramids in Giza, were built during the Fourth Dynasty, during a time of climate change. The source of life-giving water at this time was changing from a combination of local rainfall and river flow to an almost total reliance on the river. The pyramids, therefore, can be understood as an exemplar of the integration of the annual inundation cycle into the pharaonic mortuary cult.



The Birth of the Nile

Historically, the course of the Nile has not remained constant. On a historical timescale, for instance, the river has migrated rapidly in the Luxor region, in the southern part of the Upper Egypt, sweeping more than 5 kilometers across the valley at rates of 2–3 kilometers per 1,000 years. Satellite elevation data (SRTM) and Landsat imagery have been used to trace the ancient river levees. Such structures provided a relatively quick and easy way to constrain the ancient river course, and their location using such modern tools has also provided a basis for investigations elsewhere along the Nile. Maps from the last 200 years have also been used to establish the rate of change in the river’s course, and the direction of these movements. Such contemporary investigations have been used to extrapolate trends thousands of years into the past. Based on these methods, for example, it is currently believed that, near Luxor, the course of the Nile during Predynastic times most likely ran southeast of the present-day city, past Medamud, and up the eastern edge of the valley to modern Qift. In subsequent centuries, however, the river migrated to the west of Karnak and Luxor. At this time, the northern section of the river channel, traveling westward, passed the location of Qus, and potentially Danfiq. The historical migration of the Qamula–Danfiq bend then occurred, while the large, continuously active Luxor–Karnak site altered the eastern migration of the river, pinning it within its existing western channel. Papyri of ancient Egyptian governors describe incidents of famine in detail and contain one of only two references to cannibalism in ancient Egypt. Numerous texts also record the frequency of sandstorms and accumulations of sand. Texts from the years 2002 to 1990 bc are replete with mention of crop failures, low Niles, drought, sandstorms, and the difficulty of survival. The Prophecy of Neferty was composed during the years 1991–1962 bc, and is one of only a few documents from the obscure period between the end of the Eleventh Dynasty and the start of the Twelfth. It states: “the river of Egypt is empty and . . . men can cross over the water on foot” (Said 1993: 142–3). Egypt enjoyed a period of prosperity and a strong central government during the Twelfth Dynasty, founded in 1991 bc. There is hardly any mention of famines at this time: the Nile had become generous, and with the exception of a 90-year period (1840–1771 bc) of exceptionally high floods, its flow was normal and “good.” It is difficult to estimate the volume of river discharges in this period; however, it appears possible that floods during these years of the Middle Kingdom rose to about 11 meters above the low-water level on modern gauges at Aswan—that is, about 1.85 meters above the level of the highest modern flood, in 1878. Floods of this volume might have caused great destruction. That this did not occur means that Egypt during the Middle Kingdom must have learned not only to live with high floods but to benefit from them. Indeed,

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River such high floods only seem to have increased agricultural production and Egypt’s general wealth. During the beginning of the period between 1797 and 1200 bc, however, Egypt again slipped into a period of poverty and disorder, which lasted two centuries, until about 1570 bc. It was during this time that the Hyksos were able to invade Egypt and occupy Memphis in 1674 bc, founding the Fifteenth Dynasty. This period, known as the Second Intermediate Period, is among the most obscure in Egyptian history. There seems to have been a repeat of the high floods of Middle Kingdom times during the reign of King Sobkhotep, during the Thirteenth Dynasty (1703–1635 bc). And for about 330 years (1570–1240 bc) the floods were normal, even slightly higher than the modern floods. A period of low floods followed from 1200 bc, and for a period of 225 years during the Twentieth and Twenty-First Dynasties. This was a period of decline and increased political impotence. This was indeed a “dark age” in ancient history (Said 1993: 150). Libyan incursions became common during this period and exhausted Egypt’s people, until they were finally overrun by the Libyans, who established the Twenty-Second and Twenty-Third Dynasties. During this time (945–525 bc), the floods recorded on the Karnak temple quay ranged from 9.2 to 11.1 meters, indicating a period of exceptionally high water. The few records available from the succeeding millennium, up to the entry of the Arabs into Egypt, indicate that the Nile floods were again high, with the exception of the latter years of the sixth century and the early years of the seventh century ad. Indeed, Herodotus (c. 450 bc) described Egypt during flood time as a sea. And during most of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, the deserts of Egypt were extremely active, indicating there must have been enough rainfall to make them far more hospitable than today. Throughout this time, the disappearance of local grasslands southwards was the outcome of a slow and gradual process, rather than a single, dramatic event. By the start of the Middle Kingdom, grasslands had retreated as far as Karnak due to climate change, and by the end of the same period, the south of Egypt, too, had become a desert. Research has shown that the earliest displacement of sand by the wind and its deposition in the Nile valley came before the First Intermediate Period in the north (at Giza/ Memphis) and after the Middle Kingdom (at the quarries of Gebel al-Asr) in the south. In the twentieth century, Egyptians fundamentally changed the natural structure of the Nile system. In 1970, during the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt completed construction of the Aswan High Dam, creating the artificial, 500-kilometer-long Lake Nasser. The High Dam signified that Egypt could finally become complete master of the Nile within its borders. But at the same time, it has made Egyptians more dependent on the Nile than ever before. Not only did the dam control



The Birth of the Nile

flooding, but it centralized control of water for irrigation works. As such, it has both restricted and opened up options for political strategies and initiatives. Nowadays, the river is entirely under human control in Egypt. Observations of sediments across Egypt suggest that the impact of the present period of climate change may move southwards across the country. Among potential threats to modern Egypt are new fluctuations in the flood level of the Nile, increasing rainfall in the Sahara, and rising seas that may inundate the delta. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, sea-level rise of only 0.5 meters will reduce Egypt’s available agricultural land significantly. Moreover, the reduction of floodwater since the building of the Aswan High Dam and the consequent salinization of groundwater in Egypt will likely cause crop yields to eventually drop and pose other grave future environmental challenges for the country. Bibliography Angelakis, Andreas N., Larry M. Mays, Demetris Koutsoyiannis, and Nikos Mamassis. 2012. Evolution of Water Supply throughout the Millennia. London: IWA. Attia, M. I. 1954. Deposits in the Nile Valley and the Delta. Geological Survey of Egypt. Cairo: Government Press. Aufrère, S., J. C. Golvin, and J. C. Goyon. 1991. L’Égypte restituée. Tome 1: Sites et temples de Haute Égypte. De l’apogée de la civilization à l’époque gréco-romaine. Paris: Éditions Errance. Baines, J., and J. Malek. 2002. Atlas of Ancient Egypt (revised edition). Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Ball, J. 1942. Egypt in the Classical Geographers. Survey of Egypt. Cairo: Government Press. Boserup, Ester. 1965. The Conditions of Agricultural Growth. London: George Allen & Unwin. Butzer, K. 1959. “Environment and Human Ecology in Egypt during Predynastic and Early Dynastic Times.” Bulletin de la Societe de Geographie d’Éypte, 32, pp. 43–87. Butzer, K. W. 1976. Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt: A Study in Cultural Ecology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butzer, K. 1995. “Environmental Change in the Near East and Human Impact on the Land.” In J. M. Sasson, ed., Civilizations of the Ancient Near East. New York: Scribner, Vol. 1, pp. 123–51. Butzer, K. W. 1980. “Pleistocene History of the Nile Valley and Lower Nubia.” In M. A.J . Williams and H. Faure, eds., The Sahara and the Nile: Quaternary and Prehistoric Occupation in Northern Africa. Rotterdam: A. A. Balkema, pp. 253–80. Dickinson, F. A. 1910. Lake Victoria to Khartoum with Rifle and Camera. London: John Lane, the Bodley Head.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Fairbanks, Richard G. 1989. “A 17,000-Year Glacio-Eustatic Sea Level Record: Influence of Glacial Melting Rates on the Younger Dryas Event and DeepOcean Circulation.” Nature, 342 (6250), pp. 637–42. Garstin, W. 1909. “Fifty Years of Exploration, and Some of Its Results.” Geographical Journal, 33 (2), pp. 117–47. Gebeto, Petros J. 2010. No More Thirst: The Citizens of the Nile. Nairobi: P. J. Gebeto. Graham, A., and J. Bunbury. 2005. “The Ancient Landscapes and Waterscapes of Karnak.” Egyptian Archaeology, 27, pp. 17–19. Hillier, John K., Judith M. Bunbury, and Angus Graham. 2007. “Monuments on a Migrating Nile.” Journal of Archeological Science, 34, pp. 1011–15. Hoffman, Michael A. 1979. Egypt Before the Pharaohs: The Prehistoric Foundations of Egyptian Civilization. New York: Dorset Press. Hume, W. F. 1906. “Notes on the History on the Nile and Its Valley.” Geographical Journal, 27 (1), pp. 52–9. Hurst, H. E. 1944. A Short Account of the Nile Basin. Cairo: Government Press. Jeffreys, D. G. 1985. Survey of Memphis I. London: Egypt Exploration Society. Kemp, Barry. 1983. Ancient Egypt: A Social History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kerisel, Jean. 2001. The Nile and Its Masters: Past, Present, Future. Source of Hope and Anger. Rotterdam: A. A. Balkema. Kraeling, Carl H., and Robert McC. Adams. 1960. City Invincible: A Symposium on Urbanization and Cultural Development in the Ancient Near East Held at the Ori­ ental Institute of the University of Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lorenz, E. N. 1969. “Atmospheric Predictability as Revealed by Naturally Occurring Analogues.” Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, 26, pp. 636–46. Rafferty, John P. 2011. Rivers and Streams. New York: Britannica Educational Publishing, pp. 154–71. Said, Rushdi. 1993. The River Nile: Geology, Hydrology and Utilization. Oxford: Pergamon. Schumm, Stanley A. 2005. River Variability and Complexity. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 182–91. Solomon, Steven. 2010. Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization. New York: HarperCollins, pp. 15–37. Tvedt, Terje, and Richard Coopey. 2010. Rivers and Society: From Early Civilizations to Modern Times. A History of Water, Series 2, Vol. 2. London: I. B. Tauris, pp. 3–26, 52–71, 72–9. Ucko, Peter J., Ruth Tringham, and G. W. Dimbleby. 1972. Man, Settlement and Urbanism: Proceedings of a Meeting of the Research Seminar in Archaeology and Related Subjects Held at the Institute of Archaeology, London University. London: Duckworth. Waterbury, John. 1979. Hydropolitics of the Nile Valley. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Williams, M., et al. 2006. “Abrupt Return of the Summer Monsoon 15,000 Years Ago: New Supporting Evidence from the Lower White Nile and Lake Albert.” Quaternary Science Reviews, 25, pp. 2651–65. Wohl, Ellen. 2010. A World of Rivers: Environmental Change on Ten of the World’s Great Rivers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 73–100.

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The Nile of Lower Egypt: Memphis, the First Capital City The more one contemplates this city, the more does the admiration she inspires increase, and each successive visit to her ruins becomes a fresh cause of wonder and delight. — Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (quoted in Mariette 1877)

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othing remained of the ancient capital. Only broken walls and fragments awaited the visitor when the Arab traveler Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (1162–231) arrived there. Even then, Memphis had already decayed to ruins covered with dust and sand. Its inhabitants were long gone, and so were the mud-brick structures that housed them. Only enormous limestone temples and pyramids stood as the last relics of the once-great city by the Nile, hinting at the glory days of the first capital of ancient Egypt. Nevertheless, these ruins still had something to “astonish the mind”—an assemblage that challenged even a most gifted writer like al-Baghdadi to find the right words to describe his wonder and amazement. Memphis, the protagonist of this chapter, was the product of 20 different dynasties, a city abounding in great structures, including temples of Amun, Isis, Ptah, and Ra. Indeed, everyone who passed through—from pharaohs to invading rulers, local residents, and foreign travelers—left some inscription, creating a true record of ancient Egypt. Yet the Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, who visited the area several decades after al-Baghdadi, remarked that the entire site was a field of ruins covered in mud. And a century later, the Mamluks abandoned the area altogether, leaving it to the inhabitants of a few surrounding villages. Today the area is a cultivated field—totally engulfed by metropolitan Cairo—with a few ruins housed within a fenced perimeter. How can one tell the history of a city that has been covered by sand from the nearby desert for millennia—a city whose monumental buildings were largely dismantled to make other structures, whose ordinary houses and public places likely sank into the soft valley floor and have since been buried under centuries of silt deposited by Nile floods? We know little of this amazing city, which was one of the longest-lasting metropolises in human history. Yet archaeologists working close to the present-day village

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River of Mit Rahina have never given up, and every year they announce a new find that helps us understand it. Throughout history, the Nile has defined the shape and content of Egyptian culture, and the remains of great cities in the Nile valley and delta illuminate the primacy of the river in the life of ancient Egyptians. For specific purposes, some of these settlements were built away from the Nile—for example, to accommodate the craftsmen and laborers who built Egypt’s temples, tombs, and pyramids. But all the other ancient cities, towns, and villages were located close to the river’s banks. For these settlements, the Nile offered plentiful water, fertile silt for agriculture, and a connection to each other and the outside world. Beyond serving as an artery of trade and communication, the river also provided a stage for ritual and ceremonial activities. It would not be an exaggeration to describe the Nile as a life-giving river. The pharaohs of the Fifth Dynasty were great pyramid builders but not great city builders. Although Memphis as the capital of a unified Egypt predates the pyramids of Giza, the city expanded substantially at the time of their construction. Although most cities along the Nile were constructed on terraces, for some reason Memphis was built on the valley floor, a decision which ultimately led to its impermanence compared with other Egyptian monuments. It is known it was built initially as a fortress in an area where the Nile was diverted, creating an arc-like form to its east. And under the Sixth Dynasty it became the formal capital of Egypt. It was probably also then that it was given the name Mennefer, meaning “lasting and beautiful” in ancient Egyptian—the same name given the pyramid of Pepy I. The toponym Memphis only came later, as the Greek pronunciation of the Egyptian name. But Memphis had many other names through its long history—including Ankhtawy (“life of the two lands”), indicating its location halfway between Upper and Lower Egypt, and Inbuhedj (“white walls”), which hinted at the whitewashed brick of the royal buildings it once included. Yet, although Memphis lasted more than 3,000 years—for the whole dynastic period and well into Ptolemaic times—its exact location remains conjectural. Adding to this puzzle is that, during the course of three millennia, the dynamic Nile has shifted course, moving fitfully eastward. It is thus probable that parts of ancient Memphis were inundated over the centuries and abandoned. It is known that all great human civilizations have flourished in relation to water, but the dramatic movement and hydraulic character of the Nile created its own idiosyncratic forms of urbanism (Figure 3.1). When the Suez Canal was opened in 1867, it facilitated the movement of people and goods in unprecedented ways. One of its effects was to increase the number of European tourists coming to Egypt. Traveling up the Nile at the time, British visitors would first have passed



The Nile of Lower Egypt

Figure 3.1 The movement of the Nile in Egypt over the past 5,000 years, based on Lutley and Bunbury (2008)

the old necropolis at Giza, where they would have caught site of the pyramids—Khufu, Khafra, and Menkaure—on the plateau above the river. Going further south, they would have come across the Saqqara necropolis, where they might have encountered the French antiquarian August Mariette—discoverer of the Serapeum, a labyrinthine temple that housed an underground gallery holding the tombs of Apis, the bull. But inside another temple on the Saqqara plateau (Figure 3.2), visitors might have encountered a mummified man wearing a gilded mask. His name was Khaemwaset, a Theban prince who had recorded Memphis’s history 2,000 years before the arrival of any European.

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Figure 3.2 Map of the Memphite region

Khaemwaset (c. 1279–1213 bc), who lived during the Nineteenth Dynasty (1189–1077 bc), was the fourth son of Ramesses II (r. 1279–1213 bc) and the brother of Ramesses III (r. 1186–1155 bc). Unlike other princes, however, he held no post in the military; instead, he was high priest of the god Ptah, one of the most important religious officers in ancient Egypt, responsible for the cult of Apis, Ptah’s earthly manifestation. Khaemwaset, who had three children—Ramesses, Hori (who later followed his father into the Ptah priesthood), and Isisnofret—was further significant because he had been entrusted with the construction of a new temple of Ptah in Memphis, and with the restoration of other buildings and tombs there



The Nile of Lower Egypt

that had fallen into ruin. Indeed, Khaemwaset, who spent much of his life researching and restoring ancient buildings in a city that was already two millennia old, was arguably the first antiquarian and Egyptologist. Widely known as a wise man, he also became the hero of numerous stories written in Greco-Roman times. While it was Khaemwaset who recorded Memphis’s history from ruins and relics, it was Menes, the king who unified Upper and Lower Egypt and founded the First Dynasty (3150–2890 bc), who is credited with founding the city. King Menes chose its location for the capital of a single Egypt largely because of its strategic setting. The city of On (modern-day Heliopolis), the center of the cult of Atum, was then located on the east bank of the Nile, where it was vulnerable to attack from rival dynasties. But to attack Memphis, on the west bank, a foe from the east would first have to complete a difficult crossing of the river. Located where the Nile valley starts to open out to the delta, Memphis could also serve as a political center, connecting the north to the south. As such, it soon developed into the commercial, military, and religious center of a new Egypt. According to the Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484–425 bc), Menes (whom Herodotus also called Narmer or Min) first had to divert the Nile before he could build his new capital. This may explain the short canal that bordered the city and whose remnants still exist. Indeed, it appears that Memphis was not directly “on” the Nile. Yet during the entire Old Kingdom, the river served as the city’s main defense against foreign incursions. It was only during the Middle Kingdom that this natural boundary would prove insufficient, and a number of subsidiary forts would need to be constructed to help defend it against attack. Besides its defensive location, the area around Memphis also offered considerable advantage for agriculture and was adjacent to the mineral resources of the eastern desert. It thus provided a suitable location for trading within Egypt and between Egypt and elsewhere. In ancient Egypt, all kings were regarded as divine creatures, descend­ ants of the early gods. Specifically, they were regarded as incarnations of the god Horus, who succeeded his father Osiris. The king existed at the apex of a political and religious hierarchy, which helped him conduct his duties and ceremonies. At the top of ancient Egyptian society, he ruled over a hierarchy of educated bureaucrats, nobles, priests, and civil servants at the top and the great mass of common people on the bottom. Originally, the word nesu was used to refer to the king, but eventually this was changed to “pharaoh,” a term that originated in the ancient Egyptian word per-aa (“great house”). The pharaoh, as a god, supposedly had power over the Nile, just as over his people. And the Nile often helped him achieve that power, as it rose during its annual flood to irrigate the fields, allowing Egyptian peasants simply to sow their seeds when it receded and wait until the sun

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River baked their cops into maturity. Yet while the life of a peasant was affected greatly by the actions of the king, royal culture was largely remote from them. Not having witnessed the negative effects of floods on crops or the occasional famine that resulted from a low Nile, Herodotus remarked that the life of the Egyptian peasant was effortless compared with that of his Greek compatriots. However, it was actually the form of basin irrigation and management under a central administration created by the pharaohs that allowed this lifestyle. In Egypt, the prosperity created by the Nile is typically considered to have sustained a population of 1–2 million people throughout the 25 centuries of the Old and Middle Kingdoms. Ancient Egyptians did not profess a single religion. Instead, each locality had its own god: Heliopolis had Atum as a town god; Abydos had Osiris; Thebes had Amon. For its part, Memphis had Ptah, and one of the ancient capital’s most prominent structures, the temple of Ptah, was located at its heart, near the village of Mit Rahinah. Called Hut-Ka-Ptah, the ancient temple was not a single structure but a complex of a central temple dedicated to Ptah (who was also the patron of craftsmen and artisans) and satellite buildings for associated gods (Figure 3.3). Even in the

Figure 3.3 Plan of the Temple of Ptah at Memphis



The Nile of Lower Egypt

Middle and New Kingdoms, when the Theban gods rose to prominence, the temple of Ptah was continuously rebuilt and embellished by the pharaohs. Ramesses II of the Nineteenth Dynasty was among the later pharaohs who extensively reworked the temple of Ptah, and who identified with the creator-god of Memphis. Hut-Ka-Ptah eventually came to hold such significance for ancient Egyptians that it became synonymous not only with the city of Memphis but with the country of Egypt as a whole. Indeed, the term Hut-Ka-Ptah was later transformed into Aigyptos in Greek, which in turn gave birth to the English name “Egypt.” In ancient Egypt, temples, as houses of the gods, had many roles. Since they were crucial to the fabric of society and culture, state resources in great amounts were poured into their construction and maintenance. Temples were not only centers of religion, but also of economic power. Great temples had numerous employees, including priests and staff, who constituted almost independent administrative units. The architectural forms of temples were intended to show the cosmology of the universe. Their ceilings were embellished with stars on the vault of heaven or constellations; their columns had to be monumental and colossal, as if they were holding up the sky; and pylons (large double gateways) were built at their entrances. Temples were holy sites that represented the divinity of the king and his eternal life. No wonder large quantities of stone were used in their construction. Memphis prospered as the national capital during the Old Kingdom, reaching full importance by the Third Dynasty (2686–2613 bc), during the reign of Djoser (r. 2668–2649 bc). The construction of royal pyramids was among the primary activities of the ancient Egyptian state, and the prosperity of Memphis can first be glimpsed through Djoser’s step pyramid at Saqqara. Located 30 kilometers south of modern-day Cairo, Saqqara was the largest necropolis in ancient Egypt; 20 pyramids and royal tombs and hundreds of private tombs once stood there. Excavations show that tombs at Saqqara were originally built of mud brick, with rectangular bases, flat roofs, and slightly sloping walls. These structures are today known as mastabas (“benches” in Arabic). But during the reign of Djoser, the Saqqara necropolis witnessed a major change in building construction, as traditional mud bricks were replaced by stone. Indeed, the step pyramid, or the pyramid of Djoser, built here c. 2600 bc, has been described as the first major stone structure in the world. It was designed by Imhotep, Djoser’s chief architect, as a series of six mastabas stacked on top of each other. At the time, it was also the tallest pyramid in Egypt, measuring 62 meters in height, and Imhotep earned great fame and recognition from his accomplishment. Although the step pyramid signaled a revolution in building technology, it was the Fourth Dynasty (2613–2498 bc) that gave us the pyramids of Giza. During his reign (2589–2566 bc), Khufu, the second pharaoh

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River of the Fourth Dynasty, selected a prominent site on the plateau of Giza as the location for a new necropolis. And it was here that he built his pyramid, and where successive pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty likewise built theirs. Indeed, Giza soon established itself as the most well-known pyramid complex in the world. Originally measuring 147 meters high, Khufu’s pyramid complex covered an area of 13 hectares. The monumental structure itself was built of limestone, with a main sepulchral chamber made of granite. Khafra (r. 2558–2532 bc), the fourth pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty, continued the construction project in Giza. He is thought to have built the well-known Great Sphinx (the oldest and largest sphinx in Egypt) and the Sphinx temple, entirely made of limestone, which stands just beyond it (Figure 3.4). With the body of a lion, the colossal Sphinx has Khafra’s features and royal headdress, and historians have suggested that it was intended to represent Khafra transformed into Horus, the ancient Egyptian god of kingship. No one agrees as to what subsequently damaged the Sphinx’s face. Some have argued an Arab ruler hacked off its nose because he somehow felt uncomfortable with the Sphinx’s smile. Others have attributed the damage to the cannons of the French army at the Battle of the Pyramids during Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt. Yet the most plausible cause of the damage is simply the passage of time. The pyramid of Khafra, the second of the three pyramids at Giza, is situated to the southwest of the pyramid of Khufu. Although it is actually 2.5 meters shorter, it appears taller than Khufu’s pyramid because of its location on slightly higher ground. Its related funerary temples are now mostly destroyed. Only the granite temple standing near the Sphinx remains of what must once have been a much larger ceremonial complex. The Great Pyramid at Giza was built during the reign of Menkaure (2532–2504 bc), the fifth pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty and the son

Figure 3.4 The Sphinx of Giza and the pyramid of Khafra in the nineteenth century

Figure 3.5 The pyramids at Giza



The Nile of Lower Egypt

of Khafra. It occupies less than half the area of Khafra’s pyramid, and measures only 66 meters high, the smallest of the three main pyramids of Giza. Notwithstanding the modesty of its size in relation to its neighbors, however, the pyramid of Menkaure possesses distinctive aesthetic characteristics. In ancient Egypt, the city of the dead and the city of the living were interrelated. The domain of the dead, however, mostly consisting of tombs and temples, was built from stone and located sufficiently far from the Nile to avoid inundation, while the structures of the living were built mostly of mud brick and other locally available materials. Unlike tombs and temples, ordinary houses needed to be located adjacent to the Nile for easy access to water, transport, and agricultural production, but proximity to the Nile exposed such areas of settlement to flooding. And it was not only individual houses that had to be rebuilt after each such occasion: the entire structure of the city sometimes had to be readjusted, by abandoning destroyed parts and creating new areas elsewhere, to accommodate the behavior of the Nile. A variety of structures were associated with the king in ancient Egypt. The category of “palaces” included residential complexes, administrative centers, and ceremonial buildings attached to mortuary temples. Little is actually known of the palaces built during the Old Kingdom. But the remains of the palace of Merneptah from the Middle Kingdom’s Nineteenth Dynasty (1292–1189 bc), at the archaeological site of Kom el-Qal’a, may provide a sense of the ancient architecture of the Memphite region. Merneptah’s palace contained all the ceremonial and residential features of a royal residence. Built of mud brick with stone thresholds and column bases, it occupied an area of 3,000 square meters. Its central court led to a pillared vestibule and throne room, and its walls were painted in bright primary colors. Behind the throne room were the private chambers of the king, which included a sleeping room, lavatory, and bathing chamber. In Memphis over the centuries, residential areas for ordinary people were usually located around the royal palace and temple of Ptah. Compared with royal and religious architecture, little evidence remains of these buildings, especially from the Old Kingdom, and thus relatively little is known regarding the social life of the city. This is primarily because houses were built of perishable materials such as mud brick, which was also used in building granaries and storehouses. Wooden columns, instead of gigantic stone pillars, held up roofs, whose rafters were typically formed from palm trunks. Mud brick was a material that was easily crafted using locally available resources, and although it was fragile in structure, it kept the heat of the sun from infiltrating interior spaces, while allowing air to pass through. By the beginning of the Old Kingdom, the typical Egyptian house was a multi-roomed, rectangular structure, whose layout was reminiscent of a

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River temple. Inside the main entrance, it typically had a reception area that led to private quarters in the back. But living space in ancient Egypt extended beyond the interiors of individual houses. Streets, even roofs, were thus the site for many activities, including eating, spinning, weaving, and playing games. The construction of massive royal pyramids necessitated a considerable number of workers, from skilled craftsmen to unskilled laborers, who occupied specialized settlements. Located 400 meters east of the valley temple of Menkaure at Giza, Heit el-Ghurab (“Wall of the Crow”) was one such village. In addition to work on the pyramids, its residents were involved in temple construction, as well as being employed in royal workshops, where they made a wide range of objects, such as statues, vessels, textiles, and furniture. The workers’ village comprised a series of long, narrow, mud-brick galleries. Each gallery was organized into four spaces, which functioned as dormitories, covering an area of 150 by 75 meters each. One dormitory block was capable of accommodating a total of 1,500 to 3,200 temporary laborers, who were believed to survive on baked sheep or goat meat. When Abusir and Saqqara replaced Giza as the major site for royal pyramids during the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, however, this village seems to have ceased to serve as a town for pyramid workers. A comparative study of settlements that existed during the Old Kingdom—such as Heit el-Ghurab and Khentkawes at Giza, Elephantine, and Ayn Asil in the Dakhla Oasis—points to a typical layout of Old Kingdom houses. A vestibule was located at the entrance to the building, giving residents access to various parts of the interior by means of a long corridor, whose wall may have served as a storage area for pottery vessels. At the center of the house was a series of rectangular or L-shaped rooms functioning as core units, where daily activities, such as sleeping, took place. Kitchens occupied marginal locations in houses in most cases. Depending on the size of houses and the occupation of inhabitants, some additional elements, such as courtyards, storage areas, and workshops, might also be attached. In addition to workers’ villages, a number of settlements that housed priestly communities were also developed in the Memphite region. Hetep-Senwosret (“King Senwosret Is at Peace”), modern-day Kahun, was thus associated with the pyramid of Senwosret II (r. 1897–1878 bc). It was a centrally planned town developed according to a grid, with 200 houses set along streets. The entire town was guarded and surrounded by a wall, and it catered to a permanent community whose major function was to oversee cult ceremonies. As an important seat of regional government, overseeing a number of temples, it was possibly occupied until the Thirteenth Dynasty (1803–1649 bc). At the local level, a series of administrative districts called sepat (later nome in Greek) were integral to the operation of centralized government.



The Nile of Lower Egypt

Egypt was eventually divided into 42 nomes, with the chief of each referred to as the nomarch, after the Greek nomarchos. Each nome provided a smaller version of the central government, with its own treasury, court of justice, land office, and service for building and maintaining public works such as dykes and canals. But each was also closely bound to the central government through taxation. Indeed, central-government officials often visited the nomes to oversee the agricultural fields and calculate the grain tax. As local chief administrators, nomarchs were given titles and estates as rewards, and on special occasions they were even granted the right to build their own tombs in the royal necropolis. However, the growing power and influence of locally dispersed nomarchs would later become a source of internal conflict, and would ultimately lead to the decentralization of power in Egypt. Unlike under later dynasties, especially during the New Kingdom, most of the highest officials in the Old Kingdom came from royal families. Ancient Egypt was a hierarchical society in which administrative centers were developed at the local, provincial, and national levels. Yet, since cities, towns, and villages were exclusively established according to social status and the occupation of their residents, hardly any single settlement housed a large number of people. At its height, it is believed that even Memphis, which long remained the seat of government, had no more than 50,000 residents because it was inhabited only by the ruling class and high officials. Egypt also developed a clearly demarcated, two-tiered economy, with separate rural and urban sectors. Nevertheless, cities, towns, and villages were all incorporated into a single bureaucratic network through taxation, corvée labor, and exchange of goods. Ancient Egypt was ultimately a society based on agriculture, in which everyone was tied to agricultural production in one way or another. But it would be misleading to regard it as strictly a rural society. Indeed, a simple focus on settlement size and population density (such as that which has often dominated accounts of ancient Egypt based on contemporary understandings of “urban”) cannot adequately explain its pattern. Rather, the nature of urbanism in ancient Egypt must account for the differential role and function of each settlement, and the networks and hierarchies that existed between them. Thus, recent archaeological findings at settlements built during the Old Kingdom point to the presence of a complex rural–urban system, in which high officials residing in cities and towns were closely involved in rural society. Indeed, city and countryside were enmeshed in a complex network of relations—from the leasing of land and tax collection to the accounting of harvests and conscription of labor for military and building purposes. But it was centralized taxation that was critical to the entire system, because the transfer of food surpluses between rural and urban sectors did not come in the form of market exchange, but as tax assessments.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Foodstuffs such as bread, beer, and vegetables were all produced in rural Egypt; however, in addition to agricultural goods, markets existed in luxury items, jewelry, and furniture. Large-scale river transport was necessary not only to facilitate the distribution of grain but also to transfer building materials. Indeed, transportation routes were largely designed for heavy-weight building materials such as stone. Egypt was a state which established its political legitimacy primarily through monumental construction in the form of pyramids and temples; therefore, connection to the Nile was more than a practical concern. Although the Old Kingdom pyramids were built mostly from of local stone, limestone and granite might sometimes be fetched from other sites to increase their monumentality. The Nile also provided abundant sources of water and alluvial soil, which were mixed with straw to make mud brick. The dominant building material in ancient Egypt, mud brick was a good insulator, keeping houses cool inside during the summer and warm during the winter. The use of stone, although another important building material, was mostly limited to monuments. As mentioned, the first large-scale use of stone was at the pyramid complex of Djoser during the Third Dynasty. Yet stone here was merely used in the form of small blocks as a replacement for mud brick. The first use of monumental blocks was for the pyramids of Snefru, one at Meidum and one at Dahshur, which required that the stone be extracted from mines or open quarries. Limestone was the favored building stone during the Old Kingdom, whereas sandstone was often employed during the New Kingdom. Compared with these two relatively soft stones, granite was much harder to quarry and work. This led to its limited use to accentuate important parts of buildings, such as a portcullis or the lining of the interior passages of the Old Kingdom pyramids. With cities, towns, and villages alike situated on the Nile’s narrow flood plain, the river provided plentiful points for shipping and trading. Ancient Egyptian settlements thus did not need to be concentrated, but were relatively dispersed, giving ancient Egypt the unique identity of a state defined by scattered settlements of various sizes. However, such a dispersed pattern over a vast territory opened Egypt to the continual risk of foreign incursion and internal conflict. And although Memphis long remained the political and administrative center of the ancient state, the pharaohs were continually involved in military campaigns against foreign and domestic enemies. Nevertheless, Memphis possessed the defining characteristics of a national capital, as replicated by other cities that would rise to that status in the centuries to follow. As the permanent seat of the central government, it provided a site for temples of national significance, enclosure walls, royal tombs, and manufacturing and production areas. The last of the Old Kingdom pyramids in Memphis was erected about three centuries after those at Giza. This was the pyramid of Pepi



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II Neferkare (r. 2278–2181 bc), the last pharaoh of the Sixth Dynasty (2345–2181 bc). As mentioned, after the Fourth Dynasty the official royal necropolis was moved south, to Abusir, and by the Sixth Dynasty Saqqara had re-established itself as the official city of the dead. The waning of the Old Kingdom also brought the eclipse of Memphis, and by the Sixth Dynasty the city had entered a period of decline. The influence of the centralized government in the city’s affairs began to dwindle, and in its shadow a new city, which would later be called Thebes, rose to become the religious capital of Egypt. Memphis, however, remained an important political center and continued to exert artistic and administrative influence. Coronation ceremonies as well as the Heb-Sed festival continued to take place there, and even during the New Kingdom Memphis seemed to have served as the principal residence of the crown prince. Thus, in the Nineteenth Dynasty, Ramesses II built a new royal residence called Pi-Ramesses (“The House of Ramesses”) in the Nile delta, reusing building materials and blocks from temples and pyramid complexes in the Memphis area. This was also when Khaemwaset, the high priest of Ptah, began construction of the labyrinthine Serapeum there, dedicated to the cult of Apis, the bull god. Memphis made another important appearance in world history when Alexander the Great made the old city his headquarters as he drew up plans for the new city of Alexandria in 332 bc. During the Greco-Roman period, the transportation network in the Mediterranean and the Nile was developed to a great extent, giving prominence to a new travel industry up the Nile valley. Inspired by narratives of ruins of Memphis—the Giza pyramids, the temples, and the Sphinx—this was when a number of famous travelers sailed up the Nile to visit the ancient capital. In the following seven centuries, however, Memphis fell into almost total oblivion, as the rise of Alexandria killed its economy over time. The Greek historian Strabo, who visited Egypt during Ptolemaic rule, wrote of a large city with many inhabitants whose palaces and temples had been abandoned. Stripped of its ceremonial role, Memphis continued to survive as an agricultural center for a few more centuries. Yet by the time the Arab general ‘Amr Ibn al-‘As conquered Egypt during the Islamic expansion, little existed there except a few villages and what al-Baghdadi and al-Idrisi described as a field of ruins. Changes in the course of the Nile, successive floods, agricultural expansion and contraction, and the looting of stone from its structures all contributed to its final demise. But it can be surmised today that many of the remains of one of humankind’s longest-lived cities lie buried under other settlements that now constitute Cairo, the megalopolis that ultimately swallowed its past.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Bibliography Brewer, Douglas J., and Emily Teeter. 2007. Egypt and the Egyptians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dodson, Aidan. 2000. Monarchs of the Nile. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Erman, Adolf. 1971. Life in Ancient Egypt. New York: Dover Publications. Fagan, Brian. 2001. Elixir: A History of Walter and Humankind. New York: Bloomsbury. Greener, Leslie. 1967. The Discovery of Egypt. New York: Viking Press. Jeffreys, David. 2012. “Climbing the White Walls: Recent Experiences of the Memphis Survey.” Ancient Memphis, “Enduring Is the Perfection,” proceedings of the international conference held at Macquarie University, Sydney, August 14–15, 2008. Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters en Departement Oosterse Studies. Lutley, K., and Bunbury, J. M. 2008. “The Nile on the Move.” Egyptian Archaeology, 32, pp. 3–5. Mariette, Auguste. 1877. Itinéraire de la Haute Égypte [The Monuments of Upper Egypt]. Alexandria: A. Moure’s. Moeller, Nadine. 2017. The Archaeology of Urbanism in Ancient Egypt: From the Predynastic Period to the End of the Middle Kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Snape, Steven. 2014. The Complete Cities of Ancient Egypt. London: Thames & Hudson. Wegner, Josef W., and Jennifer Houser Wegner. 2015. The Sphinx that Traveled to Philadelphia: The Story of the Colossal Sphinx in the Penn Museum. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

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Thebes of the Pharaohs: The Nile of Upper Egypt I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read, Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings.” Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away. — Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias” (1818) 1

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iovanni Battista Belzoni (1778–1823) was born to a poor family in Italy. Known also as “the Great Belzoni” due to his towering height, he was a man of multiple occupations: a vagrant, a traveler, and a circus strongman. Before he made himself an explorer, Belzoni worked as an engineer, and he came to Egypt in 1815 to persuade Mehmed Ali to undertake a new irrigation project. The project fell through, but fate was awaiting him elsewhere in Upper Egypt. On the request of the British consul, Henry Salt, about a year after his arrival in Cairo, Belzoni headed out to Thebes, an ancient capital of Egypt which was then attracting a number of explorers who were capitalizing on the growing trade in Egyptian antiquities. His task was to transport to London the colossal granite head known as “the Young Memnon,” which was lying on the desert sand of western Thebes. The head turned out to be a bust of Ramesses II (r. 1279–1213 bc), the greatest pharaoh of the New Kingdom. The mysterious gift of ancient Egypt, it seemed the perfect object to showcase the might and glory of the British Empire. And with the help of locally recruited porters, Belzoni was

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River able to dig up the half-sunken statue, which weighed nearly seven tons, and move it to the bank of the Nile. The news of the Young Memnon’s impending arrival thrilled the British people, and the Romantic poet Percy Shelley wrote a sonnet to commemorate the historic moment under the title of “Ozymandias,” the name given by the Greeks to Ramesses II, “King of Kings.” About two decades before the colossal head of Ramesses II made its way across the Mediterranean to England, however, it had been the French who became the first modern Europeans to systematically explore the banks of the Nile in Upper Egypt. Upon the sight of Thebes in 1799, the French artist Dominique Vivant Denon (1747–1825) could not help but marvel at the mysterious beauty of the hitherto obscure ancient capital. Having arrived in Egypt with the Napoleonic expedition, the talented Denon left numerous accounts and drawings of ruins and relics there, which would later do much to stimulate European curiosity. What fascinated Denon most in Thebes (which was called Luxor at the time, as it is again now), however, were the obelisks erected in front of the Luxor temple. Nothing seemed more appropriate to him than transporting one of them to France and placing it in the heart of Paris to herald the new era that had followed the revolution there. The renowned French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) chimed in and gave more weight to the idea. “If one must see an Egyptian obelisk in Paris,” he argued in 1829, “then let it be one of those from Luxor” (quoted in Wilkinson 2014: 97). The obelisk was ultimately shipped to France and installed at the Place de la Concorde in 1836. The city of Luxor, now an administrative governorate in Egypt, is located 600 kilometers south of Cairo, on the east bank of the Nile. It is a thriving place that houses a number of modern hotels and upscale restaurants that accommodate the hordes of tourists who visit the remnants of ancient Thebes, mostly during the winter season. Over the centuries, Thebes has had many names. It was known as Waset (“Dominion”) or Niwt (“The City”) in ancient Egypt. And during the Greco-Roman period, it was called Diospolis Magna. The modern name, Luxor, came from the Arabs, who arrived in Egypt in the seventh century ad. Upon seeing the remains of its great temples, they named the town el-Uqsor, possibly meaning both “the palaces” and “ruins.” Until the French Jesuit priest Claude Sicard visited Upper Egypt several times between 1707 and 1721, however, hardly anyone had made the association between the ruins and the ancient city of Thebes. But following Sicard’s reports, the Danish naval captain F. L. Norden arrived in Luxor in 1737. And the same year and in 1738 the Englishman Richard Pococke also visited the area. One of the first to describe the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, Pococke produced plans of two important ancient tombs. The Scottish explorer James Bruce, who later traveled to the source of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia,



Thebes of the Pharaohs

also passed through the area and reported on its treasures during a journey up the Nile in January 1769. It was the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt in 1798, however, that stimulated among Europeans a great new interest in Egypt. And with the publication of the volumes of the Description de l’Égypte that followed it, which included Denon’s renderings of Egyptian ruins, Thebes garnered worldwide attention. The British consul in Egypt at the time, Henry Salt, and his French counterpart, Bernardino Drovetti, were representative of a new generation of Europeans intent on exploring the mysteries of ancient Egypt. And, as in the case of the Rosetta Stone (also discovered during the Napoleonic expedition), Anglo-French political and military rivalry intensified competition surrounding the collection of Egyptian antiquities—including the aforementioned large head of Ramesses II, now housed in the British Museum. After the Rosetta Stone was deciphered by Champollion in 1822, the study of Thebes gained even more momentum. It was there, for example, that John Gardner Wilkinson spent many months before publishing the book Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians in 1837. There was probably no more sensational moment during the European exploration of the area, however, than the discovery of the tomb of the young king Tutankhamun (r. 1332–1323 bc)—a tomb which had long remained hidden. King Tut’s sudden death may have made it impossible to build a conspicuous tomb for the young pharaoh. But starting in the early 1900s, the English aristocrat Lord Carnarvon had sponsored the excavation of noble and royal tombs in the area of western Thebes known as the Valley of Kings. And in 1922, after a few years of systemic research and with the financial help of Carnarvon, the English archaeologist Howard Carter discovered the tomb, which, thanks to its obscurity, had been preserved from looting and vandalism. The discovery of Tutank­ hamun’s golden mask in one of the innermost coffins electrified the world. The gilded mask, in a perfect state of preservation, had been shining like the sun in the dark for millennia. The young pharaoh’s expression was as calm and placid as the water of the Nile when it was low. And soon after its discovery, Tutankhamun’s mask became the quintessential image of ancient Egypt. Unlike Memphis, which was located away from the Nile to avoid its floodwaters, the settlement at Thebes bordered directly on the river. During the Old Kingdom, the site had been of little importance, because the center of Egypt was Memphis. But with the decline of the Old Kingdom—probably due to low water, famine, and other factors—Egyptian rulers began to settle in Herakleopolis, south of Fayoum and about 110 kilometers southwest of modern-day Cairo. It was during the First Intermediate Period, however, that the real turning point arrived in the history of Thebes. A provincial family there,

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River under the leadership of Intef II (r. 2112–2063 bc), began a rebellion against the northern powers that laid the foundation for Egypt’s reunification. It was ultimately Intef II’s grandson, Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II (r. 2061– 2010 bc), who would manage this feat and become the first pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom. The Theban victory owed much to the secure location of Thebes in Upper Egypt, away from military conflicts in the north. But the higher terrain around Thebes was also important because it protected it from the Nile’s floods, making it suitable for permanent settlement. Theban control over Egypt brought the hitherto nondescript city to prominence, and over the course of the Middle Kingdom it was transformed from a small town to an imperial city. However, it was not until the New Kingdom that Thebes reached the height of its power, when Ahmose I (r. 1549–1524 bc), the founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty, made it his capital. Thebes subsequently served as the religious capital of Egypt during the entire New Kingdom. And, although the majority of the royal court still lived in Memphis, homes of the nobility were built there in tandem with the development of the royal section of the city. Thebes’s economic well-being always owed more to its religious institutions and funerary function as the burial site for the pharaohs than to trade or defense, as was the case with other settlements in Lower Egypt. It was Amun-Re, the king of the gods, in particular, who was worshipped at Thebes, in its sprawling Luxor and Karnak temples. Because of the importance of Amun, the role of Thebes in ancient Egypt was enormous. Not only did the cult of Amun-Re transform the city into a vital center for ceremonies and festivals, but it contributed to the expansion of the Theban priesthood. Indeed, the power and authority accorded Amun’s high priest may have been one of the motivations for the decision of renegade king Akhenaten (r. 1351–1334 bc) to build a new capital between Memphis and Thebes. Rejecting many of the Theban gods, including Amun-Re, Akhenaten chose to worship only Aten, and he named his new capital Ahketaten in an effort to tie himself to the establishment of an entirely new religious order. The geography of the Theban region made it an ideal site for a religious center. The Nile valley here is surrounded by mountains which create a bounded plane. In physical terms, the river running through may be seen as dividing Thebes into an east and a west bank. But, spiritually, it may alternately be seen as a path, not an edge, connecting the two worlds of Thebes: the living and the dead, the profane and the sacred, the present and the past, and, even today, the modern and the eternal. It was on the east bank that Amun-Re and other gods were enshrined. And over the centuries, the pharaohs built palaces and temples there at what became known as the Karnak complex. Meanwhile, beginning with Mentuhotep II, who built a funeral monument, half-tomb and half-temple, at Deir el-Bahri, the Nile’s west bank became Thebes’s



Thebes of the Pharaohs

Figure 4.1 Map of the Theban region

equally famous city of the dead. Here a number of pharaonic funerary temples were laid out facing the river (Figure 4.1). Their common orientation might have been derived from the symbolic status of the river as the life-giver, yet it also provided easy access for the pharaohs, who mostly traveled by boat along the Nile. The temples at Karnak, on Thebes’s east bank, formed the largest religious complex in Egypt. Originally named ipet-isut (“the most select of places”), its construction probably began in earnest during the Middle Kingdom reign of Senusret I (r. 1971–1926 bc). But the majority of buildings there are believed to date from the later New Kingdom. Sandstone was the primary material, transported from a region nearby called Gebel Silsila, via the Nile. A number of conspicuous gateways called “pylons” were erected in front of the temples and in front of entrances through their surrounding brick precinct walls. The overwhelming presence of the gigantic gateways made a great impression on the ancient Greeks. When the Greek poet Homer described Thebes centuries after it had reached its peak, he remained dazzled by its luxury and glory. In Iliad IX, Homer described Thebes as the “hundred-gated city”:

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Thebes, where men’s dwellings are rich, and rich the possessions, Thebes of the hundred gates, from each of them riding Twice a hundred warriors with horses and harness. (Quoted in Ludwig 1947: 375)

But the scale of Thebes’s other structures, such as the hypostyle halls of Seti I and Ramesses II, each with more than 100 columns, must have also seemed overwhelming. Of the two major temples on the east bank, the Karnak temple was by far the larger. Unlike the Luxor temple, adjacent to the Nile, it was set back from the river and seems to have been connected to it by means of a short canal. The canal was no doubt important to provide the temple with water, a necessity of life and ritual. But it must have also provided a crucial route by which to transport people and goods to it. The Nile was indispensable in the pursuit of spiritual life, but its economic function was no less important. Dedicated to the worship of the Theban Triad (Amun, Mut, and Khonsu/Montu), the Karnak temple comprises three precincts. The central precinct of Amun, the largest of the three, had actually been founded in the Eleventh Dynasty (2061–1991 bc). However, numerous monuments and structures, ranging from obelisks to pylons, were added to it over the centuries by various pharaohs. Given the symbolic gravity of Karnak and the importance of the sun god, the precinct of Amun was also the primary locus for kings to commemorate their successful military campaigns and divine rule. As with other sites of great significance, the temple of Amun was ultimately a palimpsest on which power and authority were ceaselessly written, erased, and overwritten. The precinct of the goddess Mut, the wife of Amun, was located south of the precinct of Amun. Amenhotep III (r. 1391–1353 bc), the ninth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, installed hundreds of statues of a lioness, which represented the goddess, within its enclosure wall. The precinct of Khonsu/ Montu, the Theban war god and the son of Amun and Mut, in turn constituted the northernmost part of the Karnak temple complex. A processional route connected the Karnak temple to the Luxor temple. Called the Avenue of Sphinxes, as it was once lined by more than 1,000 stone sphinxes, it ran parallel to the Nile and functioned as the spine of the east bank of Thebes. The Luxor temple was an exception to the norm in ancient Egypt that pharaonic temples faced the river, the very symbol of power which controlled both life and death. Its entrance instead faced the Karnak temple, to the north. This may have been because the Luxor temple was originally built as an annex to the Karnak temple. Constructed around 1400 bc, the Luxor temple was known in ancient Egypt as ipet resyt (“the southern sanctuary”). Two obelisks originally stood at its gate, one of which was relocated, as mentioned, to the Place de la



Thebes of the Pharaohs

Figure 4.2 Pylon and obelisk at the Luxor temple

Concorde in Paris. And as its construction continued, ­Ramesses II added the imposing pylon and obelisks to its facade (Figure 4.2). Gigantic colonnades inside the temple also accentuated the open-air court (“the solar court”), designed to highlight the mysterious power of the sun god and his association with the divinity of the pharaoh. Amenhotep III, who used architecture to display the holiness of the royal family by symbolically connecting the king with Amun, later erected a life-size statue of himself within the temple. Over the centuries, the processional way between Karnak and Luxor provided the main stage on which the annual Festival of the Sanctuary took place. During this event, the cult images of the Theban Triad were transported overland from their normal sites at Karnak to their “sanctuary” at Luxor. However, later in the Eighteenth Dynasty, it was said the images were brought to the Luxor temple by barge along the Nile. Such festivals served as spectacular theatrical displays of the divine power of the royal family. But the festivals themselves were deeply entrenched in the religious life of ordinary people. Imagine the ineffable scene of the river carrying the images of the Theban gods. In ancient Egypt, architectural grandeur and splendor were mostly reserved for sacred space and funerary temples. By contrast, the residential complexes inhabited by kings (or royal palaces in the modern sense) were nowhere near as extraordinary. The pharaohs were on the move frequently, for military expeditions in foreign territories or for other purposes within their domains. A few large residential structures have been found attached to mortuary temples in western Thebes, such as the palace of Ramesses

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River III at Medinet Habu. But they are today thought to have been ancillary buildings to serve the dead, not the living king. Malkata (“the place where things are picked up,” in Arabic) is, however, among a very few surviving examples of a royal palace complex from ancient Egypt. Constructed during the reign of Amenhotep III, who was a prolific builder, it was located about 1.5 kilometers southwest of his funerary temple on the west bank of Thebes. The palace comprised a number of large buildings, including a columned audience hall, a throne room, royal apartments, small suites, storerooms, and open courtyards (Figure 4.3). A group of houses in the southwestern corner of the complex was also used by the vizier and other high officials. A network of canals connected the palace, which included an artificial lake named Birket Habu, to the Nile. As the palace was by nature modest, stone was used sparingly in its construction, and it was principally built of mud brick in combination with wooden columns. Deir el-Ballas, on the edge of the western desert, on the west bank of the Nile about 45 kilometers north of Thebes, is another surviving example of a palace-town. Consisting of a south and north palace, it is believed to have been inhabited for a short period of time. But its primary function seems to have been as a military staging point for wars against the Hyksos in the late Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Dynasties. If the east bank of the Nile was an environment for the living, the west bank remains mysterious because it is known to this day as the city of the dead, Egypt’s most abundant necropolis. Ancient Egyptians considered the west the land of the dead because that was where the sun set every evening, and “going to the west” meant “going to die,” a concept that became particularly strong during the later years of the Middle Kingdom. The Valley of the Kings, whose construction had started by the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty, during the reign of Amenhotep I (r. 1525–1504 bc), was an ideal site for royal burial. Surrounded by natural rock walls, it emanated a sense of isolation and seclusion from the outside world, thereby giving the royal necropolis the feel of mystery and spirituality. In addition to the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens, mortuary temples were located on the west-bank cliffs 3–4 kilometers away from the Nile. Canals were dug to bring Nile water to these sites, which were located in an otherwise barren and dust-dry desert. In a widely dispersed area, a number of mortuary temples were constructed to commemorate the eternal power of the pharaohs from the New Kingdom, including Thutmose III, Thutmose IV, Hatshepsut, Amenhotep III, Tutan­khamun, Ay, Horemheb, Seti I, Ramesses II, and Ramesses III. During the middle of the Eighteenth Dynasty (1549–1292 bc), Thebes prospered. The dynasty had been established following the expulsion of the Hyksos from Lower Egypt during the reign of Ahmose I, at which time Thebes became the official capital of all Egypt. Although most of the



Thebes of the Pharaohs

Figure 4.3 The palace of Amenhotemp III

rulers of this period did not reside in Thebes, they created many architectural monuments there. Thutmose III (r. 1479–1425 bc), for instance, the pharaoh who expanded Egypt’s boundaries to their maximum extent, is known to have enlarged and embellished the temple of Amun while at the same time erecting pylons in front of structures built by his predecessors and mutilating and removing statues of Hatshepsut. Another important settlement site on Thebes’s west bank was Deir el-Medina (meaning “the monastery of the city” in Arabic), which was

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River built to accommodate the craftsmen of the royal tombs. Occupying an area of 6,400 square meters, it was almost invisible from the Nile and shut off from the outside world. The workers themselves called the village Pa-demi (“the town”). Surrounded by a perimeter wall 6 meters high, it contained 68 houses. Since these workers were the elite of their pro­fessions, their lives must have been different from other residents of ancient Egypt. Since the village was designed to serve particular purposes, it was not created organically. Nonetheless, Deir el-Medina provides the best evidence today of the physical layout of a town comprising individual houses for common people (Figure 4.4). For centuries, the function of Deir el-Medina was to provide living space for a set of people with particu­ lar skills—in this case royal tomb-cutting and decorating in the Valley of the Kings. Compared with more typical towns in Egypt, which depended on access to the life-giving river, Deir el-Medina was not located on agricultural land but in the desert, where its residents had easy access to their worksite. The town’s location in the midst of the desert, however, did cause its residents inconvenience in terms of the necessities of life: water and goods had to be brought to the village. As time passed, however, a more self-sustaining economy developed within the community. Among its

Figure 4.4 Map of Deir el-Medina



Thebes of the Pharaohs

ancillary structures, the village contained a temple dedicated to Amun. Chapels were erected at the northern end of the village, and the residents participated in the holidays associated with the cult of Amun-Re as well as festivals related to the cult of Amenhotep I. They also took time off to brew beer for festivals, where an excess of food and drink seemed to be consumed. Along with the sites of religious activity, the presence of cemeteries in the village indicates that it was far from a temporary town for transient workers, but rather a permanent settlement for them and their families. Indeed, the relationship between Deir el-Medina and the Valley of the Kings seems to have lasted for centuries. Among the most imposing structures on Thebes’s west bank is a terraced mortuary temple for Queen Hatshepsut (r. 1478–1458 bc) at Deir el-Bahri (Figure 4.5). Senenmut, a native Egyptian who played a leading role in the construction of Eighteenth Dynasty Thebes, was known to be its chief architect. Carved into a hill next to Mentuhotep II’s temple, Hatshepsut’s temple was one of the greatest architectural achievements

Figure 4.5 View of the Deir el-Bahri temple

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Figure 4.6 Colossi of Memnon

of the New Kingdom. Its design is dominated by three vast terraces, set against the cliff. In addition to depicting important episodes from her life, it contains a description on its walls of an expedition sent by Hatshepsut to Ethiopia (then called the Land of Punt) around 1463 bc that provides valuable information regarding the ancient world. Amenhotep III also built a funerary temple called Kom el-Hetan on the plains of the west bank. Colossal sculptures characterized this monumental structure, including spectacular statues of Amenhotep III himself at the temple’s easternmost gateway. Later popularized by the name “the Colossi of Memnon” during the Roman period, the twin statues were directed toward the rising sun as well as visitors coming from the east bank of Thebes (Figure 4.6). Given the temple’s location on the Theban plain, this must have been a particularly imposing sight, designed to display the eternal might and majesty of the pharaoh. The colossi were so impressive that the Romans even referred in general to western Thebes as “Memnonia,” after the statues. While Amenhotep III was credited with contributing much to the architecture of Thebes, on both its east and its west banks, his son and successor, Akhenaten, actually left Thebes for much of the brief period of his reign. As mentioned earlier, Akhenaten established a new capital to the north along the Nile, which would be named Akhetaten. However,



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Thebes still remained an important city throughout this period of rebellious religious reform. And before moving to his new capital, Akhenaten also dedicated a temple to Aten east of the temple of Amun at Karnak. This temple was destroyed after his death, however, along with other monuments he had built. And when Akhenaten’s son, Tutankhamun, came to power, he moved the capital back to Thebes, leaving Akhetaten abandoned. With Tutankhamun’s sudden death and a subsequent power vacuum, however, the Eighteenth Dynasty came to an end. Seti I (r. 1290–1279 bc) was a Nineteenth Dynasty pharaoh and the father of Ramesses II, who would later become the most powerful pharaoh in the history of ancient Egypt. He put great effort into re-establishing centralized power after the chaotic end of the previous dynasty, by regaining control over neighboring enemies and leading military campaigns, mostly against the Hittites. His military successes were recorded at the temple of Amun at Karnak. He also built a mortuary temple on the west bank of Thebes (the temple of Seti I). While Thebes remained Egypt’s religious capital, however, he moved his administrative capital to Memphis. Ramesses II, or Ramesses the Great, was, as mentioned, the most well-known and powerful pharaoh of the New Kingdom. One of the most extraordinary military expeditions during his reign ended with victory at the Battle of Kadesh against the Hittites, scenes of which were elaborately inscribed on the walls of numerous monuments in Thebes. Among the most notable of these monuments was the Ramesseum, which was dedicated to him. However, Ramesses II continued building on a massive scale throughout his reign, and he built one of the most elegant tombs in western Thebes for his wife, Nefertari, at what is now known as the Valley of the Queens. During the reign of Ramesses III (r. 1186–1155 bc) in the Twentieth Dynasty, the New Kingdom began to decline following a series of invasions. The mortuary temple of Ramesses III is known as Medinet Habu. Measuring 210 meters wide and 300 meters long, its precinct resembles in design the nearby Ramesseum. However, following the reign of Ramesses XI (r. 1107–1077 bc), who would be remembered as the last pharaoh of the New Kingdom, it seems that the looting of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings began. Although it had already lost its importance as the capital city, Thebes continued to mesmerize people during the Greco-Roman period. The expansion of transport routes during the Roman Empire allowed a range of travelers to make their way from the Mediterranean to the interior of Egypt via the Nile. By this time, Alexandria had become the most crucial transport hub in the eastern Mediterranean. Thus, ancient travelers likely disembarked at the harbor there, sailed on canals dug to connect the sea and the river, and then journeyed up the river to reach Thebes, which had already fallen into ruins.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Toward the end of the fourth century ad, with the decline of Roman rule, Christianity came to change the face of the west bank of Thebes. Quite a few ancient temples were transformed into churches at that time, to accommodate the new religion, and in the seventh century monasteries were founded anew or rebuilt from the old tombs. Thebes was occasionally visited by European travelers in the Middle Ages, yet it was not until the Napoleonic expedition at the turn of the nineteenth century that the ruins and relics of Luxor were systemically investigated and proved to be those of the ancient city of Thebes. The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in the 1920s was so sensational that unverified rumors came to embellish newspaper accounts of it. One in particular, known as the Curse of the Pharaohs, started when some of the explorers and workers involved in the excavation came to a tragic end shortly after the discovery. Most notable was the abrupt death of Lord Carnarvon, the chief financial supporter of the project. A similar curse seemed to have already befallen Belzoni about a century before the tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered. After he successfully removed the colossal head of Ramesses II from western Thebes and shipped it to London, Belzoni resumed exploring the Nile in a hunt for other antiquities. He ultimately discovered an entry to the Abu Simbel temple, one of the most magnificent remains of the Nubian kingdom, which had until then been covered by thick layers of sand. But his adventures did not stop there. He subsequently added to his list of excavations numerous other tombs and artifacts, among them the tomb of Seti I. However, when Belzoni decided to continue his explorations in West Africa, upon his arrival in Benin, he came down with dysentery, a disease which ended his life. Were the sudden deaths of people involved in the excavations of the tombs really the result of the Curse of the Pharaohs? Interestingly, a number of explorers of the sources of the Nile had similarly been rumored to have been felled by a so-called Curse of the Nile, years earlier. The stories and narratives of death surrounding the discovery of ancient Egypt thus echoed the tragic history of Nile exploration. But as the political rivalry between France and Britain continued in Europe, it brought a massive removal of antiquities from the Nile valley, causing even graver ruination of an already ruined landscape. The curses therefore need not be subjected to scientific investigation. They may rather be understood as evidence of a violent history of colonial enterprise. By the mid-1970s, Thebes came to garner international recognition, particularly through the tourist industry. As modern edifices for wealthy tourists embellished Luxor, the relics and ruins of Karnak became a staple of popular culture. As Thebes became famous among Europeans, numerous replicas and representations of it were also created. And now the image of the ancient city whose conception and development owed



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a great deal to the Nile has even made its way across time and space to the American city of Las Vegas, another city built in the desert, where a hotel named Luxor has taken the shape of a pyramid with sphinxes at its entrance. Today, however, a visitor to the original Luxor may notice the strange presence of a minaret piercing into the sky at the site of Luxor temple. The mosque is named after a Sufi sheikh from Bagdad, Abu al-Haggag, who spent his last years in Luxor before dying in 1243. The mosque of Abu al-Haggag was built atop the ruins of the Luxor temple. The Arabs neither damaged the temple nor attempted to uncover what was hidden underneath, but simply superimposed the mosque onto it. The mosque has, since then, stood on the same site and, in a strange way, has continued the legacy of the Luxor temple as a site of worship. It is a reminder of how cities have different and new lives, even in the most ancient of lands on the banks of a great river. Note 1. From Parr (1957: 31). The original was published in Examiner on January 11, 1818.

Bibliography Bagnall, Roger S., and Dominic Rathbone. 2008. Egypt: From Alexander to the Copts. An Archaeological and Historical Guide. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Ludwig, Emil. 1947. The Nile: The Life-Story of a River. Garden City, NJ: Garden City Publishing. Manniche, Lise. 1987. City of the Dead: Thebes in Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mayes, Stanley. 2003. The Great Belzoni: The Circus Strongman Who Discovered Egypt’s Ancient Treasures. New York: Tauris Parke Paperbacks. Michałowski, Kazimierz. 1969. Art of Ancient Egypt. New York: H. N. Abrams. Nims, Charles Francis. 1965. Thebes of the Pharaohs: Pattern for Every City. New York: Stein & Day. Parr, Johnstone. 1957. “Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias.’” Keats–Shelley Journal, 6, pp. 31–35. Pemberton, Delia. 2005. Atlas of Ancient Egypt. London: British Museum Press. Smith, William Stevenson. 1958. The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Snape, S. R. 2014. The Complete Cities of Ancient Egypt. London: Thames & Hudson. Strudwick, Nigel, and Helen Strudwick. 1999. Thebes in Egypt: A Guide to the Tombs and Temples of Ancient Luxor. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Time-Life Books. 1997. What Life Was Like on the Banks of the Nile: Egypt, 3050–30 bc. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books. Wilkinson, Toby A. H. 2014. The Nile: A Journey Downriver through Egypt’s Past and Present. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

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Avaris and Akhetaten: Temporary Capitals on the Nile More ink has been spilt on the Amarna period than the whole of the rest of Egyptian history, and Akhenaten still continues to excite popular interest. — James Henry Breasted (1933: 62) [T]he monuments of Amarna were the work of the Hykos, others wished to refer to them to a period anterior to that of Menes . . . — Richard Lepsius (1853: 82)

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o place in history has managed to leave such a long legacy mixing religion and myth as has ancient Egypt. And whether relating to the ancient religions of the god kings, or to Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, the cities along the Nile seem always to have played a role in making the connection between myth and religion. This is the story of two such cities. In the northeastern heart of the Nile delta, the modern-day village of Tell al-Daba’a lies adjacent to the remains of one of the ancient branches of the Nile. Within the village, in a small and insignificant archaeological dig, at least in appearance, can be found the ruins of Avaris, an important city from which all of Lower Egypt was once governed for more than a century. “Hyksos” is a term in contemporary, colloquial Arabic that is often used to describe people who are aggressive raiders. But it also once designated a people who ruled Egypt for more than a century in the second millennium bc, with Avaris as their capital. In the ancient Egyptian language, Avaris was once called Hut-waret, which meant “great house.” Its location was a strategic one linking the Pelusiac branch of the Nile to the Mediterranean Sea, at a confluence of land and sea routes. A fortified city, Avaris became the capital of Egypt after the Hyksos invaded the country from the east. Their 100-year reign is now recorded as the Fifteenth Dynasty (1650–1540 bc), during the Second Intermediate Period. In the ancient Egyptian language the word hyksos meant “rulers of foreign lands.” And as its etymological root indicates, the Hyksos were the first rulers of foreign origin in the history of Egypt. The list of actual names of the Hyksos kings remains unknown, which may reveal that they were not considered legitimate by later historians. Reliefs and sculptures depicting them are nonexistent, which also suggests

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River the exceptional status of the Hyksos in the historiography of ancient Egypt. Were they foreign invaders who oppressed the native Egyptians? Both ancient Egyptian folktales and the official narrative recorded by the ancient Egyptian historian Manetho, who lived in the Ptolemaic period, tend to support such a view. Indeed, they describe the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt as a war of liberation and a great victory acquired after heroic moves by the brave native Theban pharaohs of Upper Egypt. But what does the eradication of the hated Hyksos from Egypt and their subsequent removal from history, tell us? Little is known about the real identity of the Hyksos: the language they spoke, their ethnic origin, and their homeland remain in the realm of conjecture. It is, however, agreed that they hailed from the area in west Asia which was later known as the Levant. The biblical story of the Exodus depicts the expulsion of the Israelites from Egypt before they went on to construct the city of Jerusalem. Some scholars have suggested that the Hyksos might have been the Israelites, but there is little evidence to support this. Proponents have used the discovery at Avaris of four-room houses, a predominant dwelling type in Iron Age Israel/Palestine, to show the connection between the Hyksos and Israelites. But opponents of this view point out that there were actually two Exoduses that took place from ancient Egypt—one during the time of the Hyksos and another during the Ramesside period. However, both positions lack historical evidence. Various types of building have been found in the archaeological dig at the site of Avaris, including palaces, temples, arsenals, storehouses, and tombs (Figure 5.1). The major Hyksos settlement, near the banks of the former Pelusiac branch of the Nile, was surrounded by a buttressed wall with a height of 6.2–8.5 meters. Within gardens enclosed by the wall tree pits were found in a grid system, which indicate the presence of orchards and vineyards. The Hyksos also built a temple dedicated to the god Seth in their capital city. The style of buildings and pottery as well as the culture in general are recognized today as largely Canaanite. And, typical of this culture, tombs were sometimes built within houses and courtyards, or directly attached to houses. This burial custom was not common in ancient Egypt and is thought to have been introduced from the Levant. Space within the settlement became scarce later in the history of Avaris, which further encouraged the practice of house burial. Records indicate that while the hated Hyksos were occupying the eastern delta, Thebans in the south were preparing to wage battle and rid Egypt of its foreign occupiers. Kamose was the last king of the Theban Seventeenth Dynasty. He ruled for three years, during which time he pursued a campaign against his northern foes, who had allied with the Kingdom of Kush in the south. At the time of his revengeful attack on Avaris, Kamose declared war on the Hyksos king Apophis by saying, “I



Avaris and Akhetaten

Figure 5.1 Plan of Avaris during the Hyksos period, based on Bietak (1981)

shall drink the wine of your vineyard . . . I [shall] lay waste your dwelling place . . . , I [shall] cut down your trees” (quoted in Bietak 1996: 65). But it was his son (or brother, according to different sources) Ahmose I (1549–1524 bc) who would finally expel the Hyksos and become the next native king of Egypt. After Avaris was captured by Ahmose I, the Hyksos retreated to southern Canaan, and this brought an end to Canaanite influence in the region. After he had taken Avaris, Ahmose I went on to seize Sharuhen, which had been a strategically important site of Hyksos rule and their last stronghold, in order to sever them completely from Egypt. The war of liberation, commemorated as such since it pushed the Hyksos out of Egypt proper, made Ahmose the founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty. And it marked the beginning of a new era, which Manetho would later label the New Kingdom. Despite the family link between Kamose and Ahmose I, it was the significance given to the military accomplishments of Ahmose I that provided the justification for designating his coming to power as the beginning of a new dynasty. The New Kingdom then marked itself as the period in which pharaohs began to strengthen border control, especially with regard to migration from Canaan into the Nile delta. The expulsion of the Hyksos and liberation from foreign rule had a huge impact on the Egyptian worldview. And based on a professional army and skillful diplomacy, the new empire eventually expanded its territory northward, so that it stretched from

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River southern Egypt (current-day Sudan) to Syria. It remains a mystery why, during their years in Egypt, the Hyksos did not adopt its way of life, as did the later Ptolemaic or Kushite invaders. Perhaps this was because they remained somewhat isolated from the people they ruled and never integrated into Egyptian culture, language, or religion. With the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Thebes became the capital of Egypt again, and Avaris was abandoned. Indeed, Thebes continued to be an important city throughout this period, while it was not until the reign of Ramesses II (r. 1279–1213 bc), in the Nineteenth Dynasty, that Avaris would be totally restored, as a new city called Pi-Ramesses, on its former site. In the interim, a series of important events took place. For example, it was Thutmose III (r. 1479–1425 bc), the sixth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty and a skilled warrior, who conquered Syria. But when he was initially crowned king at a young age, it was Queen Hatshepsut—his stepmother and aunt, being a daughter of Thutmose I and wife of Thutmose II—who acted as regent and exerted a level of power which had been hitherto unknown to women in ancient Egypt. In Thebes, Hatshepsut built a number of structures, including her famous temple carved in the rocks. Thutmose III’s training in military skills prepared him to pursue several important campaigns, which greatly expanded the boundary of Egypt. Sent from the newly occupied territories to Egypt at that time, many gifts enriched the culture and art of ancient Egypt. And during the reign of Amenhotep III (1390–1353 bc), Egypt enjoyed unprecedented prosperity. Amenhotep III also became one of Egypt’s most prolific builders of monuments, temples, and palaces, especially in Thebes. Amenhotep III was succeeded by his second son, Akhenaten (r. 1351– 1334 bc), a king who tried to totally transform Egyptian religion, art, and governance during his brief reign. In addition to his openness to various religious ideas and gods, Amenhotep III had emphasized the worship of Aten—the sun god Re—in addition to Amun—the patron god of Thebes—and this was to play an important role in the life of his son. Indeed, his son, originally enthroned as Amenhotep IV, took the radical step of changing his name to Akhenaten—which meant “Devoted to the god Aten”—during the fifth year of his reign. And declaring Aten the only god, the new king set out to move his capital from Thebes to a new desert site midway between Memphis and Thebes. Akhenaten would later name this new city Akhetaten—“Horizon of the Sun Disk.” Not only did Akhenaten devote himself to the worship of Aten as the only god, but he also set out to destroy the old religion and erase the physical traces of Amun from state temples all over Egypt. In other words, Akhenaten was the first pharaoh in Egyptian history to “attack” a traditional god and seek to end all forms of worship other than those dedicated to Aten. The motivation behind his radical and iconoclastic



Avaris and Akhetaten

move remains a matter of debate. Some have pointed to Akhenaten’s desire to limit the increasing political influence of Theban high priests, who might use their position to undermine the king’s power. Others have suggested that Akhenaten’s reign coincided with the rise of an “ecumenical” worldview in Egypt, triggered by the expansionist military campaigns of Thutmose III, which had exposed the country to the idea of monotheism (Assmann 2002: 215). It is also believed that Akhenaten’s mother, Queen Tiye, exerted great influence on him. Queen Tiye was still alive when Akhenaten rose to the throne, and he maintained good relations with her. Indeed, she may have resided in the new capital city with her son and daughter-in-law. Akhenaten’s appearance may have been markedly different from that of previous Egyptian pharaohs, and he was represented in a strikingly different way than the muscular portrayals of earlier kings. As with the numerous portraits of his wife, Nefertiti, which depict her as someone with a gracefully elongated and beautifully symmetrical face, Akhenaten was often painted with a characteristically long chin (Figures 5.2, 5.3). Akhenaten’s thick lips, prominent nose, up-turned eyes, and unmuscular arms and legs were other aspects of his unusual depiction. Yet it remains unknown whether this uniquely bisexual physiognomy reflected his actual appearance or simply the way he chose to be portrayed in statues.

Figure 5.2 Image of Akhenaten

Figure 5.3 Bust of Nefertiti

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Akhenaten was married to Nefertiti (c. 1380–1340 bc) at a very young age. As can be gleaned from her name, which means “the beautiful one has arrived,” she was said to be a woman of peerless beauty. Some have suggested that she was probably the daughter of Ay, a powerful court figure who would himself succeed Akhenaten’s son (Tutankhaten/­ Tutankhamun) after his early death; but in fact her origin remains unknown. Nefertiti was portrayed in numerous statues and images with radiant beauty and a determined face, and she was elevated to a divine status that was unprecedented among previous queens. Nefertiti was the principal wife of Akhenaten, but not the only one. Akhenaten’s other wives included a woman named Kiya, who probably gave birth to Akhenaten’s only son, Tutankhaten (who later changed his name to Tutankhamun, as explained below). Nefertiti is believed to have had only one child, a daughter, Meritaten; nevertheless, Nefertiti played a crucial role in Akhenaten’s life as well as in that of the city of ­Akhetaten. Furthermore, in many images, Akhenaten is shown in ways that indicate his overt affection for Nefertiti, with the couple often posed in intimate, sensual, and relaxed ways. This was significantly different from the deportment of previous pharaohs, who had rarely exhibited public familiarity with their spouses. Whether the presentation of Akhenaten in statues was a reflection of his physical deformity or an attempt to cover it up remains unknown; yet, one may say that the experimental style foretells a different aesthetic sense that prevailed during Akhenaten’s reign. It is also possible that this style owed its origin to the new religion of Aten, who was thought to possess androgynous features. One might also argue that the emaciated depictions of Akhenaten in statues and images were intended to highlight his extra-human, god-like status. Akhenaten was a man of strong vision, who was propelled to take action and transform the physical environment to express his beliefs. And as much as revolutionary religious beliefs gave rise to novel artistic expressions, so did new types of space emerge in his time. His vision was most concretely realized and manifested through the built form of his new capital—the city of Akhetaten (Figure 5.4). For Akhenaten, it was crucial that the new capital be situated in uninhabited desert above the east bank of the Nile, on land uncontaminated by the past, the worship of any other god, or any trace of history. As such, the new capital was different from all other cities of ancient Egypt, which were imagined to inherit mythical elements—from water to earth. At his chosen isolated desert site between Memphis and Thebes, to which even the water had to be hauled, Akhenaten built many structures at astonishing speed and scale, including the Great Aten Temple. The new site had ample space for the construction of the ambitious capital city. But it also benefited greatly from its proximity to the Nile, which not only lent it a religious aura but also provided it with a large expanse of agricultural land to support its new residents.



Avaris and Akhetaten

Figure 5.4 The Amarna area, showing Akhetaten

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River The city of Akhetaten was defined by a total of 16 boundary stelae, beyond which it was not to extend. The establishment of markers by the stelae provides a glimpse of how Akhenaten first proclaimed the chosen site of Akhetaten, then set its boundaries, promising a major building effort. Today, the buildings and the landscape he created provide the crucial medium through which we can understand Akhenaten’s vision. This involved the construction of temples dedicated to Aten, palaces for the royal family, and tombs, most of which would later be located in a remote valley in the mountains to the east of the city. Akhenaten built many temples in Thebes, and particularly in Karnak, before he began the construction of Akhetaten. And characteristically, all of these temples, including those built in Akhetaten, had no roof, which was meant to connect them to the sun. The main architect behind the construction of the new capital was undoubtedly the king himself, who was able to wield absolute power and make use of the most of plentiful resources. Palaces and temples, located in series along the line of the riverbank, seem to have been on Akhenaten’s agenda for Akhetaten. Extending from the north, a broad highway now called the Royal Road passed the North Riverside Palace, the Great Ramp, the North Palace, and the Central City, while pointing toward Kom el-Nana to the south. At the central point of this north–south axis lay the Central City, where state buildings, along with an irregular complex of service buildings, were concentrated. Initially, Akhenaten seems to have planned the Royal Road in parallel with the river bank, but an increase in population and the need to build structures to house it must have eventually hindered its further extension to the south beyond the Central City. The main road, which ran parallel to the Nile, was also the primary locus where the royal family displayed their divinity by means of parades and rituals. According to the king’s plan, the boundary stelae remained the only signpost that indicated the city limits. Otherwise, Akhetaten seems to have had neither boundary lines nor surrounding walls or fences. If they ever existed, they had probably been abandoned by the time Akhetaten was finished, since there was no threat from without Egypt. Even if there were some who might have trespassed into the city, it is unlikely that they posed a threat to the authority of Akhenaten. In ancient Egypt, it was primarily through buildings and images, not through words, that religion found its expression, and today the remains of Akhetaten’s temples and landscape provide tangible evidence of the way the religion of Aten was conceived by ancient Egyptians. For example, it is known that Akhenaten strove to escape the traditions of his time. However, a simple ordering scheme nonetheless seems to have determined the layout of Akhetaten—especially as regards the preferred orientations of the temples toward the Nile. Conventional temple designs were



Avaris and Akhetaten

typically based on an axis line from river frontage to a sanctuary at the back. And the two main Aten temples—the Great Aten Temple and the Small Aten Temple—developed this axis even further, by adding spatial elements that would emphasize the openness to the river. In contrast to the Small Aten Temple, which was designed as a single building and is thus easier to comprehend, the wrecked site of the Great Aten Temple provides relatively little information as to its original layout and function. A mud-brick wall today surrounds an almost empty area 800 meters by 300 meters, which gives a disorienting feeling to the individual buildings therein—the Long Temple and the Sanctuary. A pair of brick pylons in the center of the west wall was the main entrance to the Great Aten Temple. The pylons might have once had four deep rectangular slots for tall wooden flagpoles. The Long Temple was a narrow building of stone, measuring about 190 meters by 33 meters, which stood 32 meters away from the pylons (Figure 3.5). Its fifth court had concentric rectangles inside, a pattern similar to that found in the next segment, the sixth court. These two courts served as the most important space of the temple, containing tables of offerings that would have served as the principal focus of attention. In Akhetaten’s temples, tables of offering were the symbolically crucial space, where the king staged religious ceremonies facing toward the sun. By contrast, the Sanctuary at the rear of the Great Aten Temple was an empty space without any features. Akhenaten is also described as having built “apartments” or “houses” for himself and his wife in Akhetaten (Figure 5.6), along with a “House of Rejoicing.” While “apartments” or “houses” generally refer in Egyptian records to palaces, the “House of Rejoicing” seems to have indicated a palace. Normally, Egyptian palaces are thought to have been spaces of

Figure 5.5 Plan of the Long Temple

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Figure 5.6 Plan of the central area of Akhetaten

multiple function designed to separate the ruler from the rest of society. Anything but intimate, they were intended to give a strong impression to visitors. But this account may not fit the shape and function of all ancient Egyptian palaces. For example, between the central square of Amarna, which functioned as a food distribution center in Ahketaten, and the Small Aten Temple lay a group of small mud-brick buildings with no fixed plans. These small houses seem to have served multiple functions, from centers for social and administrative services to places of recreation. Indeed, if the notion of palace is considered to describe more than simply an enclosed architectural form, but instead to represent an institution, one may think that the entire Central City was Akhenaten’s principal palace—only without an enclosure wall. In fact, in Ahketaten, all houses of administration were centrally located, including that of the high priest, Pa-nehesi, which was located



Avaris and Akhetaten

near the rear of the Great Aten Temple. Pa-nehesi’s house was built in a convenient location to help him in his other role—as the superintendent of Aten’s cattle. And his other house, at the northern end of the city, functioned as a domestic office, from which he could conduct his administrative duties. Separated by the Royal Road, the two worlds of the scribal offices and the Great Palace were connected by a bridge resting on mud-brick piers. The largest building at Akhetaten, the Great Palace was located along the west side of the Royal Road. The central part of this palace was built of stone and arranged in parallel to the Nile. A massive entrance might have existed at the north of the palace. A huge courtyard stood behind the façade on the south, with a square hall of columns, subdivided into two side aisles, at its rear. Akhenaten’s tomb, cut into the rock of a narrow valley, also contained a burial chamber for his daughter Meketaten. An unfinished subsidiary tomb therein might have been either for her or for Nefertiti. The Valley of the Kings, where royal tombs were built in the escarpment facing Akhetaten, also had tombs for various “priests.” This term did not have a religious connotation, but rather designated a broad category of people who served Akhenaten, from stewards and military officers to policemen and scribes. Their tombs were divided into two groups: the northern group enjoying the high cliff, and the southern group being located on a low escarpment. In order to build his visionary capital city in a barren desert in such a short time, a large number of people must have had to be recruited. The pace of construction was also evident in the wide use of unburnt brick in the construction of its buildings. And among the thousands of people who came to build the new capital city must have been both those long loyal to the king and those new to the court. Texts carved in the rock tombs bear testimony to the interlocking relationship between royal patronage and popular obligation—the inner workings of the city. And quite a few loyal courtiers were promoted by the king from humble station to high status, which was publicly recognizable by costly gifts and prizes—golden objects and foodstuffs. Even people such as metal-workers, jewelry- and furniture-makers, and sculptors were included in the list of those who received expensive gifts from the king. Like Akhenaten himself, who brought his own group of people to the new land, people of high rank moved to Akhetaten with a crowd of dependants. The high priest Pa-nehesi, for instance, moved with his people, who would later build small villages adjacent to main settlement. It was these ordinary people who completed and formed the city that Akhenaten had wanted to dedicate to Aten. The end of the new city was close at hand around 1336 bc when Akhenaten died, in the seventeenth year of his reign. Shortly before his death, Akhenaten’s daughters as well as Queen Tiye also died, probably

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River owing to an outbreak of plague which swept ancient Egypt. Egypt’s military allies, most notably the Mitanni, were being attacked at the time by the Hittites, a competing empire to the north which already posed a grave threat to the pharaoh. It was during this chaotic period that the revolutionary king died, for reasons unknown. And a combination of fatal disease and military threat at the time might have provided the catalyst for the dramatic change that followed. What transpired after Akhenaten’s death remains unclear and contested. Various sources indicate he was followed by a king named Smenkhkare (1335–1332 bc). But who was this new pharaoh, who ruled for a few years before Akhenaten’s son Tutankhaten ascended to the throne? In a letter sent to the Hittite king during this period, Suppiluliumas, allegedly an Egyptian young widow begged him to send one of his sons to marry her, and she would ensure he became a pharaoh. It is possible the writer of this plea was none other than Nefertiti—or her daughter, Meritaten, who may have served as a ceremonial wife for the latter part of Suppiluliumas’s reign, but may have been the person to marry Smenkhkare. What remains unanswered is the identity of Smenkhakare. Might this have been Nefertiti herself, or one of the Hittite princes that Suppiluliumas sent to Egypt? Or might both of them have ruled Egypt collectively under the name of Smenkhakare? Akhenaten’s heir Tutankhaten (r. 1332–1322 bc), however, eventually succeeded to the throne at the age of 10, and was crowned at Akhetaten. Yet, he soon abandoned his father’s religion, renouncing references to the sun god and replacing the “Aten” in his name with “Amun,” returning to an older tradition; he thus changed his name from Tutankhaten (“the living image of Aten”) to Tutankhamun (“the original image of Amun”). Subsequently, Akhetaten was abandoned. The city, however, was not completely destroyed. The buildings built of mud-brick remained, although anything useful, such as wood, was scavenged. By contrast, stone buildings, mostly located close to the river, were disassembled, and their stones were transported by boat to other sites, to be incorporated into other buildings. Another significant move made by Tutankhamun was to return the capital to Thebes. And he soon married the third daughter of Akhenaten, Anhksenpaaten, who later became Ankhsenamun. Yet, it was Ay (1322– 1319 bc), the young king’s main vizier, who is thought to have wielded actual power behind the throne. It is possible that Ay served as a co-regent during the reign of Tutankhamun, and figured prominently in the young king’s rejection of Aten. After Tutankhamun died without issue at the age of 19, it was also Ay who came to power and became the new pharaoh. Tutankhamun’s death remains mysterious, and various sources suggest that Ay may either have murdered him or have had him removed from power before his death.



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But before closing this chapter, there is another character who deserves our attention. This is Horemheb (1319–1292 bc), who began his military career during the reign of Akhenaten and who later became the head of the army during Tutankhamun’s reign. Like Ay, Horemheb was not of royal blood, and in a coup-like move he succeeded Ay to the throne. It was Horemheb who actually undertook the massive work of dismantling Akhetaten’s temples to the god Aten, as well as many of his royal buildings. He also destroyed statues of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, and attempted to erase their names from official history. Indeed, with Horemheb, the Eighteenth Dynasty came to an end. Along with the complete abandonment of it as a settlement site, as well as its excision from public memory, the location of Akhetaten in the desert above the Nile did, however, make it immune from floods, looting, and human habitation for thousands of years. Hence, the city survived the passing of the time by being forgotten. Akhetaten thus still presents much archaeological evidence from the past, from the original brick walls of Akhetaten houses to several buildings that are three millennia old. Akhetaten’s posthumous fate is thus similar to that of Akhenaten, whose name was removed from the king-list, whose buildings were destroyed, and whose memory was completely obliterated for later generations. However, the word “obliteration” alone is insufficient to fathom the whole attack on the rebellious king as well as his visionary capital city. Akhetaten as a city became inaccessible to successive generations of Egypt in ancient as well as contemporary times. The city held its own form of encryption in its structure, which required much time and effort to be uncovered. It is a further paradox that Akhenaten’s revolutionary vision, con­ sidered heretical by his successors, eventually also gained iconic status in the modern period. In the twentieth century, Akhenaten was re-evaluated as a figure of great importance because he advocated worshipping only one god, as Judaism and Islam would also later advocate. Perhaps this reinterpretation of the king also provides a mirror to the present. His images have been consumed by multiple parties, depending on their political, intellectual, and artistic interests. For example, the limestone bust of his wife Nefertiti, a rare find which is now stored in a Berlin museum, is one of the most beautiful works of art from ancient Egypt, and is considered the most accurate representation of an elegant queen. It would, though, be inaccurate to describe Akhenaten’s era as a monotheistic time. In ancient Egypt, plural forms of religious traditions—from material fetish to animal gods—coexisted even during Akhenaten’s reign. Akhenaten’s visionary attempt to create a new religious tradition and build a new capital, rather, bear resemblance to millennia-old political tactics by which a ruling class may strive to gain legitimacy by declaring a renewal or a renaissance—or by making the state “great again,” in contemporary language.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Although Akhenaten’s legacy has continued in religion, architecture, and art, his city of Akhetaten, however, shared the fate of Avaris, the capital city of the Hyksos. The two cities were built from scratch according to the strong wills and visions of their rulers. Yet they were subsequently abandoned after the rulers departed. One was the city of the rebellious king who denied the centuries-long tradition of ancient Egypt; the other was the site of the foreign enemies who were thought to have humiliated Egypt. As much as their kings lacked legitimacy, the histories of the two cities long remained ignored by subsequent rulers, and this fact has paradoxically amplified the production and reproduction of myths around them in the modern period. Bibliography Assmann, Jan. 2002. The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs. New York: Metropolitan Books. Bietak, Manfred. 1981. Avaris and Piramesse: Archaeological Exploration in the Eastern Nile Delta. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bietak, Manfred. 1996. Avaris, the Capital of the Hyksos: Recent Excavations at Tell el-Dab ’a. London: British Museum Press. Breasted, James Henry. 1933. The Dawn of Conscience. New York: Scribner. Burkhardt, John Lewis. 1819. Travels in Nubia. London: John Murray. Gardiner, Alan H. 1961. Egypt of the Pharaohs: An Introduction. London: Oxford University Press. Gore, Rick. 2011. “Pharaohs of the Sun,” National Geographic, April, pp. 34–57. Kemp, Barry J. 2014. The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Amarna and Its People. London: Thames & Hudson. Lepsius, Richard. 1853. Discoveries in Egypt, Ethiopia and the Peninsula of Sinai, in the Years 1842–1845, During the Mission Sent Out by His Majesty, Frederick William IV of Prussia. London: R. Bentley. Montet, Pierre. 1968. Lives of the Pharaohs. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Rohl, David M. 2007. The Lords of Avaris: Uncovering the Legendary Origins of Western Civilization. London: Century.

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Nubia on the Nile: The Kingdom of the Black Pharaohs in Napata and Meroe These monuments do not belong solely to the countries who hold them in trust. The whole world has the right to see them endure. — Vittorino Veronese, Director-General of UNESCO, 1960, as recorded as an engraving at the site of the Abu Simbel temple

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n a small, indistinct island near Aswan in Upper Egypt lies a small lodge nestled serenely in a slightly hilly terrain with a magnificent view of the Nile. The Agilika Lodge, an ecologically sensitive small hotel, humble in size, is, however, named after another island nearby. That island, its namesake, stood vacant for thousands of years before being vaulted to international attention as the new home of the famous ancient Egyptian temple of Philae (Figure 6.1). As the story goes, when the Aswan Low Dam was completed in 1902, the island of Philae behind it, on which the temple stood, was partially inundated by water. Then, by the 1960s, when the High Dam was under construction, it became clear that many other temples would soon perish

Figure 6.1 The island of Philae

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River under the water of the mammoth new reservoir behind it. Something had to be done to rescue these magnificent ancient structures. Ultimately, it fell to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to embark on a major international campaign to preserve and relocate them. And many such temples were eventually cut from the rock on which they stood, or into which they had been carved, and moved to higher ground, so that they could be visited and appreciated by future generations. As part of the larger UNESCO effort, Agilika, a decent-size island in the archipelago between the two dams (and the closest island to Philae), was selected as the new site of the Philae temple. In a twist of irony, the word agilika in the language of the Nubians—the indigenous inhabitants of this region of the Nile—means “don’t forget me.” It is difficult to pinpoint the exact time when the island was given this name; but in a form of poetic justice, and because of a quirk in geography, the island which wished not to be forgotten now became the location of the renowned temple of Philae, a major historical monument. If only Nubia and its people had been equally fortunate! Perhaps Agilika, both the lodge and the island, may today stand as a symbol of the struggles of the Nubian people over the millennia. Perhaps they can also speak for these ancient inhabitants of this part of the Upper Nile, who once built an empire and a prosperous civilization, but who encountered major hardships and resisted attempts to force them off their land for centuries. Today, this region of the Nile, unlike Lower Egypt with its Giza pyramids, has an economy that relies almost exclusively on tourism. But while Lower Egypt screams with exuberant hotels and luxurious resorts, the humble eco-lodge further south whispers agilika for those willing to listen. Its owner built it specifically to raise awareness of the Nubians, a people whose history and culture have been silently covered by thick layers of sand through acts of nature and human intervention. For several millennia, Nubian civilization stretched from north of the Abu Simbel temple (or the area referred to as Lower Nubia) to the pyramids of Napata and Meroe in Upper Nubia. Geographically, the area is divided by a series of rapids called the Cataracts, formed when the river runs over granite ledges. The First Cataract lies north of Aswan, in Egypt, while the Sixth is located 1,600 kilometers to the south, just north of Khartoum, the present capital of Sudan. Throughout their long history, the Nubians, a dark-skinned people, faced periodic affronts and succumbed to the rule of many pharaohs, who governed them as god-kings. The boundaries of their communities changed constantly, shifting their zone of influence and allowing a strange cultural flux to occur. Before Nubian civilization emerged in its own right, the Nubians had settled the region and established many towns. But it was the early Nubian kings,



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known today as the black pharaohs, who rose to greatest prominence. Referred to as the Kushites, after their first king, Kashta, who partly established the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, they ruled from the city of Napata. Kashta’s successors would then continue to rule parts of Egypt from Meroe, during the later decades of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, particularly after the Nubians were expelled from Egypt and before the final collapse of the ancient Egyptian’s empire and the dissolution of the Nubian people into the tribal cultures of Africa. By the time of the 1899 Condominium Agreement, which determined the status of Sudan between Britain and Egypt, the displacement of the Nubian people and their structures had already begun. But it wasn’t until the middle of the twentieth century that this displacement reached its peak, as Nubia’s most significant monument, the Abu Simbel temple, had to be rescued from inundation by water behind the Aswan High Dam. In addition to the relocation and reconstruction of such a great monument, construction of the dam entailed a significant displacement of the Nubian people from their ancestral lands (Figure 6.2). Our story starts with Abu Simbel, perhaps of all the temples of ancient Egypt the most beloved by Egyptians and tourists alike. Built by Ramesses II (r. 1279–1213 bc) one of the longest-reigning monarch in Egyptian history, in honor to the gods Amun-Re and Re-Horakhty, the temple was entirely carved out of the mountain so that it consisted mainly of outer facades and inner rooms. It stood as part of a complex that also included a smaller temple dedicated to Ramesses II’s wife, Nefertari, and colossal statues of both queen and king. Outside Abu Simbel, the Egyptian ruler

Figure 6.2 Many Nubian settlements were displaced by the construction of the Aswan High Dam

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River also portrayed himself on a sandstone facade alongside the statues of himself 20 meters high and statues of his wife 10 meters high. Although no reliable source explains where the name “Abu Simbel” comes from, some folk tales allege that a man bearing that name led the first European explorers to its site. The complex, located in Lower Nubia, has always been as admired for its construction technique as well as for its survival in the face of time. However, in 1960, and before the construction of the Aswan High Dam, high floods along the Nile in the region where the temple is located caused it to be partially submerged under water, year after year. Since it was carved out of a sandstone hill, this threatened the entire monument with collapse. UNESCO engaged with the Egyptian government to execute the salvage of Abu Simbel. The plan of action involved cutting off the facade and inner walls of the temple and relocating them to a safer site at a higher elevation. In order to do so, huge blocks had to be transported and reassembled in a new cavern, 60 meters above the original site. A concrete dome was then built directly on top in this new location to give the temple the appearance of being carved out of rock, as it had been originally (Figure 6.3). Today, the principal entrance to the main temple leads to the Great Temple Rooms, which start about 14 meters inside the rock surface. After walking through the Courtyard Hall, which is connected to the Hypostyle Hall, a well-marked axis guides the visitor along a path to the ante­chamber, and finally to the rear Sanctuary. The recognition of the Great Temple of Abu Simbel as an important heritage site saved it from dis­appearing, along with the legacy of the Nubian region within which it

Figure 6.3 Relocation of the Abu Simbel temple complex required elaborate new construction



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exists. Unfortunately, very few other structures in this area were recognized and preserved as well as Abu Simbel. In fact, the relocation of the temple to higher ground may have been just as drastic an action as the displacement of the Nubians and the disappearance of their ancient culture. Fascination with the civilization of the Nubians began in the first half of the nineteenth century, with the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt and the Frenchman Frédéric Cailliaud. Burckhardt decided to follow his studies at the universities of Leipzig and Göttingen with study of the Arabic language at Cambridge. He then set off for the Middle East in the first decade of the nineteenth century, equipped with little more than passion and a degree, passing himself off as a merchant. After living in Aleppo for a while, he moved to Cairo, using the city as a base for repeated excursions to Nubia—or what came to be known by early explorers as the land of black pharaohs and the Kushite kingdom of ancient Egypt. The Kushite kingdom defined a unique era in Egyptian history, and it produced two important cities, Napata and Meroe, which served as capitals of the ancient kingdoms of Upper Egypt (Figure 6.4). Burckhardt

Figure 6.4 Principal sites of the Kushite kingdom

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River departed Cairo to explore Nubia in March 1813, and was later happy to bear the label of the first white man to see the temple of Abu Simbel. He observed, “The desert of Nubia is not a boundless expanse of sand in which nothing interrupts the desolate monotony. It is dotted with peaks, some of which reach no less than two or three hundred feet in height, and here and there they are shaded by dense, vigorous woods of palms and acacias” (Burckhardt 1819: 7). Due to the initial efforts of Burckhardt, Cailliaud later succeeded in locating the ruins of Meroe, the second capital of the Kushite pharaohs. Cailliaud was filled with emotion when he first saw the numerous pyramids there. Although not as large or high as the pyramids of Lower Egypt, the pyramids of Meroe are equally impressive in composition and proportion. The discoveries of these European explorers soon led to the gradual unveiling of Napata and Meroe as the successive capitals of the Kushites during their golden age. But the story of settlement in the region starts much earlier. Archaeological findings confirm that during the fifth millennium bc, in prehistoric times, the original Neolithic inhabitants of the area migrated from regions south of the Sahara and settled along the banks of the Blue Nile, in what is now part of northern Sudan. It is believed that the predynastic civilizations of Egypt originated from this Neolithic civilization, and that its inhabitants would later become the Nubian people. The large collections of Egyptian commodities in the graves of the early Nubian kings, found by archaeologists, suggest that early Nubians traded extensively with the northern Egyptians. However, other artifacts reveal that peaceful trade between the Nubians and the early dynasties of Lower Egypt was occasionally broken by hostile actions committed by the Egyptians against what they called “the people living south of the First Cataract.” However, inscriptions found near the First Cataract, in an area delimited by the boundaries of the southern-most city in Egypt during the reign of King Mernere of the Egyptian Sixth Dynasty, reveal that the Egyptians had no intention to move farther south. Unfortunately, we know little of the Nubian side of the story, as Nubia produced no texts or writing of its own in the early period. All early references to Nubia appear in the ancient Egyptian language; and by the time of the black pharaohs, they and their courts had completely adopted this form of writing. In the early days, the domestic architecture of the Nubians consisted of hemispherical huts made from frames covered with straw or grass. Their jewelry comprised shell, ivory, bone, and stone beads, and their clothes were often made of dyed leather. Later, a new group of inhabitants came from Central Africa to the region. This group appeared to be more resistant to Egyptian domination. Indeed, when Senusret I, the second king of the Twelfth Dynasty (c. 1970–1936 bc), embarked on a campaign to colonize Nubia, he had to engage in a massive military expedition. And



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archaeologists have inferred that the many Egyptian forts in the area were mainly built to keep these “new” inhabitants under control. This earliest conquest and occupation of Nubia by the Egyptians seems to have started with Amenemhat I (c. 2000–1970 bc), the first king of the Twelfth Dynasty; but it was his son Senusret I who completed it. During Senusret’s reign, 14 forts were constructed in Nubia to oversee the new land and hold down a potentially hostile population. However, for 80 years after the reign of Senusret I, there was relative peace in Nubia, as trade flourished between the two peoples. However, for some unknown reason, Senusret III seems to have resumed military operations in Nubia, possibly to deal with uprisings by the inhabitants. After the reign of Senusret III, who was also assumed to be the mythical warrior Sesostris, there was another period of peace in Nubia, and multiple inscriptions indicate that Egyptians from the north began to settle in the region. But the threat posed by the Hyksos, a tribe that migrated from western Asia to the eastern banks of the Nile, eventually brought instability and the collapse of the Thirteenth Dynasty. Ironic­ ally, the conquest of Egypt by the Hyksos is believed by some to have influenced the eventual Egyptianization of Nubia. Nubian soldiers joined the Egyptian fight against the Hyksos; and these same Nubian soldiers later brought practices of Egyptian culture back to their land. This may have also made the Nubians less resistant to a new expansion of Egyptian control from the north once the threat posed by the Hyksos had passed. As soon as the Eighteenth Dynasty came to power, they immediately set out to advance the frontier of Egypt into Nubia. But it was Tuth­ mosis I (r. 1530–1520 bc), the third king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who consolidated the conquest. Tuthmosis I effectively occupied the entire Dongola Reach, which was the “heart” of Nubia at the time, finalizing the greatest expansion of the Egyptian empire within Africa. Nubia was, by then, fully part of Egypt, and the Egyptian king’s eldest son, or viceroy, was traditionally made responsible for the administration of the southern half of the country, extending from the city of Hierakonpolis to the small town of Napata. It is not surprising that the original Nubian kingdoms were centered on small towns. Indeed, most ancient Egyptian settlements were not as large or complex as those of Ur or Babylon in Mesopotamia. But it was during this dynasty that Egyptians and Nubians largely intermingled, living, marrying, and working together. Indeed, the Nubian cemeteries of the era include tombs of Egyptian as well as Nubian officials, whereas such a mixture is unusual elsewhere in Egypt. Ramesses II was the most important king of the Nineteenth Dynasty; but following his long rule, which featured many military victories and much building activity, Egypt faced various internal uprisings, as well as external threats from surrounding powers. Then, under the reign of Ramesses XI, a civil war broke out. The viceroy, Pa-nehesi, and his

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Nubian troops eventually restored order in the south. Pa-nehesi’s successor, Herikor, often also referred to as Herihor, would later become the king of Upper Egypt (1085 bc), and it would be his successors who would become the black pharaohs of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty. With the end of the Egyptian New Kingdom in 1070 bc, the Nubians migrated further south and settled in Napata. And it was from here that the Kushite kingdom would later develop and govern the region for more than a century. Kashta (r. 760–747 bc)—from whose name the word Kushite is derived—was the first to assume full pharaonic titles and see himself as a legitimate heir to the throne of Egypt. Kashta believed he had been chosen by the god Amun to conquer and reunite Egypt; and, indeed, during his reign he attempted to extend his control over the entire country. Archaeological findings from Kushite cemeteries provide evidence that there were Nubian kings before Kashta, but he was the first to be based in Napata— and the first effective ruler of what was to become the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty. Kashta was eventually responsible for a massive Egyptianization of Nubia, as he ruled over an area that initially extended from Napata to Aswan (or the First Cataract). He was also the first Nubian king to claim the old Egyptian title of “Lord of the Two Lands.” However, it was Kashta’s son and successor Piye—whose name was formerly Piankhy—who would turn out to be the real conqueror of Lower Egypt. Ascending to the throne, Piye first extended Kushite influence downriver to Thebes. There, he had his sister Amenirdis I adopted by the incumbent priestess, Shepenwepet I, or “Wife of the God Amun.” And this was a title Amenirdis would herself later receive. Napata was the most important Nubian cult center, because the Nubian god Amun was believed to dwell at the nearby scared mountain of Gebel Barkal. But the Nubians considered their Amun to be a brother of the Theban Amun, whom they believed responsible for endowing the pharaoh with the power to rule over all of Egypt and Kush. For two decades, Piye’s reign seemed to be stable and peaceful, until powers from the north started to endanger his kingdom. Specifically, when Tefnakht—the prince of Lower Egypt—took control of Memphis and the old Middle Kingdom center of Itj-tawy, threatening Kushite interests, Piye decided not only to make war on Tefnakht, but to lead the attack himself. His plan of attack, however, was first to send his soldiers north to besiege the city of Hermopolis, a small kingdom whose ruler, Namlot, had submitted to Tefnakht. Then, hearing that Namlot had left his own city to fight for his new lord in the siege of Herakleopolis, Piye’s men went straight to Herakleopolis to confront both Namlot and Tefnakht. After they had defeated Tefnakht’s forces, they pursued him and his remaining soldiers north, while Namlot escaped and returned to Hermopolis. In the conquest of Hermopolis, Piye himself took command of the siege. He first made sure that the city walls were enclosed with mud so the



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residents could not escape, and he then placed his archers in a great tower, from which they could shoot over the walls. In this way, Namlot and his city were forced to surrender. Piye was an interesting king also noted for being a great horse lover. When he attacked Hermopolis and discovered the poor condition of Namlot’s stables, he was very troubled. A relief in Piye’s temple on Gebel Barkal shows him freeing these horses and taking care of them. Indeed, when he was buried, he had his horses buried with him in his tomb. As Piye and his forces headed north to take over Memphis, the cities of the Nile valley surrendered one by one to his army. In Memphis, seeing that the city was well fortified and that part of its walls were protected by the waters of the Nile, he ordered his men to attack the harbor and confiscate all its ferryboats and cargo ships. The use of the Nile as a path was crucial to conquering Memphis. And by lining these vessels up across the river Piye was ultimately able to create a bridge from which his soldiers could attack the city’s eastern wall. After the capture of Memphis, all of Egypt submitted to Piye—even Tefnakht, who had taken refuge on an island in the northern Nile delta, and who sent a message begging for pardon. Now Piye, the descendent of former slaves, was pharaoh—not of a Kushite kingdom, but of all Egypt. Indeed, he reigned over a land that extended from Napata in the south (which remained his capital for a while because of its significance to Kushite politics) to Thebes, in the middle of the Nile valley, to Memphis, where the Nile delta began. The rule of Piye’s family was to last for almost four decades. The city of Napata represented the heart of the Kushite kingdom (Figure 6.5). It lay on the west bank of the Nile near the Fourth Cataract, and for centuries was the most important place of rule for the Kushite

Figure 6.5 The pyramids at Napata

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River kings. In fact, many historians define this era as the “Napatan period,” and its kingdom as the “Napatan state.” Due to the city’s importance (and despite his conquest of much of Egypt), Piye decided to follow his predecessors’ footsteps and stay in Napata. It is believed that the limits of the later Napatan kingdom extended from the Third Cataract (including Kawa and Kerma) all the way south to where the White Nile and the Blue Nile meet. Piye’s son Taharka (r. 690–664 bc), a man considered by some Egyptologists to be the last of the great pharaohs, was known not only as a pharaoh of ancient Egypt but also as a great Kushite king. His reign brought a period of prosperity, and it is not surprising that the most outstanding sculptures and temples of the early Napatan period were made during Taharka’s reign. Taharka built widely. In fact, he is known today as the one Kushite king who built and restored as many temples throughout Egypt (including in Memphis and Thebes) as in Nubia. He also enlarged the temples of Napata, established new sanctuaries in several Nubian towns (like Qasr Ibrim), and renovated the New Kingdom temples at Kaw, as well as the temple to Amun-Re at Karnak, which is considered his greatest landmark. He also built the altar, the 11 large granite statues (representing him, his queen, and five later kings), and a granite sphinx of Senkamanisken in Gebel Barkal (the mountain of Amun). The cult of Amun remained central to religion and politics in Kushite culture, even as it faded in Lower Egypt. The Kushites of Napata believed that Amun was the only god to be worshiped, and hence all campaigns were conducted in his name. After Taharka’s death, his nephew Tanutamun assumed the crown, but he had to spend much of his reign defending Egypt against the Assyrian invasions of Esarhadon in 671 bc and Ashurbanipal in 667 bc. Ultimately, Tanutamun was forced to abandon Thebes and much of the rest of Lower Egypt after having reigned there for eight years (664–656 bc). But he remained as the king of Kush for three more years. And despite Tanutamun’s retreat, Thebes remained loyal to the Napatan king for almost another decade, because the high priest of Amun there was a member of the Kushite family and loyal to the Kushite kings. Following Tanutamun’s withdrawal, Psamtek I, an Egyptian king of Libyan origin who ruled Sais—a town in the western delta, close to the Libyan desert—collaborated with the Assyrians as they colonized the region. He took over the Egyptian kingdom and became the “founder” of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty (664–610 bc). But later on, Atlanersa (r. 653–640 bc) rose to take over the Nubian throne, ruling over a Kushite kingdom bounded in the north by Aswan. Atlanersa had to use merc­ enaries to subdue his rivals and establish his authority in the rest of the territory. And this was effectively accomplished only after Nitocris, the daughter of Psamtek I, was declared “Wife of the God Amun,” succeeding Shepenwepet II, the sister of Taharka. Although they had been expelled



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from Egypt, the Napatan kings still used the title of “King of the Two Lands,” reflecting their claim to all of Egypt. Indeed, by this time, most of the religious costumes and rituals and court practices of Lower Egypt had been fully adopted into Nubian culture (Figure 6.6). When the Assyrian-supported rulers of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty defeated Tanutamun and sacked Napata, the Kushites were forced to move to Meroe, further south. However, they did not abandon Napata entirely; they still saw it as their holy city because it housed the temple of Amun at the base of the Gebel Barkal mountain. And long after the Kushite kings moved to Meroe, they still returned to Napata to be crowned in the temple and to be buried in the holy cemeteries nearby. The new Kushite capital, Meroe, was a well-watered city located between the Fifth Cataract and the merging of the Nile and the Atbara River. But despite being an appropriate site for agriculture, bringing significant growth to the economy, there were other reasons why the Kushites moved there. According to some historians, this included the local availability of iron ore, which gave them the opportunity to develop ironworking and enhance their tools and techniques. Figure 6.6 The Napatan kings continued to Iron tools allowed the Nubians to make wear the double crown even after being expelled hoes and axes to plow and cultivate the from Egypt land more effectively. In fact, Meroe soon became an industrial center of sorts, producing many iron implements. Because it lay within a region of tropical seasonal rainfall, the Nubian Kushites, who may now be called Meroites, were able to build large rain-collection pools and a complex system of irrigation canals. This allowed grassy plains to flourish on either side of Meroe, replacing barren dunes. While rainfall in the area enabled agriculture, its soil was very suitable for cultivation, and could be cropped for several months of the year. The availability of arable land further permitted the Meroites, the majority

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of whom were peasant farmers and cattle herders, to move away from the banks of the Nile. Living in houses built from mud and reed, clustered in small rural villages, they could thus avoid the ravages of the seasonal Figure 6.7 The pyramids at Meroe Nile floods. For their part, the craftsmen of Meroe were influenced by the art and icon­ography of northern Egypt and the Napatan period. The tombs of the Meroitic kings, at both Meroe and Gebel Barkal, are small, steep-sided pyra­mids, like those of the rulers of the Napatan period (Figure 6.7). But with the move to Meroe, Kushite architecture and ornamentation also changed and gained its own identity, diverging from that of Napata. As with much of Meroitic society, it maintained an intrinsic relation to religion, however. And the town’s form as well as its architectural style reflected the Meroitic belief in a close connection between religious and government affairs. Eventually, this new Kushite capital would become the most important African city of its time, as it expanded from a simple royal capital to a more complex urban center. At its height, Meroe was composed of a walled royal area, residential compounds, an industrial area, cemeteries, and temples. Its architecture and ornamentation were influenced by both the Napatan and Ptolemaic styles; because it was an important trading center, the Meroites interacted directly with these northern cultures. Meroe’s largest buildings were its major temple and central palace. The king’s palace had simple living quarters and large audience halls, and it was surrounded by courtyards and storehouses. All these components were connected by a processional way, along which smaller temples and sphinxes were aligned, eventually leading to the temple of Amun. Such a processional path, often connecting large courtyards, was typically used for public gatherings, ceremonies, and rituals reaffirming the ruler’s loyalty to the god Amun. The temple of Amun itself was 140 meters long and was accessed by means of a path lined by four stone rams. It was built with bricks and punctuated by columns and pylons. The temple plan featured an outer hall with a small stone shrine in its center. The shrine had a pulpit on its west side, accessed via steps with engraved scenes of kneeling prisoners. A series of smaller halls led to the main sanctuary, whose altar was decorated with religious scenes. Two other important structures in the town should be mentioned here: these are today known as the “Royal Bath” and the “Sun Temple.” The Royal Bath was a colonnaded building, built in red brick, with a big water tank at its center. The tank itself was surrounded by statues and painted walls. Such a design derived from a Hellenistic model introduced to Lower Egypt in Ptolemaic times.



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While the Royal Bath was located immediately to the west of the palace, the Sun Temple was more distant. On the west side of the town, it was connected to the royal city by means of a processional path. Throughout its history, the Sun Temple underwent many changes. During the Napatan period, it had originally been built on a simple raised platform. But it was rebuilt in the Meroitic period, gaining a colonnaded platform and a new means of access to the sanctuary by means of a raised ramp. Inscriptions found on the walls of the Sun Temple indicate that the structure also served as a hall to celebrate military victories. In particular, its eastern facade was decorated with illustrations of prisoners. The houses of Meroe accommodated extended families and were usually built with sun-dried brick, the same material that was commonly used in Napata and Lower Egypt. Smaller rooms were usually ancillary to larger ones, which might serve either as living areas or as bedrooms—and thus contained fireplaces and cooking facilities. Meroe also had three cemeteries for the elites and the royal rulers. These often featured mastabas and pyramids placed over single, rock-cut burial chambers that could be reached via a stairway. The mastabas were usually made of stones and were square shaped, while the pyramids were far smaller than the ones built in Lower Egypt. The pyramids of Meroe were among the last pyramids ever built in Egypt and Nubia. The first of them (2600–1520 bc) were typically made of two layers of sandstone blocks, with steep slopes and small-scaled bases. These constructions later evolved into rubble-filled brick structures. Their external walls were then covered with lime plaster, decorated, and painted. The royal pyramids had their own chapels, located on their eastern sides. These were decorated with scenes of cults and funerary rituals, which were supposed to sustain the deceased in the afterlife. A few of the pyramids built by the Kushites in Meroe were quite large. These structures were sited in such a manner that when the sun struck them they appeared gold from different angles as the sun moved from east to west. These pyramids also had forecourts decor­ ated with funeral procession scenes. The three royal cemeteries—located to the north, south, and west of the town—were slightly different in detail and design. The northern and southern cemeteries were connected to the royal city by long paths. The western cemetery, the oldest, was located nearest to the town and was the largest of the three. It was used by the Kushites from the early Napatan period until the end of Meroitic period, and it accommodated hundreds of burial sites for ordinary people between the elite and royal pyramids and mastabas. The first two kings of Meroe were buried with many of their wives in the southern cemetery, which comprised more than 200 burial sites. The northern and southern sides of each pyramid here were decorated with paintings showing the tomb’s owner watching his or her own funeral, while their western sides portrayed the sun god’s emergence from the underworld.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River In the first century ad witnessed a decline in the size and detail of public buildings in the Meroitic kingdom, as well as a decline in the number of non-royal houses. Nonetheless, Meroitic art and architecture continued to develop, due to a number of external cultural influences. Nevertheless, with the fall of Meroe, there were significant changes in political, social, and artistic traditions that distanced the Nubians even more from their Egyptian cousins. This led them eventually to stop building pyramids, and they returned to building burial mounds. Despite the spread of Christianity into Nubia, Meroitic painting and artistic traditions endured until the Islamic conquest of the region. After this time, however, Nubian culture and tradition were incorporated into Islamic culture, and consequently changed, causing Nubian culture to slowly lose its uniqueness. Meroe’s location was ideal for international trade. North of the Fifth Cataract, traders could take a direct route across the desert, and then rejoin the Nile above the Second Cataract without having to follow the river’s southwestern curve. From here, they could travel down the Nile to the market cities of Egypt. Likewise, from Meroe, they could travel southward to the borders of present-day Uganda, or eastward by other routes to the Red Sea. Indeed, Meroites exchanged goods with the tribes and countries of the Mediterranean, the East African coast, the Arabian Peninsula, and India. And merchants from these communities would pass through Meroe as they traveled west and south. This exposure influenced the Meroites, and its effects can be seen in their artifacts, wall reliefs, and buildings. Nevertheless, during this time, the Meroites developed their own language and culture—one distinct from that of the Egyptians. In later years, the people of Meroe overturned the monarchy and enjoyed greater political freedom in determining their own affairs. During this time, the king was often selected by the priests and the noblemen—a system that ensured he could be removed if he became unpopular. Meroe also influenced the surrounding regions, for it was located at the center of a web of trade routes that spread the knowledge of ironworking into Central and East Africa. Metal and agricultural products also transformed Meroe, for a little while at least, into a very wealthy capital. In the second century bc, at a time when Upper Egypt was rebelling against Ptolemaic rule, the Nubians attempted to regain control of all of Nubia. This was again a time when Nubians and Egyptians lived peacefully together, with the Ptolemies attempting to appease both. Although the Nubians ultimately regained control of the entire region, theirs was a short-lived victory, for they had lost control of much of the region to Rome by the end of the first century bc. Meroe then underwent a gradual decline, starting in the first century ad, which ultimately led to its collapse in the third century ad. The final collapse of the Meroitic kingdom



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resulted from a combination of invasions by the barbarian Noba people from the south and attacks by the kingdom of Axum to the west. In a span of less than a century, under these assaults, Kushite culture faded away. The collapse brought impoverishment to the region, allowed for the spread of Christianity, and brought the end of Meroitic history by the mid-fourth century ad. In 1899, the Condominium Agreement, which established the boundary between Egypt and Sudan, arbitrarily divided the area, and hence the descendants of the Nubians. A proud people who had settled the banks of the Nile for centuries were thus divided between two countries in such a way that neither country would recognize the Nubians as full “citizens.” Indeed, the Nubians were stripped of many privileges, such as the right to own land and build their own homes. Confronted by these conditions, the Nubians fought to be identified as a distinct nation with their own history, language, and culture. The Nubians suffered tremendous losses: of their land, their cities, their temples, and their identity. Seen in this light, while the salvaging of Abu Simbel may have been an architectural mega-success that addressed the threat to a specific monument, the construction of the Agilika Lodge may be more important symbolically, because it recognizes the threat facing all Nubians—the threat of their culture’s total extinction. The lodge relies on the selling of traditional Nubian cuisine and drinks, and strives to be fully operated by the indigenous Nubian tribes of Aswan. Standing on the land of Nubia, the former Kushite kingdom, and anchored between the Abu Simbel temple and the pyramids of Meroe, the lodge provides a reminder of the unwritten history of the Nubian people—a history to which both Egyptians and tourists should pay tribute.

Note 1. As recorded as an engraving at the site of the Abu Simbel temple.

Bibliography Arkell, A. J. 1955. A History of the Sudan to ad 1821. London: Athlone Press. Bonnet, Charles, and Dominique Valbelle. 2006. The Nubian Pharaohs: Black Kings of the Nile. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Burstein, Stanley M. 1995. Graeco–Africana: Studies in the History of Greek Relations with Egypt and Nubia. New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas. Burckhardt, John L. 1819. Travels in Nubia. London: John Murray. Dodson, Aidan. 1997. Monarchs of the Nile. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Draper, Robert. 2008. “The Black Pharaohs: An Ignored Chapter of History Tells of a Time When Kings from Deep in Africa Conquered Ancient Egypt.” National Geographic Magazine, February. Fisher, Marjorie, Peter Lacovara, Salima Ikram, and Sue D’Aurua, eds. 2012. Ancient Nubia: African Kingdoms on the Nile. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Mann, Kenny. 1997. Egypt, Kush, Aksum: Northeast Africa. Parsippany, NJ: Dillon Press. Morkot, Robert. 2000. The Black Pharaohs: Egypt’s Nubian Rulers. London: Rubicon Press. Powell, Anne. “Nubia: The Land Upriver.” Accessed October 20, 2011. Shinnie, P. L. 1967. Meroe: A Civilization of the Sudan. New York: F. A. Praeger. Vattenbyggnadsbyrån (VBB). 1976. The Salvage of the Abu Simbel Temples: Concluding Report, December 1971. Stockholm. Welsby, Derek A. 1998. The Kingdom of Kush: The Napatan and Meroitic Empires. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener.

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Alexandria: Greeks and Romans on the Western Edge of the Nile Delta Alexandria is a delightful town on the shore of the Roman Sea. Commanded by an impregnable fortress, it is a distinguished place, with a pleasant meed of upright and devout people. The drinking water of the inhabitants is derived from the Nile, which reaches them in the season of its floods via an aqueduct, and fills their cisterns. — Shams al-Din al-Muqaddasi (1994 [999]: 192)

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hen Napoleon Bonaparte disembarked from his sea voyage to Egypt in 1798, the once-prosperous city of Alexandria was a mere village. Its population had shrunk to only 8,000, whereas the neighboring city of Rosetta had approximately 13,000 residents. The famous Pharos lighthouse, which had mesmerized people in the ancient world, had long disappeared, and in its place was a district for Ottoman soldiers and poor Turks. But the ambitious general would be captivated by Alexandria nonetheless. And he would soon come to identify himself with Alexander the Great, the invincible emperor of the ancient Mediterranean. Napoleon won the Battle of the Pyramids, and he conquered Cairo. However, his loss of control over the sea route from France to Egypt, with his defeat in the Battle of the Nile at the Bay of Aboukir, east of Alexandria, by the British naval forces led by Admiral Nelson, ultimately deterred him from his dream of ruling all of Egypt, a feat that Alexander and Julius Caesar had achieved before him. Napoleon’s campaign reminded the world of the former glory of Alexandria and its founder, Alexander the Great. Alexander’s first contact with Egypt occurred in 333 bc. After conquering Syria and much of the Levant, he had turned his eyes south. Traveling overland, Memphis was his first destination. But it is claimed that Alexander then boarded ships and sailed northward through the Nile delta along the river’s Canopic branch, until he reached a point opposite the island of Pharos. Alexander was only 25 years old at that time, and the young king needed a capital from which to rule his new possessions in Egypt—a city which could provide access to Greece and his homeland in Macedonia. The Rhakotis area near the island of Pharos appeared to provide the ideal site for such a capital. It offered a good harbor, a perfect climate, and access to grain, livestock,

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River and stone quarries for building. Furthermore, the geography of Rhakotis, along the seashore between the Canopic branch and the Mediterranean, guaranteed a secure foothold between water and land, a requirement not only militarily but also for trade on the Mediterranean. No wonder the area had long been a haven for fishermen and pirates. In the centuries to follow, Greek and other settlers would transform the site of Rhakotis into Alexandria, one of the most important cities in the history of the Nile. But from the beginning, it was Alexandria’s location between the Nile delta and the Mediterranean Sea that was its greatest strategic asset. The Nile has one of the largest river deltas in the world, stretching 160 kilometers from north to south and extending east to west along 240 kilometers of coastline. Currently, it is largely divided into sections based on two main distributaries of its flow—the Damietta and the Rosetta branches. However, ancient records show that the delta once had seven distributaries, and that these have only recently been reduced to two as a result of flood-control measures. During Alexander’s time, it was the Canopic branch, the westernmost, that was the Nile’s widest and most important outlet to the sea, and Rhakotis was connected to it by way canals and the giant Lake Mareotis (present-day Lake Maryut) (Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1 The ancient branches of the Nile delta

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Figure 7.2 The connection between the Nile, Lake Mareotis, and the Mediterranean Sea during the Greco-Roman period

Many of the coastal lakes in Egypt were connected to the Mediterranean and hence had salty waters, but Mareotis was a unique product of the Nile. At the time of Alexandria’s founding, it was much larger than the present Lake Maryut, measuring, according to the Greek geographer Strabo (64 bc–24 ad), more than 150 stadia (25 kilometers) wide and 300 stadia (50 kilometers) long. Because it was only indirectly connected with the Nile through a series of canals (Figure 7.2), it was also relatively immune from the accumulation of sediments from the river. As a result, the main body of the lake was deep enough to enable river vessels and boats to sail on it. For a city which was primarily based on commerce, not on agriculture or industry, it thus provided a vital maritime link between the sea and the river. Also critical to the development of the city was a series of canals linking directly to the Canopic branch and connecting the lake to the city’s Mediter­ranean harbors. One of the earliest of these, the Schedia Canal, played an important role in transporting people and goods between the city and the whole of Egypt. Another, the Kibotos Canal, which connected the lake with the city’s western harbor, seemed to serve as a crucial

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River route through which Alexandrian imports (incense, ivory, spices or silk) and exports (Egyptian grains) were transported. It is believed that additional canals were constructed during the early Roman period in response to increased trade between the northern Mediterranean and Egypt. These eventually included the Sabastos and the Neapolis Canals as part of an integrated network of water transport that linked river, lake, and sea. When Alexander founded Alexandria in 331 bc, it was the first of many cities to bear his name. His plans were to perpetuate the best of the Hellenistic period and create a great new Greek metropolis. To accomplish this, he appointed Cleomenes of Naucratis as governor and Dinocrates of Rhodes as his primary architect. Dinocrates built the city around the nucleus of the old Rhakotis site. Indeed, the name Rhakotis (meaning “construction site”) would remain to designate the district within the city that would become home to its native Egyptians. But Dinocrates imagined the city to be a “megalopolis” from the start, one that would fill the space between the Mediterranean to the north and Lake Mareotis to the south. Thirty-two kilometers from the Nile, it thus developed as a thin rectilinear grid with encircling walls on three sides. Based on Hellenistic principles for an ideal city, it took the shape of a stretched Macedonian chlamys that measured about 3 kilometers in diameter. Two thoroughfares, running from east to west and north to south, were constructed at right angles in a rectangular grid, and its intervening fabric was arranged evenly, with blocks labeled according to the Greek alphabet. The city was designed in such a way that fresh northerly winds could blow through it and help lower ambient temperatures during the hot summer. And although the lake initially provided a source of drinking water, fresh water was eventually supplied directly by means of a canal from the Canopic branch. When this water reached the city, it flowed through underground conduits leading to the streets of the Greek quarter, where it was stored in rock cisterns under public buildings and the city’s principal houses. The annual Nile flood provided plentiful water to fill these cisterns.1 Alexandria’s walls, about 15 kilometers in length, had three gates—at the eastern, western, and southern ends. The Canopic Way, the city’s principal street, measuring around 5 kilometers long, connected the Moon Gate in the western wall to the Canopic Gate in the eastern wall. Another major street, the Street of the Soma, was laid out from the waterfront to the south wall, and its length was about 1.3 kilometers. The city’s principal buildings, such as the Palace of Justice (the Dicasterion), were all initially erected along the Canopic Way. And while the major building material was brick, public buildings facing the city’s two main streets were finished with marble, as were most Greek structures. The marble gave visitors an impression of Alexandria as a gleaming, white city. And because little or no wood was used for construction, the risk of fire was relatively low.

Alexandria For 300 years, Alexandria served as the capital of Egypt’s Ptolemaic Dynasty. But from the beginning, its port was its defining feature. This was developed largely after the construction of the city’s streets and walls. Along the seafront, Alexander also ordered the construction of a causeway, called the Heptastadion, to connect the island of Pharos to the mainland. As its name indicated, the total distance of the Heptastadion was seven stades, or around 1,400 meters. At first, the Heptastadion was designed to prevent Nile silt from building up, as had happened in harbors nearby. But in time it also functioned to enlarge the physical area of the city, and an aqueduct running across it supplied water to areas of settlement on the island. The construction of the Heptastadion had the effect of dividing the city’s seafront in two: the Great Harbor on the east and the Eunostos Harbor (the “Harbor of the Happy Return”) on the west. The eastern harbor functioned as the royal and naval harbor, while the western one was primarily used for the import and export of merchandise. Ships were allowed to pass between them through two gaps in the causeway. The western harbor was also connected, through the Kibotos Canal, to Lake Mareotis, which in turn was linked with the Nile. This network of water transport allowed a growing trade in Egyptian grain to find its way to the Mediterranean market and later to satisfy the needs of the Roman Empire. Alexandria had a cosmopolitan community, whose development was the result of the expanding market system of the ancient world. The locational advantage of Alexandria further strengthened its role in the Mediterranean region, connecting ancient caravan routes in Egypt to trade along the Red Sea coast. And as the city profited from the grain trade between Egypt and the Mediterranean, it also attracted a large number of merchants and investors from overseas. Alexandria’s economic success gave rise to the establishment of a large mint, from which a new system of coins emerged. About a half million people inhabited Alexandria at its peak, near the end of Ptolemaic times. In addition to native Egyptians, these included descendants of settlers from Peloponnesian Greece, the Aegean Islands, Asia Minor, Thrace, Macedonia, Persia, Syria, and Judaea. The city within the walls was mainly divided into three residential districts—the Bruchium, the Delta, and Rhakotis—and the two port areas. Buoyed by their access to capital and skilled labor, Greek immigrants formed a wealthy settler community in a city whose growing maritime economy helped make it a land of new opportunities. The Greek residents inhabited the Bruchium, or the royal district, which was located between Lochias and the Hep­ tastadion. It thus occupied the strategic center of the city, bounded by the waterfront on the north and the Canopic Way on the south (Figure 7.3). Within the Bruchium were located many of the city’s principal buildings; it is assumed these included the famous museum and library but it

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Figure 7.3 Map of Ptolemaic Alexandria

seems impossible now to pinpoint the exact locations of these important structures. However, descriptions of the museum indicate that it was surrounded by courts and walkways planted with trees, and that it contained a portico, the Exedra (Great Hall), the Oecus (Dining Hall), an observatory, a zoological garden, and the world-famous library of Alexandria. The mausoleum of Alexander the Great, called the Soma, was supposedly also located in this central area of the city. The Soma must have been a structure of great importance, occupying the intersection of the two main streets; however, it is probable that it had already disappeared by the fourth century ad. Located also in the Bruchium was the Gymnasium, a complex that functioned as a high school or university for Greek male youths. Its role in the civic life of the Greek community was so important that its director assumed the position of head of all citizens—equivalent to a mayor in today’s parlance. For physical training, Greek male youths went to the Palaestra, where they exercised, bathed, and anointed themselves. A number of religious temples were also concentrated in the Bruchium district, including those to Arsinoe, Bendis, and Isis. Located east of the Bruchium was the Delta district, for Jewish immigrants. Little has remained of the buildings there. With their own

Alexandria magistrate, however, Jews enjoyed a great deal of freedom compared with other minorities. Alexandrian Jews spoke the Greek language and adopted Greek customs, and this undoubtedly put them in a favorable position for conducting business. The privileges Alexandrian Jews were granted partly owed to their position in Palestine, which was also under Ptolemaic rule from 309 to 219 bc. In order to conduct business and protect the frontiers, the Ptolemies utilized the help of the Jewish community. The close ties that existed between Palestinian and Alexandrian Jews also enabled the latter to play a significant role in the luxury trade between Egypt and the Mediterranean. A third district of the city, Rhakotis, was the indigenous Egyptian quarter. It was situated in the southwestern part of the city, bounded by the two principal streets. Because of the way the city’s water supply was designed, while Bruchium residents had the privilege of drinking water clarified of Nile silt, those who inhabited Rhakotis had to consume unclarified water. Among the most notable buildings here was the Serapeum. In fact a complex of buildings, including a library, lecture rooms, and shrines, this was a temple devoted to the cult of the god Serapis—a synthetic deity compounded of various Greek and Egyptian gods created by Ptolemy I and his advisors with the intent of uniting Greeks and Egyptians. The deity was given an Egyptian name, Serapis (a combination of Osiris and Apis), in a deliberate attempt to make worship accessible to ordinary Egyptians. As the city developed in Ptolemaic times, suburbs were created outside its walls, both on the sea side and inland. These settlements, both of which were named Eleusis, were known in antiquity to be devoted to the leisure of the Alexandrians. A third suburban area, Canopus, came into being near the mouth of the Canopic branch, about 15 kilometers to the east. It was a symbolic town for pilgrimages to the temple of Serapis, yet it was also a place of amusement, where festivals, music, dancing, and licentious­ness continued day and night. Travelers could have accessed it by boat across Lake Mareotis or by various natural channels that connected it to the Canopic branch of the Nile. Alexandria was ruled by an autonomous civic administration modeled after the Greek institutions of a city-state (polis). Cleomenes is credited with the city’s early success. He created a mercenary army, reorganized the finances of Egypt, and built the city walls and Alexander’s palace. In particular, the professionalization of the military brought significant change to the economy of the region. It allowed soldiers to pursue a stable career and liberated farmers and merchants from conscription. Mercenary soldiers and mariners were recruited from various regions. This also encouraged the circulation of Ptolemaic coins as they traveled widely in tandem with increased international trade, and as Greek naval expeditions expanded, and the empire Alexander founded prospered.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Shortly after establishing Alexandria, Alexander left to pursue his Persian campaign. Before doing so, however, he decided to visit the oracle of the ancient Egyptian god Amun located at the oasis of Siwa, southwest of Alexandria. The journey to Siwa in the Sahara was very long—almost 500 kilometers. Accompanied by soldiers, Alexander and his close companions Hephaestion, Ptolemy, son of Lagos (who later became Ptolemy Sotor), Krateros, Kallisthenes, and Eumenes first traveled west along the Mediterranean coast before heading south. After the visit, Alexander took a different route on his return, traveling east through the desert and resting halfway, at the Bahariya oasis. Afterwards, Alexander spent several months traveling to Persia, occupying Babylon on the way, and planning expeditions further east. Alexander’s death is a historical mystery. Its circumstances were not registered in detail in any documents, or even in his companions’ diaries, allowing many myths to develop around it. Eumenes, Alexander’s secretary, who accompanied him during the expeditions, did write in his diary that Alexander was invited to a party where he supposedly drank something poisoned which led to his death several days later. The theory of his poisoning cannot be dismissed, since some of his companions, either out of desire to claim a piece of his empire or simply out of exhaustion from the permanent state of war, wanted him dead. However, there are other theories. For example, some historians have suggested that Alexander died of acute alcoholism. Alexander died in June 323 bc in Babylon, an event recorded on a clay tablet located at the palace of Nebuchadnezzar, which Alexander occupied. Alexander’s funeral was a major ceremony. Embalmed as in the practice of ancient Egyptian pharaohs, his body was placed in a hammered gold anthropoid sarcophagus—one shaped to fit his body. The journey of the funeral carriage then took two years, since it had to travel from Babylon to Aegae (modern-day Vergina), where the kings of Macedonia were traditionally buried. Alexander left a great legacy. By and large, he is known for having respected the religions and customs of the countries he invaded. His empire had a significant impact on their economies through the initiation of a common coinage. As part of this system, silver money replaced gold, the supply of which was prone to fluctuation. The introduction of the Persian idea of decimalization further facilitated economic circulation, providing the basis for the conversion of one gold Persian unit into 20 silver pieces. The conquests of Alexander also contributed greatly to cultural exchange between east and west, spreading Hellenic knowledge and encouraging marriages between Macedonians, Greeks, Persians, and Egyptians. After the death of Alexander, however, his generals disputed the succession among themselves and eventually divided up his empire. Of them, Ptolemy Sotor, or Ptolemy I, claimed Egypt in 323 bc, establishing

Alexandria the Ptolemaic Dynasty, which would last in Egypt until 30 bc. Ptolemy began his rule by demoting Cleomenes to deputy governor, allowing him to strengthen the financial base for his own imperial ambitions. He further transformed Alexandria into a maritime power by adding Cyrene, Palestine, Cyprus, and parts of the Asia Minor coast to his kingdom, and so securing territories necessary for the construction of a powerful fleet. Ptolemy I benefited particularly from his experience accompanying Alexander on his many journeys, during which he had recorded Alexander’s activities on a daily basis. The experience provided him with the diplomatic and political skills to manage his own empire. Ptolemy I’s rule saw the construction of several additional important buildings in Alexandria (although most of them were finished only during the reign of his successor, his son Ptolemy Philadelphus, or Ptolemy II). One of these was the museum described earlier. The term “museum,” which originated from the Greek mouseion (“shrine of the muses”), should here be understood to mean an academic complex more resembling a university than a modern museum. It encompassed multiple spaces ranging from an amphitheater-like lecture hall (the Exedra) and research laboratories (in mechanics and hydraulics), to an observatory (for astronomy) and dissecting rooms (for anatomy). The museum gathered a variety of scholars, poets, and philosophers of the Hellenistic world. Its grounds incorporated the famous library of Alexandria, where papyrus scrolls containing a great deal of the knowledge of the ancient world were stacked along the walls or on shelves (Figure 7.4). The conditions allowing for the development of this great museum were multiple. One was that the Nile delta offered fertile ground for the growth of papyrus. Additionally, the first Ptolemaic rulers provided lavish financial and administrative support for scholars to create new scrolls. They also collected old scrolls from distant shores so that the museum could truly function as the focal point for all the cultures and ideas of the Mediter­ranean basin. It was said that nearly 400,000 volumes were once stored in the library. Together, the museum and the library formed the “School of Alexandria,” which would be transformed into the seat of Christianity in the Middle East during the first 300 years ad. Figure 7.4 The library of Alexandria The Ptolemies also built a palace as portrayed by O. Von Corven in the nineteenth century located at the promontory of Silsileh, a

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River thin peninsula that jutted out on the other side of the entrance to Alexandria’s eastern harbor from the island of Pharos. Unfortunately, the building’s dimensions and even its type of architecture remain unknown. As the seat of the government as well as the royal residence, the palace had a special harbor (the “Royal Harbor”) and an island retreat (the “Antirhodos”). As mentioned, most of the buildings begun during the reign of Ptolemy I remained unfinished at the time of his death. Indeed, the only building finished and inaugurated by him seems to have been the Serapeum, or the temple of Serapis, in the Egyptian section of the city, which embodied his idea of a god who possessed both Greek and Egyptian religious characteristics. Among Ptolemy I’s other actions was to return Alexander’s body for burial in Egypt to legitimize his own power. Like Alexander’s death, however, it remains a mystery where his body was finally put to rest. Some historians have suggested that it was first buried west of Memphis, at the temple of Osiris and Apis in the Sakkara area—as chronicled on the Parian Marble under the date 321–320 bc. Other accounts, however, state that it was Ptolemy II, the second ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, who actually brought Alexander’s body to Alexandria, and that it was buried in a tomb in the center of the city. Despite rigorous excavations, however, this tomb has never been discovered. Furthermore, some records indicate that Ptolemy IV Philopater, after winning the Battle of Raphia near Gaza, decided to honor Alexander by building a larger monument in the city in which to house Alexander’s sarcophagus. Ptolemy I died in 282 bc, at the age of 84, leaving many construction projects incomplete. After ascending to the throne, Ptolemy II continued his predecessor’s initiatives. And among his most remarkable achievements were the construction of the Pharos lighthouse between 285 and 280 bc and the completion of the Heptastadion connecting the city to the island of Pharos. Ptolemy II further opened up Egypt to people from everywhere, and this would make prominent contributions to the Egyptian economy. Technological advancement in ship construction was another important feature of Ptolemy II’s reign. The powerful empire reinforced by Ptolemy II, as well as his large fleet, was inherited by Ptolemy Euergetes, or Ptolemy III. The Pharos lighthouse (c. 297–270 bc) was located at the eastern end of the island for which it was named (on the site of the present-day fort of Qaitbay). Its purpose was both to provide a lookout and to indicate the location of the city to ships at sea, since there were no points of high ground along the Egyptian coast. The Pharos lighthouse was a tower consisting of four discrete vertical segments. The lowest was square, the second octagonal, the third cylindrical, and the fourth supported its great lantern and reflector. Providing the pivot of Alexandria’s naval defenses, the Pharos was situated so as to protect both the city’s harbors, especially

Alexandria its more precious eastern one, which held the royal fleet. Conceived by Ptolemy I, the lighthouse was designed by the renowned architect Sostratos of Knidos, who deftly used limestone, granite, and marble in its construction. It took 12 years to complete, and was inaugurated only during the reign of Ptolemy II. With its architectural beauty and technological prowess, the Pharos soon became the icon of Alexandria, and it eventually came to be considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. A smaller lighthouse, called Pharillion, was located at the opposite entrance to the eastern harbor. The Pharos was the greatest lighthouse in the world and the tallest building in Egypt except for the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Giza. Its significance has become manifested in linguistic form, as “pharos” is the root of words denoting “lighthouse” in many contemporary languages—for instance, phare in French, faro in Italian and Spanish, and far in Romanian. Travelers in the Middle Ages described the lighthouse as approximately 140 meters high. This would have made it more of a skyscraper than a lighthouse in the modern sense. On a six-meter stone platform, its lowest level reached 73 meters; its second, octagonal level rose an additional 35 meters; and its top level was a cylinder 18 meters high and with a cupola that functioned as a beacon chamber. Once the fire was lit in its cupola, a mirror projected a streak of light outward that could reach ships as far as 150 kilometers away. The material of the mirror remains unknown, but it might have been polished bronze or stone. A large statue of the god of the sea (Poseidon) sat on the top, as described by some travelers. The lighthouse, due to its beauty and height, attracted tourists from around the Mediterranean. Visitors could climb up the tower and enjoy an extraordinary view from a structure 140 meters above the sea. It must have been a rare experience in the ancient world (Figure 7.5). Alexandria thus became a major city during the first 100 years of Ptolemaic rule. Based on its strategic location as a hub of travel and trade, its economic success, however, owed much to its strict and comprehensive tax system. The state accumulated considerable profit from and exerted strict control over foreign trade by imposing taxes on imported goods. In addition to direct taxation, merchants at Alexandria were further expected to use the Ptolemaic coinage system. Institutions supporting financial transactions, including a centralized banking system, were developed in tandem with increased international trade. And to govern both population and land more efficiently, the Ptolemies created an extensive and complex bureaucracy. With scientific methods of irrigation and accurate records of agricultural production, they made the most of Egypt’s natural resources. The Ptolemies also controlled local industry for the purpose of maintaining state monopolies. The prosperity and prominence that Alexandria enjoyed, however, began to fade as the Ptolemaic Dynasty declined after the death of

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Figure 7.5 The Pharos lighthouse as depicted by the Austrian architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach

Ptolemy III, and his successors did not make any major new additions to the city. The exception was Cleopatra, the daughter of Ptolemy XIII Auletes and the last of the rulers of the Ptolemaic Dynasty. The death of Ptolemy XIII led to a power struggle between Cleopatra and her younger brother (and husband) Ptolemy XIV, who eventually chased her out of Alexandria. However, when the Roman general Julius Caesar landed in Alexandria and took up residence in the palace, Cleopatra did not miss the opportunity to return to her city. Stories that border on myth tell of her devising a clever method so her enemies would not detect her return; and supposedly wrapped in a roll of carpet, she was successfully smuggled into Caesar’s room. Caesar ultimately fell in love with Cleopatra, and their alliance paved the way for Cleopatra’s ascension to the throne. The Nile took center stage at this decisive moment in the Ptolemaic Dynasty, as the river bore silent witness to the diametrically opposite fates of the two royals, and the future of the city of Alexandria was changed dramatically. After receiving Caesar’s support for her side in the dispute over the legitimate rule of Egypt, Cleopatra eventually traveled with him up the Nile. There she enjoyed the scenery and monuments along the great river. Meanwhile, her brother Ptolemy XIV had died battling Caesar on the same river weeks earlier. After he returned to Rome, Caesar was assassinated in 44 bc by Roman senators who feared his popularity and ambition. After his death, Mark Antony successfully filled the power vacuum by forming a triumvirate

Alexandria with Gaius Octavius, a nephew of Caesar, and Marcus Lepidus. Antony soon also fell in love with Cleopatra, and the two spent a substantial amount of time together in Alexandria. However, the romance infuriated Rome’s ruler, Octavius, whose sister had already married Antony. That Antony made Cleopatra the extravagant gift of a great deal of territory belonging to the Roman Empire further inflamed the Roman Senate and people. This conflict culminated at the Battle of Actium, which would bring great dishonor to Antony. At this historic battle in Greece, in 31 bc, Antony and Cleopatra joined together against the Octavius’s army. But while Antony was engaged in heavy fighting, Cleopatra broke away from the engagement and retreated with her forces to Alexandria. Why Cleopatra fled at the crucial moment of the fight is unclear. The action threw Antony and his fleet into confusion and chaos, and Antony soon followed Cleopatra, leaving behind his fleet, which could not help but then surrender to Octavius. After defeat at the Battle of Actium, Antony stayed in Alexandria and reflected upon his fate. He built a small sanctuary on a peninsula jutting out into the sea, which he called the Timonium. That the lodge was named after Timon, a famous misanthrope in ancient Athens, reflects the predicament in which Antony found himself. At the time, he imagined himself leading the solitary life that Timon had once lived, secluded from all people. But soon afterwards, Cleopatra and Antony were reconciled, and they returned to their pleasure-seeking ways. But their short-lived romance was doomed, as the wrathful Octavius prepared a campaign to conquer Egypt. Upon hearing of Octavius’s march on Alexandria, Antony tried to prepare a fighting force, but on the day of the battle the soldiers of the remaining Egyptian army mutinied and joined Octavius’s forces. Thus Octavius entered Alexandria on August 1, 30 bc. Meanwhile, Cleopatra, who was staying at one of her pavilions, reportedly sent Antony a note announcing her death. What actually then transpired remains a mystery, especially regarding the exact order of events and the veracity of the accounts. Did Antony commit suicide in despair upon realizing his apparent defeat? Or, as some have claimed, did Antony fall on his sword after learning the tragic news of his lover’s death? Or did he yet die in the arms of Cleopatra, who then had to fake her own death for some unclear reason? Some have suggested that Octavius prevented or wanted to prevent Cleopatra from taking her own life after Antony’s death. He might have wanted to bring her alive to Rome and show off his final victory over Egypt to the Roman people. However, records indicate she was soon found dead in the same pavilion along with her two servants. Did Cleopatra kill herself to avoid the humiliation of captivity? Or was she poisoned? What is clear is that with her and Antony’s deaths, the Romans could fully annex Egypt as imperial territory. This brought an end to the

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Ptolemaic Dynasty. And with the arrival of the Romans, the intellectual life of Alexandria also started to fade. In addition to the Timonium, another important structure built in Alexandria during Cleopatra’s time was the Caesareum. The temple of Poseidon was originally believed to stand in the Bruchium district, but it is said to have disappeared by the time Cleopatra built the Caesareum in dedication to Antony. The Jewish philosopher Philo once described the Caesareum as “decorated on an unparalleled scale” and “embellished with porticoes, libraries, chambers, groves, gateways, broadwalks and courts” (Bagnall and Rathbone 2008: 54). Two obelisks called Cleopatra’s needles also originally stood in front of the Caesareum. One of these now stands in London and the other in New York’s Central Park. Egypt’s location at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea made it a major player connecting the cities and peoples of northern Africa and southern Europe. In particular, during the Ptolemaic Dynasty, Egypt established a strong connection with Greece, the new power in the eastern Mediterranean, and the two countries managed to maintain a long-lasting relationship throughout ancient times. The founding of Alexandria and the subsequent immigration of Greeks to Egypt was the most prominent example of this special relationship between Egypt and Greece. Following the end of Greek power, there was once a time when all roads led to Rome, as the Romans used to say. But the Roman Empire, whose power and wealth for centuries appeared to know no bounds, itself began to disintegrate by the third century ad. The fate of Rome also affected the course of the Nile and thus the fate of Alexandria. After the Emperor Diocletian, no Roman ruler made a visit to the Nile. And by the early Middle Ages, Alexandria, which was then an outpost of the Byzantine Empire, had become impoverished due to a combination of plague, famine, and lack of Nile water. Finally, in 642 ad, Muslim forces led by ‘Amr Ibn al-‘As conquered the city, as well as the rest of the territory of Egypt. In fear of counterattack from the Byzantine fleet, however, the caliph ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab moved the capital of Egypt to the new city of Fustat on the Nile. Although it thereafter lost its status as the most important city in Egypt, Alexandria continued to serve as a prominent port serving Muslim, Christian, and Jewish merchants from different Mediterranean states. The library of Alexandria had deteriorated by that time, and was possibly in ruins. But most of the city’s major public buildings, monuments, and infrastructure remained intact and continued to fascinate visitors. In the Middle Ages, special rest-houses called funduqs were built in Alexandria to house foreign traders and conduct businesses. In contrast to Muslim traders, foreigners were compelled to stay in these designated rest-houses, and were kept under close observation. Traders came from a wide range of nations or city-states—from Denmark and Norway to

Alexandria Venice and Seville. As an internationally renowned center of commerce on the eastern Mediterranean, Alexandria brought together a variety of cultures and creeds, which made the city truly cosmopolitan. And even when non-Muslim traders were banned from entering Egypt’s interior, Alexandria remained an open city. Alexandria’s locational advantages as a transit point also attracted another type of travelers—pilgrims. A large number of Muslims visited the city en route to the region’s holy sites in Mecca and Jerusalem. Ibn Battuta (1304–69), the prominent Moroccan traveler, was among those who passed through Alexandria in the fourteenth century. In Rihla [My Travels], he described a canal which had just been completed a few years before his arrival that extended between Alexandria and the Nile. The significance of Alexandria’s role in international trade was greatly diminished, however, by the Portuguese discovery of a sea route to India around the Cape of Good Hope in 1498. As a result of this discovery, alternate ports came to replace Alexandria. The sporadic outbreak of plague during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries further affected its economy and labor force. The Pharos lighthouse stood for more than 1,500 years, functioning as a navigational landmark well into the medieval period. However, an earthquake between 1326 and 1349 is believed to have destroyed it. Neither the library of Alexandria nor the Pharos lighthouse disappeared due to the Arab invasion, as has been claimed by some. Inspired by the rediscovery of writings by classical authors such as Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, and Strabo, and accounts of returning pilgrims, after the Renaissance Europeans again came as tourists to Egypt, which had emerged by the mid-seventeenth century as “the land of the pharaohs.” The royal courts of Europe dispatched antiquarians and natural­ists to document Egypt’s flora and fauna. Alexandria was their first stop in pursuit of scientific and archaeological studies. Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition of 1798–1801 was among the most well-known examples of the latter. Accompanying Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt were a range of scholars of the Commission des Sciences et des Arts, from astronomers, architects, and geographers to zoologists and botanists. Upon their return, they collectively authored the Description de l’Égypte, a series of publications on ancient and modern Egypt, which reintroduced one of the world’s greatest civilizations to the Western world. After the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, the neighboring city of Rosetta had prospered as Alexandria declined. Thus, when Napoleon arrived in Alexandria in 1798, its population was very small, whereas the city of Rosetta, located to the east, at the mouth of one of the two remaining branches of the Nile, had become home to thousands more people. The fortunes of the two cities were, however, reversed when, following the expulsion of the French and the end of Napoleon’s campaign, the Ottoman sultan appointed the Albanian Mehmed Ali as governor of

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Egypt in 1805. Mehmed Ali eventually laid the foundation for a modern Egypt, and Alexandria figured prominently in his attempts to encourage foreign investment and trade. Among the important achievements of Mehmed Ali was the digging of the Mahmoudiyah Canal, which reconnected the Nile to the Mediterranean via Alexandria. The construction of the canal was completed in 1820, and while it was formally named after Sultan Mahmud II of Istanbul, it was typically also known as the Canal of Alexandria. The 72-kilometer-long canal contributed to the transport of food and fresh water from the Nile to the city, moistening the dry throat of the city. In Mehmed Ali’s dynasty, which would last until 1952, Alexandria would once again be characterized by a diversity of communities and consuls brought together from around the Mediterranean. The city’s identity would again be firmly grounded in exchange and interaction between people, ideas, and things, and early-twentieth-century Alexandria regained its position as a great cosmopolitan city. Paradoxically, this cosmopolitanism further enhanced during the British occupation of Egypt from 1882 to 1952. Yet, during World War II, Alexandria was often pummeled by the Axis forces, as it served as a headquarters for many British army units. In the 1940s and 1950s, Alexandria functioned as the summer capital of the Egyptian kingdom. King Farouk would move there for two months every year, and the cabinet members would follow. Egypt’s independence in 1952 was a symbolic event through which Alexandria came to be governed by Egyptians for the first time. This would result in the Egyptianization of its economy and domestic life during the early years of the republic. Alexandria had been a cosmopolitan city since antiquity. It is perhaps ironic that today it has lost all of its cosmopolitan culture. Historically, the prosperity of Alexandria has depended greatly on access to Nile water. Following the disintegration of the Roman Empire, however, the canals and the lake that connected it to this life-giving source silted up from neglect. As a result, Alexandria lost its primary contact with the Nile for centuries. But the construction of the Canal of Alexandria in the early nineteenth century gave new life to the city by re-establishing its long-lost link with the Nile. The canal brought a drastic increase in the population of Alexandria, and as of 2013, more than 4 million people called the city home (Figure 7.6). The rise of Alexandria paradoxically led to the decline of its neighbor, Rosetta, whose population declined to less than 60,000 by the end of the twentieth century. However, Alexandria now faces a new threat to its water supply, as the water level of the Nile is likely to decrease as a consequence of the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile. Alexandria’s location at the end of the supply system of the Nile makes it vulnerable to any such environmental transformation. The effects of

Alexandria

Figure 7.6 Satellite view of contemporary Alexandria

climate change, including anticipated sea-level rise, also present a threat to Alexandria. Thus by the end of the twenty-first century its future may hinge more on the sea than on the Nile, as it has for the past two millennia. Yet, in the end, it is access to water, whether sweet or salty, that will determine its fate. Note 1. For many years the ancient Greeks were interested in the cause of the Nile flood. Foremost among them was Aristotle, who authored De Inundatione Nili, in which he hypothesized the association between the heavy rains in Ethiopia and the Nile flood. It is likely that his theory was based on information given by Alexander’s explorers in the region.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Bibliography Al-Muqaddasi, Shams al-Din. 1994 [999]. Ahsan al-Tagasim fi Ma’rifat al-Aqalim: The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions, Basil Collins, trans. London: Garnet. Bagnall, Roger S., and Dominic Rathbone. 2008. Egypt: From Alexander to the Copts. An Archaeological and Historical Guide. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Collins, Robert O. 2002. The Nile. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cooper, John P. 2014. The Medieval Nile: Route, Navigation, and Landscape in Islamic Egypt. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Davis, Harold T. 1957. Alexandria, the Golden City. Evanston, IL: Principia Press of Illinois. Empereur, J.-Y. 2002. Alexandria: Jewel of Egypt. New York: Harry Abrams. Foster, E. M. 1982. Alexandria: A History and a Guide. London: M. Haag. Hessel, Alfred, Don Heinrich Tolzmann, and Reuben Peiss. 2001. The Memory of Mankind: The Story of Libraries Since the Dawn of History. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press. Khalil, Emad. 2010. “The Sea, the River and the Lake: All the Waterways Lead to Alexandria.” Bolletino di Archeologia on Line, 1, pp. 33–48. Marlowe, John. 1971. The Golden Age of Alexandria: From Its Foundation by Alexander the Great in 331 bc to Its Capture by the Arabs in 642 ad. London: Gollancz. Pollard, Justin, and Howard Reid. 2006. The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern Mind. New York: Viking. Polyzoides, Apostolos. 2014. Alexandria, City of Gifts and Sorrows: From Hellen­ istic Civilization to Multiethnic Metropolis. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press. Vrettos, Theodore. 2001. Alexandria: City of the Western Mind. New York: Free Press. Williams, Kimberly. 2004. Alexandria and the Sea: Maritime Origins and Underwater Exploration. Tampa, FL: Sharp Books.

Ch a pter 8

A Nile Oasis in the Sahara: Fayoum of the Ptolemies Cool are the dawns; tall are the trees; many are the fruits; little are the rains . . . ; it is the paradise of the desert. — Abu-Uthman al-Nabulsi (1261 ad)1

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n September 26, 2016, a letter from inhabitants of the Mallaha district, a neighborhood in Fayoum, Egypt, demanded government action in response to a serious problem. Known until the early twenty-first century for its great irrigation system and canals, Fayoum had recently fallen victim to multiple cuts in its water supply. Residents further complained about pollution, especially the poisonous quality of the water and its repulsive smell. Once the grandest of Egyptian oases because of its direct access to Nile water, Fayoum is today an area in crisis, its environment a far cry from that which seduced the Greeks during Ptolemaic times and that made it a breadbasket of the Roman Empire. The ancient Egyptian name for Fayoum was She-Resy (“Southern Lake”) and Ta-She (“Expanse of Water”). The Greeks initially called it limne, or “the marsh,” before it was given administrative status and named Arsinoite after the sister-wife of Ptolemy II. A variation on an Arabic word meaning “water excess,” Fayoum itself has a Coptic root: pa-yom (“the lake” or “the land of the lake”), which in turn derives from the ancient Egyptian pa y-m. The area of Fayoum is a natural depression, located below sea level, less than 100 kilometers southwest of Cairo. Formed approximately 1.8 million years ago by wind erosion, it is separated from the Nile by a desert strip where sandy hills abound. The area is unique to the geology of contemporary Egypt because the Nile water that flows into it eventually drains to Lake Moeris rather than passing back to the river or traveling by some other channel to the Mediterranean. The history of Egypt is a mixture of place, religion, and myth, and one of the most powerful and illuminating examples of this is the Fayoum region. If the Bible made Egypt into a household name, the Book of Exodus introduced people to the king of Egypt as “Pharaoh.” In fact, Pharaoh was not necessarily one pharaoh, but many, and several are characters in our story.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River The history of the Fayoum oasis, trapped between the Sahara to the west and the Nile to the east, cannot be told without reference to Joseph, the biblical figure also mentioned in the Quran and accepted by Muslims as a prophet. More likely originating in the realm of myth, Joseph is seen as the single individual who gave life to this region—an intelligent, handsome young man who served his pharaoh well by managing state agricultural lands during difficult times. Joseph was able to read Pharaoh’s dreams and put them into practical use. Often described as the master of the Nile, he is said to have advised Pharaoh to hoard grain for seven plenteous years before Egypt was hit by drought. And when disaster did come, Pharaoh claimed it was Joseph who had saved the people of Egypt from starvation and famine. Of course, the story is more myth than reality, and the figure of Pharaoh does not correspond to any identifiable ancient Egyptian king. More than 1,000 kilometers north from where the Nile receives much of its seasonal floodwater from the ‘Atbara River, a subsidiary channel departs as a narrower branch to its west, and heads north before it takes a torturous path west to Fayoum. This is the Bahr Yussef, the Canal of Joseph, the spine that gives life to the Fayoum region (Figure 8.1). Myth has it that it was Joseph’s special understanding of the region that led Pharaoh to place his trust and confidence in him. Thus, when Joseph’s enemies wanted to remove him from the court, Pharaoh instead asked Joseph to make a new province out of marshland in the midst of desert. Joseph subsequently built three canals, drained the land, and irrigated the entire region. The whole process took only 70 days—a task that his enemies would have spent “1,000 days” to complete. El Fayoum (“the land of the 1,000 days”) was thus named, a strip of desert transformed into a lush green oasis.

Figure 8.1 Bahr Yusuf (Canal of Joseph)



A Nile Oasis in the Sahara

For centuries, Bahr Yusuf used to pour all the Nile floodwater it carried into an expanse of water known in Ptolemaic times as Lake Moeris (from the ancient Egyptian mer wer, meaning “great lake”). However, the area’s geological characteristics today make Fayoum a water-distribution center, as a network of canals and pumping stations disperses this irrigation water to surrounding regions. What remains of this supply then returns as wastewater through two supplementary drains to Lake Moeris—the remnant of which is now known as Birket Qarun in Arabic (Figure 8.2). One theory about this Arab name is that it derives from the Greco-Roman city of Karanis, which once existed on the east edge of Fayoum. Another is that it invokes the term qarn (“horn”) in reference to the general shape of the lake. The lake’s name appears as “Korah” in some Bibles. To gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics of this area during Ptolemaic times, we must scrutinize the environmental history of the region going back to prehistory. In early ancient Egyptian civilization, before the time of the pharaohs, the people in the region of Fayoum were likely part of fisher-folk communities. Their main area of settlement was initially on the north shore of Lake Moeris, where their temporary and portable settlements were made of wood and straw. Despite these primitive dwellings, they are often considered to have been the earliest settled population in the Nile valley. Not only did they build stone hearths but archaeological excavations have revealed the existence of storage sites for crops, marked by shallow cavities in the desert close to the remains of their settlements. Animal bones found in these settlements—from crocodiles, hippos, turtles, and the like—also show the importance of hunting to these people. Significantly, it is known that hunting, along with agriculture, laid the foundation for the pharaonic civilization of

Figure 8.2 Birket Qarun (Lake Moeris)

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River later years—even as many occupations by foreign invaders changed the character of the Fayoum area. Herodotus, the ancient Greek traveler and storyteller, visited Egypt between 460 and 450 ad. He described the lake as having a perimeter of 3600 stades (666 kilometers), with two pyramids standing in the middle. Each rose 50 fathoms (approximately 90 meters) above the water, and was topped with a stone colossus on a throne. He also described a canal near what he called the “city of the crocodiles.” What Herodotus observed was likely a set of pyramids constructed during the reign of King Huni, a notorious pharaoh of the Third Dynasty, to whom a significant number of pyramids are speculatively attributed. However, it is also likely that Herodotus visited the area during a time of high floods, and hence could not have determined the difference between the lake and nearby submerged land. In fact, the lake water was often very low, which would have provided an ideal habitat for crocodiles. It is difficult to date the origin of the Bahr Yusuf or attribute it to a specific event because multiple dams have been built over the centuries in the area. However, it is likely that the area of Fayoum experienced two major early periods of development. The first occurred during the Twelfth Dynasty, under the reign of Amenemhat I (1980–1970 bc). Yet it was during the reign of Amenemhat III (1842–1797 bc) that the greatest early effort at dam and canal building seems to have occurred. Indeed, several dams were constructed on Bahr Yusuf at this time to divert water to other areas of the region, establishing an elaborate system of canals in what used to be desert. Amenemhat III also managed to stabilize the level of Lake Moeris at around 20 meters above sea level, a major feat that spoke of plenty and prosperity. It is even possible that the mythical figure of Joseph was Amenemhat III. Amenemhat III’s greatest accomplishment, however, may have been the construction of the famous Labyrinth and the building of several pyramids in the necropolis of Hawara. One major pyramid, which is unlikely to have been Amenemhat III’s resting place (although it may have been built during his reign), was constructed of a mud-brick core and faced with limestone blocks. Although most of the facing stone was later pillaged for use in other buildings, this structure was still partly intact when Herodotus visited, and was not as eroded then as it is today (Figure 8.3). The pyramid had a sloping passageway with steps running down to tunnels, small rooms, and trapdoors that ultimately led to a concealed burial chamber. On his visit to Fayoum, Herodotus also saw a huge, two-story symmetrical structure of 3,000 chambers with 12 courts, with a 40-fathom (42-meter) pyramid joined to its corner. This structure, a mortuary temple of which no trace remains today, was often referred to as “the Labyrinth” (Figure 8.4) Its complexity and enormity made it famous throughout the



A Nile Oasis in the Sahara

Figure 8.3 The Hawara pyramid, built by Amenemhat III

ancient world. However, because of his lack of geographic specificity, it is difficult to match Herodotus’s description to any existing archaeological evidence. It is thus possible that Herodotus’s description of the Labyrinth may have belonged to another structure in another area. But descriptions by other travelers also indicated the existence of a major temple next to the large pyramid. And Herodotus was not the only ancient historian to describe the Labyrinth. Both Manetho, an Egyptian historian in the third century bc, and Strabo, a later Greek historian (64 bc–19 ad), claimed also to have seen it first-hand. Herodotus described the Labyrinth as being composed of two kinds of chamber, those above the ground and a mirror image below the ground, all connected by intricate decorated colonnades. After he visited, Strabo wrote in his Geographica: “Before the entrances there lie what might be called hidden chambers which are long and many in number and have paths running through one another which twist and turn, so that no one can enter or leave any court without a guide” (Book 17, 1–42). There is a consistent quality of fascination in these later Greek visitors’ descriptions of the Labyrinth. They agreed it was of both great beauty and great complexity, and that it had a roof made of long stone slabs that appeared as one piece. Indeed, given that the word “labyrinth” is of Greek origin, it is likely this mortuary temple was named by a Greek visitor after experiencing its complex maze of corridors. It was at that time located in territory belonging to the Greeks, because Alexander the Great had conquered Egypt and made it part of his new empire a century or so after Herodotus’s visit.

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Figure 8.4 The Labyrinth as reconstructed by Athanasius Kircher in the seventeenth century

Alexander was born to King Philippos II and Princess Olympias in 356 bc. At the age of 13, he was tutored by the great philosopher Aristotle in Greek arts and letters, and at the age of 16 he became governor of Macedonia. His relationship with this father deteriorated, however, when his father remarried. But when his father died suspiciously during the wedding of his stepsister, Alexander remained his father’s eldest and main heir. In the span of a few years, Alexander subsequently had to deal with many rebellions, which he quelled. Then, after unifying Greece and Macedonia, he went on to conquer Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Persia, and parts of India. When he died in 323 bc, at the age of 32, his empire extended from North Africa all the way to Central Asia. At the time of his death, all his generals met in Babel, which he considered the capital of his empire, to discuss its division among them. Since Egypt was one of the main prizes, it was naturally contested between Perdikas, the eldest of Alexander’s generals, who headed the Babel meeting, and Ptolemaios Lagos, one of Alexander’s closest friends.



A Nile Oasis in the Sahara

Ptolemaios (“Ptolemy”) wanted to claim Egypt as his possession, or at least be declared its ruler. But Perdikas did not agree and prepared a modest army to attack Egypt in an attempt to reclaim it for the empire and himself. His plan was to attack before the flood season and cross the Nile at its shallow areas. But he underestimated the Nile’s movements, and the plan went awry. By the time he arrived and tried to cross the Nile, his army was caught in several deep, flooded areas near Memphis, and he lost many soldiers and much of his equipment. The defeat allowed Ptolemy to achieve full and immediate control over all of Egypt. And to give legitimacy to his rule and to assert his superiority over the other generals, Ptolemy brought Alexander’s body from Babel, where he had died, to the Siwa oasis, east of Fayoum, where Alexander had established his first outpost in Egypt and declared himself a god. But by a quirk of fate, ­Alexander ended up not being buried in Siwa but in a tomb in Alexandria, which would soon become the capital of the Ptolemaic Dynasty in Egypt. The area of Fayoum experienced its second, and greatest, period of growth in the years that followed. When Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 bc, it had been under Persian rule. But he brought an army to defend the conquered territory, and many of its members were later joined by their families, who then settled in Egypt, particularly in its less-inhabited areas. Indeed, in the decades that followed the rise of Ptolemy—who was often referred to as “Ptolemy, son of Lagos”—Greeks and Macedonians increasingly migrated to Egypt, where they laid the foundation for Ptolemaic rule. Ptolemy built a new city near Psoi, an ancient Egyptian village on the Nile between Memphis and Thebes, but his focus remained on Alexandria in the north and the Fayoum oasis in the south. There was often tension at the time between the Greeks and Macedonians who flocked to Egypt, but these immigrants also seem not to have taken land away from indigenous Egyptians. Instead, Ptolemaic rulers embarked on major agricultural reclamation projects to settle these immigrants around the delta and in the area of Fayoum. The reclamation of desert land in Fayoum started early during Ptolemaic rule, and was much influenced by the rhythm of the Nile floods. Each year, excess Nile water, with its rich silt, would be diverted to the area’s semi-arable land, soaking it for months and allowing new areas to become productive a year or so later. The human impact on nature in this area was indeed unparalleled in Egyptian history. Ptolemy was crowned pharaoh of Egypt in 306 bc, and was later named Ptolemy I by historians. His intention was to make Egypt like the land of Helen. But in the process, he adopted the practices of ancient Egyptian pharaohs. He thus declared himself a new god, Sotor, and gave himself the title Ptolemy Sotor. Ptolemy I is credited with having initiated or built the great library of Alexandria and its lighthouse. Many Greek engineers also came to Egypt

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River after it was taken over by the Ptolemaic Dynasty, and they soon figured out that the Fayoum depression contained two ravines, but these were visible only when the water of the Nile was low. Both originated close to Bahr Yusuf, and hence enormous amounts of water would be lost, without any benefit to agriculture, if it was not directed elsewhere. The Ptolemies thus built dams to prevent the water from flowing into the ravines, and threw up a dike to guide it toward new lands in the northeast. In addition, they dug canals to distribute this water over a wide area and built embankments to protect it from the annual Nile flood. With the passage of time, this allowed the silt-rich water of the Nile to extend the area suitable for cultivation. Newly drained lands, where the flood waters had previously gone, were also put into production. Many new immigrants moved to the area, where they settled in new villages and became involved in its development. The practice of recycling papyrus under the reign of Ptolemy I unfortunately led to the loss of many important documents from this period. Conditions under Ptolemy I thus remain mostly unknown, which has largely prevented historians from writing about the early development of Fayoum under the Ptolemies. Indeed, the earliest papyri describing this development come from the period of Ptolemy II; but among these are the Zenon Papyri, describes collection which contains descriptions of the irrigation system, land-reclamation practices, and settlements of the Fayoum basin. Zenon was a manager for Apollonios, the finance minister of Ptolemy II, and he took care of a large estate, with an area of about 2,750 hectares, near Philadelphia in eastern Fayoum. Even with the evidence of such papyri, however, it is not possible to draw a full map of the canal system during the early period of expansion under the Ptolemies. Yet, we still have enough evidence to understand the change that started to occur in the region. For example, we know that the standard crops being cultivated there before the Ptolemies were grown using the traditional basin irrigation system of ancient Egypt. However, the Greek settlers introduced new forms of agriculture, resulting in the proliferation of orchards and vineyards, which had been familiar to them back home. Olives also became a major crop, as olive oil was what they used for food preparation, cooking, and lighting lamps. To the many Macedonian and Greek settlers, Fayoum came to resemble their homeland. Ptolemy I’s son—Ptolemy Philadelphus, or Ptolemy II (r. 285–246 bc)—took over as ruler of Egypt after the death of his father. He had lived a relatively comfortable life as a child in Egypt, initially marrying the daughter of one of Alexander’s generals, and became king of Egypt when he was only 25 years old (Figure 8.5). Ptolemy II was different from his father; the young king was trained not only in the art of war but was also an intellectual and a patron of the arts. Indeed, he had been educated by Strabo, who himself was a product of the school of Aristotle.



A Nile Oasis in the Sahara

After separating from his first wife, however, the young king married his 40-year-old sister, Arsinoe. The marriage of a full brother and sister was not a common practice in the Greek world, but it was for Egyptian pharaohs—a status Ptolemy II was eager to attain. And once Ptolemy II was declared pharaoh, he and his sister were considered gods, and, according to the customs of Egypt, their incest was not only acceptable but respected. It was Ptolemy II who subsequently also designated the Fayoum marsh a nome (administrative region) and named it Arsinoite, after his sister-wife (Figure 8.6). He also named one of his cities Philadelphia, a name meant to cele­ brate their sibling love. Ptolemy II intensified the work of Figure 8.5 Ptolemy II Philadelphus his father, focusing on using nature to improve crop production and secure more land for agriculture. One of his accomplishments was an elaborate system of dams and canals, built by his engineers to transform Fayoum from a swampy depression to a fertile plain. It was also during the reign of Ptolemy II that the level of water in Lake Moeris was again stabilized,

Figure 8.6 Map of the Arsinoite region

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River but this time at a much lower level than during ancient times—45 meters below the sea. The rule of Ptolemy II was not smooth, particularly in the Fayoum region. His father had established a structure of governance and a form of rule that often treated the colonized Egyptians harshly and taxed them excessively. Perhaps the greatest error of the early Ptolemaic kings, including Ptolemy II, was not showing respect for their new subjects, and instead holding Egyptian civilization in contempt despite its being far older than their own. The most disgruntled among the natives were the peasants who cultivated the land and produced the crops that fed the occupying army. But ordinary Egyptians also resented the new rulers because, as a governing elite, they did not speak their language, and instead used Greek as the language of administration. Indeed, the Greeks were looked upon as foreign invaders from a distant land, and it is not surprising that the local population engaged in a series of unsuccessful uprisings, mostly quelled by the Ptolemaic army. It took several decades before the Egyptians finally came to terms with this new power structure and made their accommodations with it. The stories from Ptolemy II’s time, recorded on papyri, show a new society concerned with arts, culture, and entertainment—but only for the ruling Macedonians. In fact, even the other Greeks who settled in Egypt and were part of Alexander’s original campaign did not receive the same benefits as the Macedonians. Despite these problems, Ptolemy II may still be credited with consolidating the Ptolemaic empire in Egypt, which lasted until the death of Cleopatra in 30 bc. He stocked the Alexandria library, built by his father, with thousands of Egyptian and Greek books, making Egypt the center of culture for the entire Mediterranean. It was during his time that an administrative structure, which would last for three centuries, was also set up. And the success of Ptolemy II in monopolizing the trade routes to the east and guaranteeing that all trade goods would pass through Egypt brought great prosperity during his reign. Finally, it was Ptolemy II who consolidated the idea that the Ptolemaic kings were gods, following the traditions of ancient Egypt—creating the conditions that allowed most Egyptians to accept them, as they did earlier pharaohs. Although Ptolemy II ended up declaring Alexandria his capital, he paid great attention to the region of Fayoum. During the early Ptolemaic period, Fayoum’s landscape was dominated by two towns, which may have simply been big villages—Crocodilopolis, which is now in the center of Fayoum, and Philadelphia, east of the lake. Among other towns established for the resettlement of Greek and Macedonian veterans during his time was Karanis. Occupying an area of 1,050 meters by 750 meters northeast of the lake, it consisted of a cluster of two- or three-story mud-brick houses. Important temples dedicated to the paired crocodile deities Pnepheros and Petesouchos were located in Karanis.



A Nile Oasis in the Sahara

Crocodiles had long played an important role in the area’s mythology. One legend recorded by the historian Diodorus tells of King Menes, a pharaoh from the First Dynasty who unified Upper and Lower Egypt and founded the city of Memphis. According to Diodorus, around 3000 bc, the young king went on a hunting trip in Fayoum and was dragged by his dogs into Lake Moeris, only to be saved by its crocodiles. Based on this ancient myth, the lake became known as a sanctuary for crocodiles. Following this precedent, the city of Shedet, originally founded by Ptolemy II, was later renamed Crocodilopolis. And evidence from papyri of the time confirms an extensive list of villages founded in Fayoum during the reign of the Ptolemaic kings. However, many of these had Egyptian names, indicating that they may have borrowed the names of pre-Ptolemaic places. The city of Philadelphia, too, was founded by Ptolemy II as part of this attempt to establish a drainage and irrigation system in the sandy and marshy basins of Fayoum and around the shores of the lake. It was a garri­ son town 1,000 meters by 500 meters. Like other settlements during the Ptolemaic period, its design was based on a Hellenistic right-angled grid of streets. Within its confines, typical housing blocks, known as insulae, comprised up to 20 mud-brick houses with courtyards. Philadelphia had the additional benefit of being located on the caravan route by which goods were transported between Fayoum and ports of the Nile. In some sense, the Ptolemies created an artificial Macedonia in Egypt through the settlement of Greek and Macedonian soldiers. This proceeded according to a system of allotment-holders (klērūchoi), originally established by the Athenian state. First applied to Egypt by the first two Ptolemies, this system was further developed during the reign of Ptolemy III. And as the expansion of cultivated area, started under Ptolemy I, continued into the reign of Ptolemy II, the new land was divided into a series of nomarchies. Thus, as new dykes and drainage canals extended the cultivated area, military veterans were able to secure much of the new land. Important also was the construction of the Lahun embankment, which helped protect the entire region from the annual flooding of the Nile. There is no doubt that a massive amount of land was reclaimed from the desert at this time through irrigation works, particularly in Fayoum. However, while some texts indicate that all this land belonged to the king, it seems that some parcels were also offered to peasants who worked for the royal family, to create a separate system of private holdings that would further extend areas of cultivation. At the time, low-lying land in the Fayoum area was primarily used for farming, while its villages were built on higher ground to protect them from floods. The abundance of crops might also have enabled the inhabitants of Fayoum to earn higher incomes than those residing in the rest of Egypt. However, the Greeks and Egyptians were residentially divided: Greek and Macedonian landowners inhabited the towns, whereas

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Egyptian peasants resided in the countryside. Unlike in other regions in Egypt, however, it is important to see Fayoum as a region in which city and countryside converged. On the one hand, a matrix of villages and agricultural land constituted the countryside; on the other, the small towns that existed between them acted as urban service centers. Together they constituted a unique system of settlement that resembled a spread-out city dependent on its hinterland for survival. As intermarriages between the Greek officers and indigenous Egyptian women were not uncommon, local culture also came to take on Greco-Egyptian characteristics. A large number of mummy portraits found in the region of Fayoum provide a glimpse of the burial culture of Greco-Egyptians during the Ptolemaic period. Mummy portraits usually contained such information as the names, professions, and origins of the deceased, as well as the places to which the mummies were to be sent. Today, they also provide a record of elite culture, thanks to the costumes, hairstyles, and jewelry depicted in them (Figure 8.7). Sometimes children were buried with toys beside their mothers, and sometimes family members were interred together. With the death of Ptolemy II, more than half a century of Ptolemaic rule had passed since Alexander had first conquered Egypt. During the inter­vening years, Greeks, Macedonians, Persians, Arabs, Jews, and Syrians had all contributed to bringing innovative new agricultural techniques to the region. Among these was the saqya, a wheel that lifted water to adjacent fields from canals coming from the Nile. This practice gave birth to the idea that Egypt was a garden that was always being watered. The new settlers also planted new crops, such as olives, allowing the production of olive oil to become an important industry in the region. The planting of vineyards and orchards was further encouraged by the rulers, because it was easy to collect taxes on them. Ancient Egypt was divided into multiple administrative provinces called sepat. These were reorganized during Ptolemaic times into nomes (a Greek word meaning “law” or legal jurisdiction). Each nome had a capital city that also served as its Figure 8.7 The mummy portrait of a young religious and economic center, and each woman in Arsinoe, Fayoum



A Nile Oasis in the Sahara

was managed by a nomarch, a prestigious position appointed by the pharaoh and sometimes granted on a hereditary basis. The Ptolemaic pharaohs created nomes as a specific form of local government. The head of a nome, usually a Macedonian, might further obtain the military title of strategos (“general”) and have multiple nomarchs working under him, dealing with public works and royal properties. Written records suggest that Fayoum became a single entity, the Arsinoite nome, and was ruled by one strategos. More recent discoveries prove that in Fayoum, nomarchs had complete control over their nomes, which were even named after them. The naming and division of the area were important because they reflected the nature of its governance. Ancient Egyptians had frequently named villages after their beloved gods. For instance, Kroko­ deilon polis referred to a crocodile-god. But during the Ptolemaic period these same nomes were divided based on a north–south axis, and their names were indicative of immigration trends. Thus, Samareia was “the village of the Syrians,” and Arabon Kome was “the village of the Arabs.” The nome system, which evolved through Ptolemaic times, ultimately disappeared following Roman bureaucratic reforms. However, Fayoum continued to be one of the areas that served as a breadbasket for Rome. Indeed, cultivation of crops that fed the Roman army and ultimately provided luxury goods for the Roman emperors was an essential part of its economy and life. But the overall population of the Fayoum region seems to have declined during the second century ad due to an outbreak of plague that swept over Egypt. After a short period of prosperity, its irrigation systems gradually fell into decay in the third century, and the Fayoum region, including the town of Philadelphia, had been abandoned by the end of the fourth century ad. Many once-vibrant settlements were ultimately covered with sand blown in by desert winds. The region of Fayoum has, however, been reborn many times since then. For example, following the Arab conquest of Egypt, agriculture was revived there, albeit on a more modest scale. But it was not until the time of Mehmed Ali, the founder of modern Egypt, whose period of rule came at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that the central government in Cairo began to pay more serious attention to the area’s agricultural potential. Indeed, by the end of the twentieth century, the region had recovered its demographic and economic role in Egypt; it had also become an important center for religious revival and preaching. A fundamentalist version of Islam has also contributed to the region’s resurgence. The relative isolation of Fayoum has enabled the Salafis, a group espousing a very conservative view of Islamic practice and a restrictive regimen for daily life, to use it as a breeding ground for their ideas. Thus, the Fayoum region, which was one of the most culturally diverse areas in Egypt two millennia ago, is one of its most intolerant fundamentalist areas at the start of the third millennium ad.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Note 1. Abu-Uthman al-Nabulsi was governor of Fayoum province in the late Ayyubid period. As cited in Hewison (2011: 1).

Bibliography Bevan, Edwyn R. 1968. The House of Ptolemy: A History of Egypt under the Ptolemaic Dynasty. Chicago: Argonaut. Bevan, Edwyn R. 2014. A History of Egypt under the Ptolemaic Dynasty. Hoboken, NJ: Taylor & Francis. Caton-Thompson, Gertrude, and E. W. Gardner. 1934. The Desert Fayum. London: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Dumont, Henri J. 2009. The Nile: Origin, Environments, Limnology and Human Use. Dordrecht: Springer. Hewison, R. Neil. 2011. The Fayoum. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Ludwig, Emil. 1937. The Nile: The Life Story of a River. New York: Viking Press. McKechnie, Paul, and Philippe Guillaume. 2008. Ptolemy II Philadelphus and His World. Leiden: Brill. Monson, Andrew. 2012. From the Ptolemies to the Romans: Political and Economic Change in Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Römer, Cornelia. 2017. “The Nile in the Fayum: Strategies of Dominating and Using the Water Resources of the River in the Oasis in the Middle Kingdom and the Graeco-Roman Period.” In Harco Willems and Jan-Michael Dahms, eds., The Nile: Natural and Cultural Landscape in Egypt. Bielefeld: Transcript, pp. 171–91. Snape, Steven, R. 2014. The Complete Cities of Ancient Egypt. London: Thames & Hudson. Strabo. 2014. The Geography of Strabo, Duane W. Roller, trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, David L. 1976. The Artists of the Mummy Portraits. Malibu, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum. Thompson, Dorothy J. 1999a. “Irrigation and Drainage in the Early Ptolemaic Fayyum.” Proceedings of the British Academy, 96, pp. 107–22. Thompson, Dorothy J. 1999b. “New and Old in the Ptolemaic Fayuum.” Proceedings of the British Academy, 96, pp. 123–38. Vandorpe, Katelijn. 2004. “The Henet of Moeris and the Ancient Administrative Division of the Fayum in two parts.” Archiv für Papyrusforschung und verwandte Gebiete, 50 (1), pp. 61–78. Willy, Clarysse. 2005. “Toponymy of Fayyum Villages in the Ptolemaic Period.” In M. Capasso and P. Davoli, eds., New Archaeological and Papyrological Researches on the Fayyum. Proceedings of the International Meeting of Egyptology and Papyrology, Lecce, June 8–10, Papyrologica Lupiensia.

Ch a pter 9

Cairo: The Thousand-year Capital on the Nile It is the metropolis of the universe, the garden of the world, the swarming core of humanity. — Ibn Khaldun ([1377]: 92)

A

lthough not well known outside the circles of Islamic history, ‘Amr ibn al-‘As was a major figure during rise of Islam on the Arabian Peninsula. A Companion of the Prophet, he is credited with leading the Arab conquest of Egypt and defeating the Byzantine army in a campaign that lasted one whole year. General ‘Amr, as a result, became the conqueror of a country similar to that mentioned in the Quran, whose verses promise good Muslims a heaven with flowing rivers. To the people of the Arabian desert, the Nile valley of Egypt was, indeed, the closest thing to heaven. Emerging as a powerful new religious and political force at the beginning of the seventh century ad, Islam brought profound change to the entire region of the Middle East and North Africa. However, the conquests that followed did not bring destruction to the region’s ancient cities. Arab-Muslim forces often encountered little resistance from local populations, many then under the declining rule of the Sasanian and Byzantine Empires. The Arab campaign in Egypt began in the summer of 640. ‘Amr had proposed it to Caliph Omar as a way to defend against a possible attack from the Byzantine governor of Jerusalem. As ‘Amr advanced into Egypt, he was first able to draw the Byzantine forces into open battle and defeat them. Then, after the remaining Byzantine army sought refuge in an old Roman fortress where the Nile opened out into the delta, he pursued them there. Despite his military superiority, ‘Amr was not able to attack the fortress, which was named Babylon, directly, but after a victory at nearby Heliopolis, the fortress fell and the Arabs set their sights on Alexandria, Egypt’s major city and a much more difficult prize. Had it not been for Egyptian political divisions, Alexandria would have been impossible to conquer. However, the local Byzantine patriarch, Cyrus, believed it was crucial to reach an understanding with the Arabs to preserve Christianity in Egypt. And his strategy led to the Treaty of Alexandria, signed in November 641, which allowed both parties to

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River achieve their goals. Specifically, ‘Amr gave Cyrus three options: continue open war, convert to Islam and be granted equality, or accept taxation in return for the free practice of religion and limited citizenship rights. Cyrus chose the third option. As the Arabs consolidated their military rule in Egypt, ‘Amr sought advice from the local Christian population, known as Copts. He eventually filled administrative seats with Copts and converts to Islam, increasing their power. Having played a significant role in the founding of the Umayyad caliphate, ‘Amr was in 658 reaffirmed by the new caliph in Damascus as governor of Egypt, and he ruled there until his death in 664. It is important to mention that the words “Copt” and “Egypt” are probably both derived from the ancient Egyptian hi ka Ptah, which means “house of the spirit of Ptah,” the god of the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis. Prior to Alexander’s invasion, the Greeks may have distorted Hikaptah to “Aigyptos.” The Arabs initially thus referred to the inhabitants of Egypt as the qibt. But by the time of their invasion, they used the word misr, meaning “settlement,” to describe all of Egypt, but also more specifically the dense urban settlements of the Nile delta. Today, Egyptians from all over the country refer to both Egypt and Cairo simply as “Misr.” At the time of the Arab conquest, the civilization of Egypt already encompassed not only multiple histories but also many chapters in the histories of other civilizations. Ancient Egyptian civilization, which had endured for three millennia, had never really died out, but it had undergone considerable transformation under Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine rule. Indeed, Egyptians often proudly speak of their country as “the tomb of all conquerors,” and although the reality of conquest is frequently more complicated, there is some truth to this epigram. Thus, most of those who had conquered Egypt to that point had found it convenient, desirable, or necessary to change their habits, customs, and even religions to fit the Egyptian mold (or to adopt Egyptian identity altogether) as a means of governing its territory. But the Arab conquest now brought a total transformation of Egypt and its absorption into Arab-Islamic civilization. The transformation began with the founding of a new administrative and military capital. The Roman military presence in Egypt had originally consisted of three legions: one in Alexandria, one in Thebes in Upper Egypt, and a third across the Nile from Memphis, at the Babylon fortress (Figure 9.1). It is believed that Emperor Trajan had ordered the fortress to be built in 98 ad. One theory is that its name derived from its construction on an earlier garrison site that dated back to the Babylonian occupation, during the time of either Nebuchadnezzar or Cambyses.1 But it is equally possible that its name was “Bab-li-on”—meaning “gate to On”—which was also the name given in the Bible to the nearby ancient city of Heliopolis. Whatever the case, the Arab conquest of Egypt would

Cairo

Figure 9.1 Remains of the Babylon fortress

not have been possible without its capture, because it occupied a position of great strategic significance where the Nile spread out to form the delta. And it was from Fustat, the site at which ‘Amr had stationed his forces during the siege of Babylon, that the Arabs would ultimately spread their control over the entire country. The occupation of Egypt represented a major victory for the Arabs. Egypt had long played an important role in their imagination as a center of civilization and a place of lush greenery and plenty, attributes largely missing from the arid lands of Arabia. From the Arab perspective, Fustat had several advantages over Alexandria as a military and administrative center. To begin, its location on the east bank of the river reflected the desire within the Arab army to ensure continued land access to Mecca and Medina without having to cross a significant water barrier. The fortress at Babylon had been situated near the fortified island of Rawdah, which had for millennia provided a way across the Nile. Another reason was that a settlement on the Nile’s east bank was preferable for Arab settlers, who wanted to distance themselves from the ruins of temples at the ancient west-bank city of Memphis, which to them represented pagan beliefs. Finally, Caliph Omar, ruling from Arabia, was interested in the area because it was from there that a Roman canal, originally built

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River under ­Trajan’s rule, had once linked the Nile to the Red Sea. The canal had allowed Egypt’s crops to be shipped all over the Roman Empire, and Omar saw great value in restoring it to provision Arab lands through ports on both sides of the Red Sea. Garrison towns like Fustat were important creations of early Islam, planned and administered according to Islamic ideals of modesty and simplicity and embodying the concerns of a state still engaged in conquest. At their centers, they typically included a mosque, a dar al-imara (governor’s residence), and a saha (square). Yet, many other details of their internal organization had to be negotiated locally between their inhabitants and the military commander or governor in charge. Thus the basic organizational plan of early Fustat was designed to accommodate a complicated array of tribal and clan associations. In general, groups were given areas of land, called khittat, in proportion to their ethnic, tribal, and economic status. This arrangement, which carried some of the values and traditions of Bedouin life, initially grew out of the organization of ‘Amr’s army. But in time, the tribes mixed, grew in number, and out-competed each other for territory, allowing the settlement to develop into a full-fledged city. The development of Fustat stretched over several centuries. The Arab army that had come to Egypt in the seventh century initially numbered between 10,000 and 15,000 men. But by the time it settled in the Fustat area, the number of its soldiers had grown to about 30,000. In those years, Egypt was still undergoing territorial and demographic transformation, and garrisons were frequently deployed to other locations to carry out small military actions. After completing their duty, such forces became entitled to land grants, and many warriors chose to settle with other members of their tribes within the allotted tribal areas around Fustat. At no time during the Umayyad period, however, did the central Arab quarters of Fustat near the Nile and nearby the Babylon fortress account for more than around half its territory. The rest of the area was populated by Egyptian Copts, who continued to occupy areas south of the old fortress, as they had done during Byzantine times. The site of the old fortress, with its church, was also soon taken over by the Coptic population, allowing the construction of new churches there and enabling its transformation into a Coptic town. Arab writers mention that the old fortress, now transformed into a town, overlooked the Nile and was accessible through a main gate, known as the Iron Gate. Records also show that, while the area east of the fortress was barren, areas to its north were cultivated with vineyards and orchards. There were two types of street in early Fustat: thoroughfares, which facili­ tated overall circulation, and local streets within its residential ­quarters. Main arteries were called khitt or tariq, while smaller streets were called darb. The mosque of ‘Amr was situated at the heart of the city, and as the quarter around this initially small structure evolved into

Cairo

Figure 9.2 The mosque of ‘Amr Ibn al-‘As

a promin­ent urban center, it was expanded in stages using columns and stones from nearby ancient Egyptian and Roman temples (Figure 9.2). During the early years of Islam, the center of caliphal rule shifted several times. However, under the Abbasid Dynasty, which came to power in 750 following the collapse of Umayyad rule in the Middle East, the center of caliphal power moved to the newly established city of Baghdad. The Umayyads, meanwhile, moved west, and created an alternate regime in a weak Visigoth state on the Iberian Peninsula (which had fallen under their control), which they thought would ultimately compete with Baghdad. In Egypt, the change to Abbasid rule brought the first of a series of additions to the original Arab-Coptic settlement at Babylon/Fustat. That settlement had been situated northeast of Fustat, which was probably in poor shape following a series of raids by the Abbasid army, and was known as al-Askar, which simply meant “the army encampment.” As a satellite town, it was initially used by the newly appointed Abbasid governor of Egypt to accommodate his forces. There are no archaeological remains of al-Askar, but the few written accounts of it that exist describe it as having a central mosque and a square that functioned for several decades. By the ninth century, the Islamic Empire, which extended from Spain to the borders of China, had begun to disintegrate into fiefdoms. Many of these were still theoretically under the rule of the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. But different political and military events led some governors

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River to declare their territories independent, while in other regions rebellious groups took over and started entirely new regimes. During this time, the gradual rise of Turkish soldiers serving the Abbasids also brought personalities such as Ahmad Ibn Tulun to the fore. Ibn Tulun’s father had been a slave brought to the court of the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun in 815. Yet despite this humble origin, Ibn Tulun benefited from an exceptional education and became one of the most important men in the service of the caliph. A capable commander, Ibn Tulun sought to impose his authority on Egypt in 868 after a long period of political instability; and following a series of military victories, he was appointed governor there by the Abbasid caliph. During his reign and that of his successors, known as the Tulunid Dynasty, Egypt, although still symbolically under Abbasid rule, effectively became an autonomous state again for the first time since the Roman conquest. However, when Ibn Tulun took over as ruler of Egypt in 870 he again moved the seat of government— this time to the northwest of Fustat and al-Askar, to the suburb of al-Qata’i, which meant “the wards” or “the quarters.” Ibn Tulun possibly modeled al-Qata’i on the city of Samarra in Iraq, which is believed to have influenced his taste in art and architecture.2 However, like al-Askar before it, al-Qata’i was not independent, but relied on the services of Fustat for its economic survival. Al-Qata’i covered 1.6 square kilometers and included a mosque, govern­ment buildings, a hippodrome, a palace complex (dar al-imara) (with views of the Nile and the port in Fustat), and a large square known as the Maydan. Ibn Tulun’s palace was located at the foot of the steep rock called Qubat al-Hawa (Dome of the Air), an outcrop later used by Salah al-Din for his citadel. The palace had nine gates, one of which, Bab as-Salat (Gate of Prayer), was connected to the mosque by a great thoroughfare, which later became Saliba Street. Next to the mosque, Ibn Tulun built another structure, which he used for ablution before Friday prayers. Ibn Tulun also built several major works of infrastructure for the population of the entire area. Among these was a hospital southwest of al-Askar. He also built an aqueduct to bring water to the palace from the Nile, since the maintenance of such an extensive complex depended on a constant supply. It is almost impossible to tell the history of a city that no longer exists, but in the case of al-Qata’i there remains one building, its mosque, that speaks not only for it but for the cultural and political geography of the entire region. Although Ibn Tulun’s palace and its surrounding structures were for the most part destroyed when Abbasid rule came to an end, the mosque survived to become one of the most important monuments of Islamic architecture. Its spiral minaret, a partial copy of the original Malweya, the minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra, is particularly elegant. Unlike ‘Amr’s mosque, the mosque of Ibn Tulun seems to have

Cairo

Figure 9.3 The Ibn Tulun mosque and its spiral minaret

retained the integrity and coherence of its original design for more than a millennium (Figure 9.3). Thirty years after ‘Amr established Fustat, the population of registered Arabs in the area of Fustat was 40,000. The city’s population might also have included an equal number of indigenous Copts.3 But the city con­ tinued to grow, and by the middle of the ninth century it had a population of about 250,000. Some of this growth may be attributed to the influx of settlers needed to carry out military actions or implement changes of government. But the rapid increase also reflected the import of slaves and an influx of foreigners who worked as craftsmen, tradesmen, and clerks in support of administrative institutions. Eventually, toward the beginning of the tenth century, a time of economic prosperity and political stability, Fustat and its later additions, al-Askar and al-Qata’i, merged into a single metropolis with a population of about 500,000. Despite political turmoil, Egypt during the Tulunid period not only became a center of culture and art, but also carried out successful military campaigns and annexed Syria. In his writings, the traveler Abu al-Qasim Muhammad ibn Hawqal described the city of Fustat, which he visited around 960, as a thriving city, extending “about two-thirds of a farsang: it is very well inhabited and supplied with provisions; all their houses are seven or eight stories high” (quoted in Manley and Abdel-Hakim 2008: 46). And he went on to describe a bridge that connected Fustat to the island of Jezirah. In the years that followed the Tulinids, however, Egypt was again ruled by a weak Abbasid caliphate, and entered a period of decline that ended only when it fell to the Fatimids, a Shiite clan from North Africa.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River With the gradual collapse of the central military authority of the Abbasids, who ruled from Baghdad, a series of local dynasties rose to lead the Islamic world. North African principalities were among the first to gain autonomy in the far-flung and loosely controlled empire. In Tunisia, the movement against the Abbasid caliphs, who were perceived as decadent, reached its peak when Sa’id ibn Husain al-Mahdi, a self-proclaimed descendant of the Prophet (who also claimed to be the promised Mahdi, or “Redeemer”), broke away from the Sunni Empire to establish a Shiite caliphate in North Africa. The Fatimids then set their sights on moving eastward, to challenge the Sunni Abbasids, and after successive attempts, the fourth Fatimid caliph, al-Mu’izz, who ruled from 953 to 975, succeeded in conquering Egypt. Egypt at that time was ruled by the Ikhshidis, who had succeeded the princes of the Tulunid clan. However, an invasion by al-Mu’izz’s general, Jawhar al-Siqeli (928–92), who was of Christian slave origin and whose full name literally meant “the Sicilian jewel,” finally ended their rule in 969, when he succeeded in taking the cities of Fustat and al-Qata’i. Immediately after his arrival, Jawhar began searching for a site to garrison his troops. According to at least one account, he carried with him instructions from al-Mu’izz related to the construction of a new Fatimid capital, which al-Mu’izz envisioned as a rival to Baghdad. Jawhar located this new city on the eastern bank of the Nile at a site north of the two earlier settlements. Seen in context, the new city would add to a chain of cities bordering the Nile, which had begun with Fustat in 640 and extended through al-Askar in 750 and al-Qata’i in 870. Jawhar’s choice for the site of Fatimid Cairo thus extended a north–south urban axis and tied the new city to its predecessors (Figure 9.4). Jawhar’s first step was to lay down the outline of a city wall, locate its gates, and start construction of two major buildings—the caliphal place and the mosque. Legend has it that on the following day, when a delegation from Fustat arrived to welcome Jawhar, they found that the plan for the entire city had already been laid out and the foundations dug. The chronicles contain no mention of the architects or builders involved in this process, indicating that his army may have included individuals with such specialized skills. Al-Maqrizi (1364–1442), the renowned medieval historian of Cairo, wrote that Jawhar initially planned his city to be square, with sides roughly 1,100 meters long. This defined a total area of about 138 hectares, of which 28 hectares were allotted to the caliphal place and 28 more to the existing Ikhshidi gardens (al-Bustan al-Kafuri) and other squares, called rahbahs. The remaining area was assigned as khittat to the 20 different groups making up the army. Al-Maqrizi wrote that Jawhar and his forces camped to the south of the proposed site and immediately started building its walls, and that Jawhar concurrently started the construction of the main caliphal palace.

Cairo

Figure 9.4 Map showing Fustat, al-Askar, al-Qata’i, and al-Qahira

Jawhar may have consulted with astrologers before deciding on the loca­tion of the town or the date for executing his plan. Several sources relate that the town was later called “al-Qahira,” after a bright star an astrologer observed in the sky that night. Jawhar supposedly started laying out the town on the evening of a Friday in the Arabic month of Sha’aban in 969. Anxious to implement his plans, he seems to have ordered his soldiers to carry on through the night. But in the morning he realized that

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River the plan had been implemented with inconsistencies, so that its originally intended square form had been extended into a rectangle. However, Jawhar decided not to correct it, saying that “it was laid out in a holy night and its irregularity must have been caused by a divine logic.” Of course, it is unlikely that the plan could have been so severely distorted during its execution. And the sides of the executed plan carry the proportion of 2:3, one not likely to have been achieved by mistake. The original plan has been the subject of continual controversy. Some believe that Caliph al-Mu’izz designed the city himself and provided Jawhar with a precise plan with specific dimensions and a proposed procedure for execution. Others suggest that the plan of Cairo was initially envisioned along the lines of a Roman castrum. Still other scholars maintain that the plan simply replicated some of the details of the town of al-Mahyadiyah in Tunisia. Whether it was modeled after a Roman castrum or a North African town, Jawhar started the city by building a palace, a mosque, and a mud-brick perimeter wall. He called it al-Mansuriyya, after a town built by al-Mu’izz’s father in Tunisia. Most of the gates of the new city likewise seem to have been named after the gates of that city, providing additional support for the view that the city was modeled after its North African counterpart. Four years after the conquest, Caliph al-Mu’izz arrived at the new city and declared it the capital of his caliphate, changing its name to al-Qahira (“the Victorious”).4 Among Europeans, the name was later distorted by Italian travelers to al-Caira, and, hence, to its current English name, Cairo. From the beginning, al-Mu’izz was intent on creating an imperial capital with an instant sense of history. From Tunisia he brought three coffins enclosing the remains of his predecessors, and he ordered them to be buried at a site close to his palace. As he arrived in the city, the caliph also led the first public prayer, setting Cairo on track to becoming the religious and intellectual capital of the Muslim world for years to come. To emphasize the change of dynasty, the Abbasid caliph’s name was elimin­ ated from all official records and prayers, and new coinage was struck. And al-Mu’izz ordained that white be used as the city’s official color, in place of black, the color of the Abbasids. For the first time in 1,000 years, Egypt now became a sovereign state headed by one person, the Fatimid caliph, who was both its spiritual and its political leader. Al-Maqrizi’s description of the different urban elements that made up the Fatimid city exceeds 200 pages, of which a considerable portion is devoted to its palaces. The caliphal palace apparently included several large halls and opened out to the city through nine gates. It was bordered by the city’s central square, or maidan, which was later framed by the addition of another caliphal structure, often called the Western Palace. The maidan acted as a place where the caliph would review his troops, and was a huge space that could accommodate 10,000 soldiers.

Cairo The caliphal palace was separated from other structures by open spaces and gardens on its other sides as well. To its west was al-Bustan al-Kafuri, a large garden established as a retreat during the time of the Ikhshidis. This was walled and connected by underground tunnels to the palace, and was exclusively reserved in the early days for use by the caliph and his family. And rahbahs (squares) on the northern and eastern sides separated the caliphal palace from a guesthouse and from the city’s residential neighborhoods, respectively. Although the spatial configuration around the palace seems irregular, it served both to isolate the caliph from his surroundings and to place him at the center of the settlement, a precedent set in the first planned Islamic capital, Baghdad. While the construction of the palace was proceeding, Jawhar decided to build a congregational Friday mosque to the south of the palace. In­itially named Jami al-Qahira, the structure soon acquired its present name, al-Azhar, which means “the magnificent”—the masculine form of the honorific title “Zahra” that had been used to refer to the Prophet’s daughter Fatima (through which the Shiite branch of Islam traced its lineage). The construction of the mosque started in 970 and was completed three years later. Al-Mu’izz led the first Friday prayers there and delivered the khutbah sermon on the first Friday of the Arab month of Ramadan in 972. After al-Mizz, the rule of Caliph al-Aziz from 975 to 996 was followed by the long reign of his son, al-Hakim (996–1021), who was only 11 when he came to power. Until he was deemed old enough to rule by himself, al-Hakim’s guardian and counselor, the eunuch Barjawan, acted as regent. After four years, however, al-Hakim had Barjawan assassinated, and became absolute monarch at the age of 15. Al-Hakim was a controversial figure, whose excesses and unpredictable behavior became the subject of many stories and myths. From the sudden execution of a court favorite after bestowing him with gifts, to boiling his noisy concubines alive in a bath, he became known for arbitrary acts of both generosity and cruelty. He supposedly issued decrees ordering the killing of all dogs in Cairo, prohibiting chess, and forbidding the consumption of certain popular food items. Women seem to have been one of his particular targets, as they lived under threat of severe punishment if they wore jewelry. They were also ordered to never leave their homes; and to ensure compliance with this law, shoemakers were prohibited from manufacturing women’s shoes. But al-Hakim was also the builder of one of Cairo’s great mosques, which still bears his name. The mosque was actually begun during the rule of Caliph Aziz, as a new location for the Friday sermon and Eid prayers, but it was finished by his son. Initially located outside the city walls, at Bab al-Futuh, it was built using materials from dismantled ancient Egyptian temples. It also signaled a change in the pattern of preaching in Cairo, as, for a time, the Friday khutbah was held in more than one

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Figure 9.5 The mosque of al-Hakim

mosque—with the mosque of ‘Amr in Fustat accommodating the Sunni khutbah, while the Shiite khutbah was held in the mosques of al-Hakim and al-Azhar. At roughly 110 meters by 103 meters in plan, the mosque of al-Hakim was twice as large as al-Azhar. It also introduced new features, such as two corner minarets and, later, a monumental projecting portal in the middle of the entry wall. Its interior could be accessed by means of 13 different entrances (Figure 9.5). Toward the end of his life, al-Hakim’s eccentricities became more bizarre. He was not only hostile to Sunnis, but also engaged in harsh treatment of the Coptic Church and his Christian subjects, who were still many. In an effort to convince them to convert to Islam, he ordered to them wear heavy crosses around their necks and prohibited them from owning slaves or riding horses in the city. As his religious fervor increased, he even began to see himself as a prophet, proclaiming his divine nature. Finally, when the population of Fustat rose in protest, he sent his army to quell the rebellion. Yet despite his despotism and cruelty, al-Hakim was remembered by some as a humble man who cared for the needs of the population, and who often walked the streets and spoke with his subjects, whom he did not allow to address him by his royal title. Toward the last years of his rule, he led a life of asceticism, dressing modestly and declining to indulge in luxury, as many of his predecessors had. Al-Hakim’s death is shrouded by mystery. He often withdrew for meditation, and one night he rode out to the Muqattam hills and never returned. Only his blood-stained garments were ever found, which led followers to believe he had left the world in order to be resurrected in the future as the Savior. His followers, known

Cairo as the Druze, eventually settled in Lebanon and Syria, and continue to regard al-Hakim as a prophet. In 1068, Egypt suffered a severe drought, and urban order in Cairo disintegrated. Eventually, the situation degenerated to such an extent that the caliph at the time, Mustansir, had to call on the governor of Acre, Badr al-Jamali, to take over the government of Egypt. Al-Jamali, who served as vizir (principal minister) in Egypt from 1073 to 1094, was a strong ruler who managed to restore order to the capital and revive the political and religious authority of the Fatimid caliphate. He also renewed the appearance of the city. Among his achievements were to enlarge the city by building a new stone wall that encompassed all the buildings outside the old wall. He also built three important new gates: Bab al-Futuh (1087) and Bab al-Nasr (1087) on the north wall, and Bab al-Zuwayla (1092) on the south wall. Bab al-Zuwayla was named after the Fatimid soldiers from the Berber al-Zawila tribe who settled near the site of the original gate in 969. All three gates displayed affinities with Byzantine architecture in Syria in terms of style, construction, and materials. They also featured pairs of short but voluminous towers, which are square in the case Bab al-Nasr and round in the case of Bab al-Futuh and Bab al-Zuwayla (Figure 9.6). Al-Jamali’s interventions again gave Fatimid Cairo the appearance of a fortified city. This was accomplished primarily by using recycled stone from nearby ancient Egyptian temples and by importing skilled builders of defensive structures from Byzantium. Al-Jamali

Figure 9.6 The Bab al-Zuwayla gate in Cairo

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River also built the Dar al-Wizarah (the palace of the vizir) northeast of the central palace. The building acted as the official residence of Fatimid vizirs until the fall of the Fatimid caliphate. Fatimid Cairo was an impressive city in its heyday. Although initially envisioned as a palatial compound, it quickly developed into a full urban settlement. The Persian scholar and traveler Nasir-i Khusraw (1004–88), who resided in Fatimid Cairo from 1047 to 1050, described it as being composed of a large number of detached palaces or houses. As he wrote, “These houses are so magnificent and fine that you would think they were made of jewels, not of plaster, tile, and stone!” He described houses five to six stories tall in “new” (that is, Fatimid) Cairo, and structures up to 14 stories tall, each accommodating up to 350 people, in Fustat, which he called “Old Cairo.” Although this may have been an exaggeration (as he had converted to Shiite Islam during his time in Cairo and become an advocate of the regime), it captured the fascination of travelers to Cairo during this time. Another element of Fatimid Cairo, apparent from its plan, was its evident social hierarchy. The earliest haras, or residential quarters, were strongly affiliated with the tribes that made up the Fatimid army, as clearly illustrated by their names. There were originally 20 haras, which surrounded the palaces at the core of the city and formed its periphery. The balance achieved between the tribes and their representation in the government of Egypt was of major importance to the city. In the early years, only the relatively wealthy could live inside the walls, while the masses, who lived in Fustat, were allowed to enter only with special permission. As a private, princely town, Fatimid Cairo did not originally seem to have contained any major markets. After all, it had only to serve a small, elite population. It is very possible, though, that during its early days the city did contain warehouses and small neighborhood markets for its residents; it would have otherwise been inconvenient for them to attend to their immediate needs. In later years, however, this situation changed as the city grew and developed a more balanced relationship with Fustat. In his brief description of the extent of trade and commerce inside Fatimid Cairo, Khusraw estimated the number of shops there at around 20,000, accommodating all types of commercial activity, although this was clearly an exaggeration. The shops were all owned by the caliph and rented to tenants. In Fatimid Cairo’s first two centuries, no one except the caliph was allowed to own commercial or residential property. It is indeed possible to think of al-Qahira during its first century as simply a palatial compound from which colonial rule was exercised, and where the local population had to abide by the dictates of their foreign rulers. During the Fatimid caliphate, commercial activity was also closely regulated by the state. The various crafts and trades were organized into

Cairo compulsory guilds, a form of labor organization that also had roots in the Byzantine occupation of Egypt. Urban markets were likewise controlled through the office of the muhtasib, a government agent who acted as a market inspector and ranked third among the men of state. Although that office became much more important at the end of Ayyubid rule, which would follow, it was part of Cairo’s pre-Ayyubid heritage. The role of the muhtasibs in Fatimid times was thus generally limited to controlling prices, checking quality, and collecting taxes. Before the end of Fatimid rule, the twin cities of al-Qahira and Fustat existed side by side and acted as a single large settlement that was both the capital of the Fatimid caliphate and the most important city of medieval Islam. However, when the Ayyubids (a Sunni Muslim dynasty of Kurdish origin) took over in 1171, they opened the privileged enclave of the Fatimid city to commoners, who had previously been able to live only outside its walls. It was then that al-Qahira’s regular pattern also started to disintegrate, and it began to look more like its older neighbor, Fustat.5 Fatimid rule in Egypt ended in the twelfth century after years of political instability brought on by the European Crusades and the Syrian Seljuk rulers. The enigmatic story of the burning of Fustat in 1168 is interesting to tell here. During the early years of the last Fatimid caliph, al-Adid, who reigned from 1160 to 1171, a major struggle broke out between his vizirs, Shawar and Dirgham, for control of the Fatimid court. When Shawar was removed from power, he struck a deal for support first from Nur al-Din, the Ayyubid ruler of Syria, and then from the Franks—particularly from Amalric, the Crusader king of Jerusalem. Attempting to pit one regional power against the other did not work in Shawar’s favor, however, as both sides had ambitions to take over Egypt. As Amalric’s forces headed toward Cairo after devastating several unfortified cities in the Nile delta, Shawar panicked. Fatimid Cairo was a walled city, which could protect itself, but much of the urban population resided in unwalled Fustat. Shawar purportedly ordered the population of Fustat to evacuate, and then (according to a tactic employed repeatedly in other parts of the world during premodern times) he ordered Fustat to be burned.6 This Nero-like move was meant to ensure that the area outside Cairo’s walls would not be used as a base to attack it. But before the Frankish troops could attack Fatimid Cairo, the Syrian troops of Nur al-Din, who had participated in the campaign, ambushed Shawar and killed him. This story, which has found its way into Cairene myth, is corroborated by eyewitness accounts and even some minor physical evidence. But visitors to Fatimid Cairo and Fustat in the succeeding century also commented on the mosques, hotels, and even houses that still existed from the last two decades of the twelfth century. Nevertheless, it is likely that when Salah al-Din ibn Ayyub, known in the West as Saladin, took over as vizir and abolished the Fatimid

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River caliphate, Fustat lay in semi-ruins. Its population was either crowded into the former princely city or living in camps outside its walls. It was thus a ruined city that Salah al-Din took over. Before long, he built a citadel on top the hill northeast of al-Qahira, and decided to establish residence in it. The decision has been attributed to security concerns, as well as to a desire to manifest his military prowess. Circular towers flanked each of the citadel gates, connected by ramparts and hollow interior passages intended for defensive use. The location of the citadel in close proximity to both al-Qahira and Fustat made it easy to supply it with provisions and water from the Nile, carried through an aqueduct, built during Salah al-Din’s time as part of the new wall that surrounded both cities. After Salah al-Din established his base in Cairo, he had to spend a considerable part of his time fighting the Crusaders, particularly the armies that came with the Third Crusade, led by the King of England, Richard the Lion Heart. Hence, he stayed in Cairo for only few years. However, after Salah al-Din’s death, his sons divided his empire and Ayyubid rule came to an end less than a century later, at the hands of Shajar al-Durr, who was originally a slave in the harem of al-Salih, the last of the Ayyubid rulers. After falling in love with Shajar al-Durr, al-Salih freed her, married her, and made her his principal wife. Shajar al-Durr belonged to the clan of slave-warriors known as the Mamluks. Brought to Egypt as a Christian slave from the remote lands of Armenia, she converted to Islam as a child and was brought up as a Muslim. The Mamluks—a word which means “those who are owned”—were valued for their horsemanship and fighting tradition, and were trained as guards for the Ayyubid rulers of Egypt. Their women served as concubines to the rulers or married powerful Mamluk men. However, given their indispensable military role, their social status changed over time. From slave soldiers, they became free men and court favorites, holding important political functions such as viziers or commanders of army battalions. The Mamluk soldiers lived in palaces of their own and in luxurious barracks on the island of Rawdah in the middle of the Nile as it passes through Cairo. For this reason, they were likely named “Bahri Mamluks,” possibly in reference to their residence on that island.7 Eventually, the Mamluks became so powerful and influential that without their support no ruler could hold the throne of Egypt. The Mamluks took over the city in the bloody struggle that followed the death of the last Ayyubid ruler and the subsequent killing of Shagarat al-Durr, who ruled clandestinely almost as queen for a few months. However, they did not completely consolidate their control until General Baybars’s victory over the Mongols, who had succeeded in destroying the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad. Thus, although Baybars was not the first Mamluk sultan, he is the one who is remembered in Islamic history as the founder of the new dynasty. But the Mamluks had no system of direct

Cairo

Figure 9.7 The complex of Qalawun

succession, and instead the most powerful among them, essentially those who had the largest number of other Mamluk fighters, came to power after a bloody struggle between them. Sultan Qalawun was among the few Mamluk rulers who established a dynasty (albeit short) within that regime. Qalawun was a builder: he constructed a major complex which included a mosque, a madrasa, and a hospital, an entirely new architectural typology in the heart of the city. Erected in 13 months, a speed unprecedented at the time for projects of that magnitude, the complex stands today as one of the greatest achievements of Bahri Mamluk architecture (Figure 9.7). The other major achievement of that era was the great mosque of Sultan Hasan, one of the last rulers of that dynasty, whose rule unfortunately corresponded to an unhappy time in the life of the city. He inherited a city which had been hit by natural calamities, such as the Nile flood of 1354 and a famine in 1375, as well as plague. In addition, the banks of the Nile were shifting westward at this time, exposing new land. All these factors contributed to a prolonged decline in the city’s population. In an ironic twist of fate, Sultan Hasan’s treasury grew considerably during this period. All belongings of families who died during the plague were confiscated and became property of the state. The sultan may have decided that the proper way to make use of this wealth was to build a magnificent religious edifice, dedicated to the victims of the epidemic.

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Figure 9.8 The mosque and madrasa of Sultan Hasan

He founded his mosque and madrasa in 1356 on a site near the citadel; its construction lasted five years (Figure 9.8). During their one and half centuries of dominance, the Bahri Mamluks were among the few rulers in Egypt who were never absorbed into the population. The island of Rawdah, where most resided in palaces, may have symbolized their power and wealth but it isolated them, as the ruling class, from their subjects. Sultan Barquq, who followed Hasan, may be considered the first Burji Mamluk sultan. Unlike the earlier Bahri Mamluks, Barquq was a Circassian, and his clan would later be called Burji Mamluks possibly because they returned the seat of government back to the citadel—whose Arabic name for some was simply the burj. Located on the site of the old Fatimid western palace, next to the Qalawun complex, Barquq’s complex bore inscriptions dating its completion in 1386 ad. It was a waqf institution, an endowed foundation to support the activities of the madrasa; there were many others of this kind during that era. The complex consisted of a cruciform madrasa plan, with an adjacent mausoleum on an irregular plot; the structure was elegantly aligned both to the street on the exterior (Figure 9.9) and to the orientation towards Mecca on the interior. The end of the Bahri Mamluk period brought a gradual change from a militarized foreign policy to one characterized by trade links and

Cairo

Figure 9.9 The mosque and madrasa of Sultan Barquq

political alliances. Burji Mamluk control, starting with Barquq’s reign, brought on the loosening of the strict military training and religious education of the Mamluks. They were allowed to live outside of the citadel, and build residences in Cairo’s different quarters and they began to mix with the local population and to adopt many aspects of Egyptian society and culture. But the Burji Mamluk era come to an end after the reign of Sultan Al-Ghuri, another great builder. His important building

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River project was the madrasa, khanqah and waqala, located in the area now named after him, “al-Ghuriya.” The mosque on the western side and the funerary complex on the eastern side face each other across the qasaba in the heart of Cairo, forming an urban composition that has appeared in the drawings and photographs of many travelers to Cairo over the years (Figure 9.10). Although the sultan dedicated many funds to this structure as a possible dwelling for his afterlife, he died while participating in a military campaign against the Ottomans in Syria. Thus in the middle of 1517 ad, the Ottomans finally defeated the Mamluks and moved the center of power in the Middle East from Cairo to Istanbul. The alleged corruption of the Mamluk rulers, in particular their abuse of the Islamic waqf system, was one of the principal reasons invoked by the Ottoman Sultan Selim (1512–20) to justify his invasion of Egypt. For the three centuries that followed, Cairo was reduced to the status of a provincial capital in the new Ottoman Empire, and as a result it entered a period of stagnation. Indeed, during the Ottoman period, which started in 1517 and lasted until the arrival of Napoleon in 1798, 110 viceroys ruled Egypt over a time frame of almost three centuries, with an average reign of only three years. Ironically, three centuries later, Napoleon would use the same excuse invoked by Sultan Selim to justify his campaign in Egypt. The Mamluk beys serving the Ottoman governor at the time mobilized and crossed the Nile to confront Napoleon, but they were immediately defeated and a few of them fled to Upper Egypt. Following the takeover of Cairo, Napoleon took little time to win over his new subjects, and occasionally he participated in local events. In the latter part of 1898, he even attended the annual celebration of Wafaa al-Nil, a unique Egyptian ceremony since the time of the ancient Egyptians, to offer gratitude to the Nile as a source of life. When Napoleon was defeated in the Bay of Aboukir by the British navy in 1798, the Egyptians finally revolted against French rule and supported the new governor, the Albanian Mehmed Ali, appointed by the Ottoman sultan. Inspired by the technological advances of Europe, Mehmed Ali brought in many European experts to set up Egypt’s industry, irrigation projects, military training, and health-care infrastructure. One of his first important infrastructure projects was to dig the Mahmoudiyah Canal, which linked the Nile again with Alexandria, the only harbor in Egypt that could accommodate deep-water ships. His extensive public works program consisted of as many as 32 canals and 41 dams and barrages, which allowed for the great expansion of agricultural land. His main goal was to transform Egypt into a modern industrial state and a great military power. And although he was not a native, and he still became known as the founder of modern Egypt. Today, the elegant mosque of Mehmed Ali dominates the skyline of Cairo from every single direction from which it can be observed

Cairo

Figure 9.10 The complex of Sultan al-Ghuri

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Figure 9.11 The mosque of Mehmed Ali atop the citadel

(Figure 9.11). It stands on the highest point of the citadel of Salah al-Din, and towers over the city, giving it a distinct identity marking connection to other times in the history of Cairo and its Nile. Notes The segment of this chapter dealing with Cairo during the Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Ottoman periods relies heavily on my work in the book Cairo: Histories of a City. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. 1. The origins of the name of Babylon have been debated by many historians. Bishop John of Nikiu, whose chronicles speak of Babylon, wrote that the foundations of the fortress were actually laid by Nebuchadnezzar, who invaded Egypt and named the fortress Babylon, after his capital city. Nikiu also wrote that Emperor Trajan, in 98 ad, erected the walls on this foundation in order to create a defense against a Jewish rebellion that was simmering at the time in Alexandria. The Greek Egyptian historian Strabo, however, noted the existence of a fortress where Babylonians had taken refuge, well before Emperor Trajan came to Egypt. 2. Although Samarra was a new city, having just replaced Baghdad as the capital of the caliphate, it is believed by architectural historians to be the cradle of

Cairo Islamic architecture, given the extensive building that took place there under Caliph al-Mu’tasim. 3. The figure recorded in the Egyptian diwan does not accurately reflect the population at that time, since women and children were usually not recorded. For an account of the demographic transformations of Fustat in this period, see Kubiak (1987: 76–84). 4. The Arabic meaning of the name has often been translated as “the victorious,” but an equally valid translation is “the oppressor.” See al-Maqrizi (1853: vol. 2, p. 273). 5. For a more detailed discussion of the disintegration of the regular Fatimid plan close to the end of their rule, see AlSayyad (1981). 6. Accounts of the burning of Fustat may be found in Sayyid (1998) and Kubiak (1976). For a discussion that doubts the extent of the Fustat burning, see Raymond (2000: 75–7). 7. The origin of the name Bahri Mamluks is contested. Bahri might have meant “of the sea” in reference to the river Nile. Alternately, Gamal al-Shayal argues that the term might have meant “the land behind the sea.” His hypothesis rests on the fact that the Mamluks came from Turkey using marine routes. As further proof of this argument, al-Shayal argues that there were groups in Yemen also called Bahri Mamluks. For more details, see al-Shayal (1967: 145).

Bibliography Abu-Lughod, Janet. 1971. Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Al-Maqrizi. 1853. Al-Mawa’aez wa al-Ttibar Fi Zikr al-Khutat wa al-Athar, vols. 1 and 2. Cairo: Bulaq Press. Ali Mubarak. 1969. Al-Khutat al-Tawfiqiyah al-Jadidah, vol. 1. Cairo: Dar alKutub. AlSayyad, Nezar. 1981. Streets of Islamic Cairo. Cambridge, MA: Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. AlSayyad, Nezar. 1991. Cities and Caliphs: On the Genesis of Arab Muslim Urbanism. New York: Greenwood Press. AlSayyad, Nezar, ed. 1992. Forms of Dominance: On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise. Aldershot: Avebury. AlSayyad, Nezar. 2011. Cairo: Histories of a City. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Al-Shayal, Gamal. 1967. Tarikh Misr al-Islamiya, vol. 2. Cairo: Dar al-Ma’aref . Butler, Alfred. 1978. The Arab Conquest of Egypt, and the Last Thirty Years of the Roman Dominion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clerget, Marcel. 1934. Le Caire, vol. 1. Cairo: E. & R. Schindler. Creswell, Keppel Archibald Cameron. 1958. Short Account of Early Muslin Architecture. New York: Penguin Books. Haswell, C. J. 1933. “Cairo: Origin and Development.” Bulletin de Societe Royal de Geographie d’Égypte, 3 and 4. Hitti, Philip. 1973. Capital Cities of Arab Islam. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Khaldun, Ibn. [1377]. Al-Muqadimah. Cairo: Dar-al-Maraf. Khusraw, Nasir-i, and Wheeler M. Thackston. 2001. Nasir-i Khusraw’s Book of Travels: Safarnamah, W. M. Thackston, trans. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers. Kubiak, Wladyslaw. 1976. “The Burning of Misr al-Fustat in 1168: A Reconsideration of Historical Evidence.” Africana Bulletin [Warsaw], 25, pp. 51–64. Kubiak, Wladyslaw. 1987. Al-Fustat: Its Foundation and Early Urban Development. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Manley, Deborah, and Sahar Abdel-Hakim, eds. 2008. Traveling Through Egypt: From 450 bc to the Twentieth Century. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Raymond, André. 2000. Cairo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sayyid, Ayman Fuad. 1998. La capitale de l’Égypte jusqu’à l’époque fatimide AlQāhira et Al-Fustāt: Essai de reconstitution topographique, pp. 285–90. Beirut: Orient-Institut der Deutschen Morgenländischen Wissenschaft; Stuttgart: In Kommission bei Franz Steiner Verlag. Yeomans, Richard. 2008. Art and Architecture of Islamic Cairo. Reading: Garnett. Zaki, Abdul Rahman. 1966. Al-Qahirah 969–1825. Cairo: Al-Dar al-Mesriyah L-lta’lif wa al-Targamah.

Ch a pter 10

Crusaders on the Nile: Damietta and Mansoura You may travel in this lake for a day and a night, sometimes meeting fresh water and narrow straits until reaching Damitta, a city that is more open, better constructed, where the artisans are more skilled, the clothes finer and the workmanship more finished. — Shams al-Din al-Muqaddasi, 999 (1994: 193) When the water of the Nile rises, it pushes the salt water of the sea away from the city . . . The population is fifty thousand and there are at any given time at least a thousand ships at anchor belonging both to private merchants and to the Sultan. — Nasrea Khusraw, Book of Travels, 1050

F

or centuries, the meeting of the Nile and the Mediterranean Sea has been an object of fascination as much for writers and travelers as for native Egyptians. Nowhere is this more evident than at the northeastern corner of the Nile delta, where the cities of Damietta and Mansoura are located. And it is here that the encounter between the river and the sea was once matched by an encounter of a different kind. In the thirteenth century, the heroes of our story—a king who would become a saint and a slave prince later turned sultan—met in a battle to define the fate of the entire region. Our story begins and ends with a crusade, and takes place on a particular area near Egypt’s coast between modern-day Damietta and Mansoura (Figure 10.1). During the thirteenth century, three major branches of the Nile defined the geography of this area and provided the setting for three ancient cities: Damietta, Tanis, and al-Farama. At the time, the Nile’s Pelusium branch, which irrigated al-Farama, was narrowing on account of sand accumulation, while its Damietta branch—due possibly to better maintenance, dredging, and stronger river currents—was becoming wider. The result would ultimately increase Damietta’s importance, while foreshadowing the disappearance of Tanis and al-Farama. It is impossible to understand the importance of this gateway region without reflecting on the character of these three ancient cities. Tanis was briefly a religious center equal to Thebes. Founded in the late years of the

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Figure 10.1 Map of the Nile delta at the time of the Crusades

Twentieth Dynasty, it was the home of King Smendes, founder of the Twenty-First Dynasty. Hebrew myth also has it that, as a child, Moses was found adrift in a basket in the Nile marshes near Tanis. The year 1866 witnessed an important discovery in Tanis: the Decree of Canopus. Inscribed in three languages—demotic and hieroglyphic Egyptian, and Greek—on a series of tablets like the Rosetta Stone, it provided a key to deciphering hieroglyphics. Through the decree we learn about the temples of Tanis—particularly its chief temple, dedicated to the god Amun. Tanis was also an important commercial and strategic center, but it was always threatened with inundation because of it is closeness to Lake Manzala. Indeed, its final demise was likely caused by changes in the courses of the Nile—in addition to human action, as we will see. Al-Farama was an important town at the time of the Crusades. Located several miles inland on the eastern-most branch of the Nile, it served as an important border fortress. The Romans called it Pelusium (a Greek name that must have been given to it during Ptolemic rule of Egypt), but its early Arabic name, Tell el-Farama, is mentioned by the Egyptian



Crusaders on the Nile

chroniclers. Because of its location, al-Farama was often besieged. Indeed, the area around it is thought to have been the site of a battle between the Persians and the ancient Egyptians that enabled the Persian king Cambyses II to ascend to the throne of Egypt in 525 bc. Two hundred years later, the Thebans retook the city and regained control of Egypt. But in 333 bc, al-Farama again surrendered—this time to Alexander the Great, who placed a garrison there while he moved east to conquer Persia. This did not end the city’s history of conflict. In the last century before Christ, al-Farama was the site of battles between feuding Ptolemic kings, the Roman Mark Antony, and the Roman admiral Pompey, who was murdered there. And during the Arab-Muslim conquest, al-Farama was one of a few cities that resisted to the end the takeover of Egypt by the Arab general ‘Amr ibn al-‘Ass. Finally, it has been claimed that in 1117 ad, Baldwin I of Jerusalem razed the city to the ground. Damietta is the only one of the three cities that survives today. Its name is derived from a word meaning “city of linen” or “northern city” in the ancient Egyptian language. But its rise to importance as an economic and political center really began when Salah el-Din, or Saladin, the founder of the Ayyubid Dynasty, was sent by the caliph in Baghdad to establish order in Egypt during the final years of Shiite Fatimid rule. Within a few years, Saladin established himself as an independent sultan, ruling over much of Egypt and the Levant and regaining control of Jerusalem (which had been under the intermittent control of Crusader princes for several decades). Wanting to fortify Egypt’s northeastern coast, Saladin ordered the evacuation of Tanis and the resettlement of its residents in Damietta, leaving Tanis with only a trench, a bridge, and a handful of soldiers. In the last year of his life, Saladin renovated Damietta’s walls with new bricks and built a new watchtower. After Saladin’s death, Al-Aziz, his second son, seems to have further upgraded the walls with stones taken from a nearby pyramid. Such were the geopolitical circumstances in the region when King Louis IX of France and Sultan al-Salih of Egypt met in 1250 in a battle that would define the region’s future for centuries. Most importantly for our story, Damietta was at the time the preeminent political and commercial center on the northeast Nile coast. Well shielded with fences, fortresses, and fortified towers, it provided a gateway to the conquest of Egypt, a strongpoint guarding access to the Holy Land, and an object of desire in the eyes of every Christian king. By contrast, the present-day city of Mansoura (Figure 10.2), whose name in Arabic simply means “the victorious,” was born only after the occupation of Damietta by the Crusaders. Indeed, it began its life as the military post from which the Ayyubids launched their resistance. Our story begins in 1218, with the Fifth Crusade. Part of this campaign was an attack on Egypt under the direction of the Frankish king Jean

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Figure 10.2 Waterfront of present-day Mansoura

de Brienne, the ruler of Acre. After the death of al-Aziz, the vacuum in the Ayyubid clan had been filled by Saladin’s brother, al-Adel, who had settled in Cairo in 1200. Yet while al-Adel served as the official ruler of the Ayyubid empire, he divided day-to-day control over it between his three sons: the eastern lands to al-Ashraf, the Levant (al-Sham) to al-Mu’azzam, and Egypt to al-Kamel. Hearing of de Brienne’s plans, al-Adel prepared an army to confront him, and put his son al-Kamel in charge. When the Franks reached Damietta, they discovered the Ayyubid forces had placed a long metal net across the entrance to the Nile, preventing their ships from entering Egypt there. To gain access to lands farther south, the Crusaders realized they needed to seize Damietta. But to do this, they first needed to take its tower, an important defensive structure on the Nile’s eastern bank. After many attempts during a long siege, the Franks finally assigned the task to an architect from Cologne. His solution was a lofty wooden tower with a moveable bridge, which he had constructed on the deck of a ship. Once this structure was floated up to the Damietta tower, it was used in a final successful assault. During these events, al-Adel died and was succeeded in Egypt by his son al-Kamel. Perceiving all Egypt to be open to attack following the fall of the tower, as a preventive measure, the new sultan resorted to an unusual tactic. He deliberately sank a large number of cargo vessels in the Nile at its narrowest path, with the hope of stopping its flow and creating obstacles for the Frankish fleet. The Franks, however, soon found a way



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around. This was to deepen the largely abandoned canal of al-Azraq to a point upstream of the sunken ships, and then divert the river into it, to allow it to be used as a passage inland. Moving up to Bura, they then waited to be joined by additional Crusader ships commissioned by the Pope and led by the Spanish nobleman Pelagius. When this second fleet arrived, it managed to enter Egypt through smaller branches of the Nile that opened directly onto the Mediterranean. The combined force then surrounded the city of Damietta. Possessing a temperament that never preferred war, and seeking to forestall the takeover of other areas of Egypt, al-Kamel attempted to make a deal with the Crusaders. He offered some of the land in Palestine that had been seized decades earlier by his grandfather, Saladin, in return for their leaving the city. To his surprise, however, the Crusaders rejected the deal. Eager for more, they asked for a payment of 300,000 dinars. In fact, the Crusaders’ refusal had more to do with their desire to maintain control of the port city as a base from which to secure a greater victory in Egypt. But al-Kamel’s response was to abandon Damietta and move south, to the village of Ashmoun-Tanah. In February 1219, the Franks were thus able to cross the Nile unopposed, where they found the city intact, completely provisioned, and ready for the taking. After seizing Damietta, the Franks fortified its citadel to make it impregnable, and dug a trench around it (Figure 10.3). Al-Kamel, meanwhile, had made a quick and tactical move 45 miles southwest to a location near the city Talkha, at confluence of two branches of the Nile. The location was chosen because it was surrounded by two water channels: the Ashmoun Canal, known for its fast currents and slippery slopes; and the Nile’s Damietta branch, up which the Crusader ships would predictably have to travel from their bases to the north. This triangular site, which was to become his military camp and would-be city, also guaran­ teed al-Kamel’s forces access to the east, from where he could expect to

Figure 10.3 The citadel at Damietta as it appears today

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River receive support from his brothers, the rulers of Syria and Palestine; and it was open to the south, from where supplies from Cairo could reach it without having to cross the Nile. Its proximity to the agricultural estates of the eastern delta, as well as market towns nearby, made it further ideal. Al-Kamel provided his new settlement with supplies and provisions, arranged its array of tents, and started building a massive wall facing the Nile, the direction from which he expected the Crusaders to attack. He then erected a palace, built numerous pavilions, and called for a general initiative on the part of his princes to build there. Eighteen months later, the camp had developed into a full-fledged town, and in anticipation of victory he named it al-Madina al-Mansoura, or the “the victorious city.” To prepare their forces to attack al-Kamel in Mansoura, the Crusaders sent detachments into the surrounding villages, fortified Damietta’s walls, and started to adapt it to their Christian needs. Around November 1219 they turned the mosque at the city’s heart into a church. But this structure has a contested story. As told by an Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi, the mosque of Amar (Abi al-Maa’ti) (Figure 10.4) was converted into a Christian cathedral. However, Christian sources, through the voice of de Joinville, the chronicler of the Seventh Crusade, tell another tale: it had originally been a Coptic church, which was converted into a mosque by ‘Amr, the Arab general who occupied Egypt during the early Islamic conquest. The Christian offensive in Egypt during the Fifth Crusade did not end, however, with the conquest of Damietta. In the summer of 1221, hoping

Figure 10.4 Interior of the mosque of ‘Amr (Abi al-Maa’ti) as it appears today



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to conquer Cairo, the Crusaders moved to attack the sultan’s new camp at Mansoura. But it was then that their lack of experience with the Nile floods resulted in their army being trapped between two branches of the Nile. Al-Kamel devised a mischievous strategy to worsen their plight by opening the gates of the barrages, drowning the countryside around their camp. And, having received further reinforcements from his brother in Syria, al-Kamel seized the opportunity to cross the Nile to the north of the Frankish army to block its only path of retreat. On August 26, 1221, the Frankish army was thus surrounded and completely cut off from their base in Damietta. Under these circumstances, the nobleman Pelagius, who had played a leading role in the occupation of Damietta, begged for peace. Because of al-Kamel’s desire to avoid a protracted war, he agreed to let the Crusaders negotiate a retreat, exchange hostages, and sign a treaty, which was to last for eight years. These were the conditions that allowed the Ayyubids to retake control of the Damietta and restore it to its former status. During the following decades, Mansoura, too, would witness a gradual expansion of its urban fabric, which included specialized em­ poriums, hammams (bath-houses), marketplaces, mosques, stables, wheat mills, dyers, schools, bakeries, chicken farms, and a wide variety of large houses and mansions. This expansion allowed it to play a major role in what was to be the next crusade on Egypt. Louis IX of France was born in 1214 to Prince Louis the Lion and Princess Blanche of Castile (Figure 10.5). At the age of 12, in 1226, he was crowned king in Reims cathedral, following the death of his father, Louis VIII. However, until he reached the age of 18, his mother, Queen Blanche—a devout Christian and a disciplinarian— ruled as regent in his stead. During this time, tutors employed by his mother taught him to read and write in Latin, as well as the arts of public speaking, war and government. Among his early actions, the young king forbade the taking of interest and was renowned for his charity. He was popular as a reformer, and helped develop the concepts behind the French royal justice system, which introduced the presumption of innocence in criminal procedure and allowed for an appeals process. As a young man, when seriously ill to the point of facing death, Louis also ap- Figure 10.5 Sixteenth-century portrait of King parently vowed to restore the Holy Land Louis IX, by El Greco

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River to Christendom. And, when he was cured, he felt compelled to act on his Catholic promise to lead such a campaign. Before doing so, he first had to settle a number of conflicts with the nobility of Europe and the king of England. But, in 1248, Louis decided to embark on the Seventh Crusade, which took him from France for six years. Since the Holy Land was then under control of the Ayyubid sultan al-Salih, ruling from Cairo, Louis first set his sights on Egypt. Al-Salih Nejjem al-Din Ayyub was born in 1205. A warrior versed in the art of combat, he had fought at the age of 16 against the Fifth Crusade with his father, al-Kamel. Indeed, he had been taken hostage by the Crusader army in 1221, and his release had corresponded with the release of Jean de Brienne. In 1232, al-Salih was assigned to defend the fort of Husankeyf (in present-day Turkey) in the north of Jazira. And in 1234, he was sent to rule in Damascus—before suspicion that he was conspiring with the Mamluks and the Khwarezmians got him suspended. In 1238, al-Kamel died, leaving al-Salih his designated heir in Jazira and his other son, al-Adil II, as his heir in Egypt. However, in the disputes that followed, al-Salih removed his brother and took over Egypt as well. In June 1240, al-Salih made a triumphal entry into Cairo and became the sole ruler of the Ayyubid clan. Once in Cairo, however, al-Salih’s reign was far from peaceful, with much intrigue and several attempts to depose him. His mistrust of the Ayyubid emirs led him to follow a practice that previous Ayyubid rulers had resorted to— that of protecting his rule through a force of mercenary soldiers. In particular, he bought to Egypt large numbers of Mamluks (Kipchak slave fighters from the Black Sea region who had been exposed to the Mongol invasions of central Asia), and employed them as his personal army. He formed these forces into two garrisons—the Bahriyya, so named because they were stationed at Rawdah island in the middle of the Nile west of Cairo; and the Jamdārīyah, which he employed as his immediate security guard. Meanwhile, the failures of the Sixth Crusade and the recapture of Jerusalem by Muslim forces in 1244 shocked Europeans and led to calls for a new crusade to regain control of the Holy Land. It fell to Louis IX, who had pledged the remainder of his life for the cause, to take up the task. In 1248, he followed his predecessors’ footsteps and set off for Egypt with the intention of recovering Jerusalem from the hands of what he considered Muslim infidels. That Egypt lay on the Mediterranean astride the trade route to the east may have incentivized his choice of targets. The man who would one day be known as Saint Louis may have also envisioned Egypt’s transformation into a major commercial hub for the French Empire. To raise funds for his campaign, before he left, Louis had severely taxed all his subjects and the Church for several years. He had then prepared a major naval force and rented ships from merchants in Marseille and Genoa. He had signed an agreement with the English king, Henry III,



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who promised not to attack France during his absence. Before sailing, King Louis left his mother, Blanche de Castille, in charge of state of affairs and received the blessings of the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, Fredrick. He took with him his younger brothers, the counts Robert d’Artois and Alphonse de Poitiers, and his wife, Marguerite de Provence. After leaving France, Louis’s first stop was Cyprus, where he waited for more Christian volunteers to join, and where he prepared and trained his forces over the course of eight months. By 1249 he had assembled a force of around 28,000 warriors (which included 2,800 knights) and hundreds of ships. But his extended stay in Cyprus also allowed news of the impending Crusader campaign to reach al-Salih, the sultan of Egypt. And although al-Salih was ill, he succeeded in mobilizing a defensive force, which established camp in Ashmoun Tanah just as the Crusader army was arriving on the Egyptian coast at Damietta. Jean de Joinville, a counselor of Louis IX who later became the official chronicler of the campaign in Egypt and Louis’s personal biographer, described the strange set of circumstances according to which the Frankish forces were able to enter Damietta uncontested. According to him, the Ayyubid army, under the emir Fakhr al-Din, which had been on its way to Damietta, sent al-Salih a message through a carrier pigeon; and when no reply was received, they assumed the sultan, who was known to be ill, had died. This led them to turn back south to Ashmoun as a precaution, instead of continuing on to Damietta. With Damietta thus unprotected, its panicked inhabitants followed the soldiers stationed there south. And by the time al-Salih’s reply arrived, it was too late to go back. The city was left quasi-deserted, and Louis IX was able to occupy it without resistance. Louis IX seized this opportunity to send a message to al-Salih asking him to surrender. From an Islamic perspective, the message, worded in French and translated into Arabic, was both arrogant and outrageous: You will be aware that I am head of the Christian community, as I acknowledge that you are head of the Mohammedan community. You know also that the [Muslim] population of Andalusia pays tribute to us and gives us gifts, and we drive them before us like a herd of cattle, killing the men, widowing the women, capturing their daughters and infants, emptying their houses. I have given you sufficient demonstration [of our strength], and the best advice I can offer. Even if you were to promise me anything on oath and to appear before the priests and monks and carry a candle before me as an act of obedience to the Cross, it would not deter me from attacking you and fighting you on the land that is dearest to you. If this country falls into my hands, it will be mine as a gift. If you keep it by victory over me, you may do as you will with me. I have told you about the armies obedient to me, filling the mountains and the plains, numerous as the stones of the earth and poised against you like the sword of Destiny. I put you on your guard against them. (Al-Maqrīzī, as quoted in Gabrieli 1957: 300–1)

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River The king sent this very bold and aggressive letter on the eve of the arrival of his brother, the Comte de Poitiers, to Damietta with additional troops. Thus reinforced, on November 20, the Frankish army began its march southward from Damietta to occupy Egypt. Although some historians portray him as violent and crude, the sultan responded to the king’s threatening letter eloquently and with reserve, including passages from the Quran. The letter was written by the pen of Qadi Baha’al Din Zuhayr Muhammad, his secretary: Your letter has reached us in which you threaten us with the size of your armies and the number of your warriors. Now we are a war-like race; never is one of our champions cut down without being replaced; never has an enemy attacked us without being destroyed. Fool! If your eyes had seen the points of our swords and the enormity of our devastations, the forts and shores that we have taken [from you] and the lands we have sacked in the past and the present, you would gnaw your fingers in repentance! The outcome of the events you are precipitating is inevitable: the day will dawn with our advantage and end in your destruction. Then you will curse yourself: “and the wicked shall know the fate that awaits them.” When you read my letter, let your response comply with the Sura of the Bees: “You shall see God’s command brought about; do not hurry it.” [Remember] too the Sura of Sad: “You shall know what this signifies after some time!” We have recourse to God’s word, for he declares most truthfully: “How many times has a small band defeated a large army, with God’s support!” For God is with the patient, and to the words of the wise, according to whom: “The man of might is brought down in the end”; so your might will finally be brought down, and will bring catastrophe upon you. Greetings. (Al-Maqrīzī, as quoted in G ­ abrieli 1957: 301, and as verified in De Joinville’s account Histoire De San Louis)

During the time these letters were exchanged, al-Salih, who had sailed to Mansoura on a warship, was engaged in its restoration. In preparation for battle, the town had become a significant military stronghold, housing all the sultan’s troops as well as those of supporting groups. Among the other improvements to its fortifications, the sultan restored its wall facing the Nile and added wooden structures behind it in which to station and hide his forces. By then a 30-year-old town that had been built by al-Salih’s father for a similar mission, it would once again play a crucial role in the fate of the region. When the Crusaders arrived at Mansoura, according to a description by de Joinville, they found the Ayyubid camp surrounded by a significant wood lattice, covered in blue cloth. De Joinville also described a main spine covered in blue linen and four wooden towers. Located outside the camp, the first tower contained a small pavilion where the Ayyubid emirs were required to leave their weapons before being permitted into the presence of the sultan. The second tower housed a large pavilion containing



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the sultan’s throne and meeting room, and the third contained a private chamber for the sultan’s entourage. The fourth tower encompassed the sultan’s private space. Taller than the other three, de Joinville claimed it could be used by the Ayyubid ruler to watch over the whole town. It was also connected by an alley to the Nile, allowing the sultan to bathe. This is how de Joinville, who may never have experienced this camp, described it. Strangely, an equivalent description by the Egyptian historian Maqrizi is far less detailed, and emphasized instead the new markets and supply chains the sultan had created to supply his forces. It is interesting to note the significant transformation of both Damietta and Mansoura at the time into fortified cities. Yet, in a letter written later, in August 1250, in Acre, entitled “Letter of St. Louis upon his Captivity and Deliverance,” Louis IX described Mansoura with derogatory phrases such as “a place vulgarly called Mansoura,” and “the village named Mansoura.” On the other hand, Damietta was described as “the city of Damietta.” This suggests that although both towns were important bastions in the war between the Ayyubids and the Franks, only one was seen through the medieval European lens as a real city, while the other was seen as a mere village with an army encampment. Approaching from the north, Louis IX initially moved his forces to the western side of the Mansoura Nile, which had been left completely open. But he decided not to attack the town immediately. Instead, he waited until his brothers and the rest of his troops could join the battle. This turned out to be a tactical mistake because it allowed the Ayyubid forces time to alter their strategy. Ominously for the Ayyubids, after he arrived at Mansoura by warship, the sultan’s health had also deteriorated. And when the sultan received the king’s letter, it is reported that he used a phrase often used in condolences, “Inna l’illa wa inna ilayhi raji’un” (“We belong to God and to Him we shall return”). Not long afterwards, Sultan al-Salih died in Mansoura on November 27, at the young age of 44. However, critically for the ­Ayyubids, al-Salih’s wife, Shajar al-Durr, was able to hide her husband’s death for several weeks until his designated successor could arrive. Indeed, the death of the sultan was so well concealed that whenever Shajar al-Durr was asked about him, she took it upon herself to answer, “The Sultan is sick; none may approach him.” All of this was happening at a time when the only thing that separated the Crusaders from the Ayyubid army was the Ashmoun branch of the Nile. Al-Salih’s successor was his young son Turan Shah, who had been posted to an important fort in the Levant. And when he arrived, Shajar al-Durr finally revealed the death of al-Salih and announced to the Ayyubid army, still headed by Fakhr al-Din: The Sultan had decreed that you give oath to him and to his son, al-Malik al-Mu’azzam Ghiyath-al-Din Turan Shah, prince of Hisn Kayfa, as successor

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River of his throne, and to the Emir Fakhr-al-Din Yusuf, son of the Grand Shaykh, as commander of the army and as governor of the Kingdom. (Al-Maqrīzī 1980: 121)

Al-Maqrīzī wrote that all the emirs subsequently pledged their loyalty to the new young sultan, although they hardly knew him. Following the announcement, Fakhr al-Din made drastic changes in Mansoura, freeing prisoners and bestowing money and honor upon certain handpicked emirs. Soon thereafter, on December 8, 1249, the Frankish army started its attack, and a fierce battle ensued between the two camps. The attacks increased in intensity as the Franks decided to cross the Ashmoun Nile by building a wooden bridge over it. However, their strategy failed for two reasons: on the one hand, the peasants on the other bank dug huge openings in the soil, widening the Nile in the areas where the Franks were attempting to cross; on the other, the Ayyubid forces showered the attacking Franks with fireballs. However, spies in the Ayyubid camp eventually helped the Franks across the Ashmoun a bit to the north, and Fakhr al-Din was then killed as his army was fleeing the battlefield. During this attack on February 9, a small force led by Louis IX’s brother, Robert of Artois, count of Artois, managed to cross the Nile before the other Crusader forces could join them. Proceeding directly to Mansoura with a force of 1,400 cavalry, Robert entered what appeared to be an empty city. The Crusaders had already experienced such a situation months earlier when they had taken Damietta. But this time it was different: Baybars al-Bunduqdari, the Mamluk general assigned by Shajar al-Durr to defend the city, had ordered all its residents to abandon their houses so he could station a great number of troops in the vacated structures. And when the Crusaders advanced to the middle of the town, Baybars’s forces emerged from their hiding places and massacred them. The count of Artois, himself, was initially able to take refuge in a house, but many of his troops were either chased away or drowned as they attempted to cross the Nile back to their camp in Jadilah. And the count was later captured and killed in what the local historians considered a great victory for the Muslims and a humiliating defeat for the Crusaders. In fact, many soldiers in the Ayyubid army thought that Robert was Louis IX and that they had killed the king, but it was quickly recognized that Louis IX had not been part of the attack. Nevertheless, the Ayyubid army followed the retreating Crusaders on land and water, confiscating dozens of their ships and taking thousands of prisoners. Faced with defeat, Louis IX was forced to propose negotiations with the Ayyubids. He offered to leave Damietta and all of Egypt in return for Jerusalem and the coastal towns of Palestine, which were then under Ayyubid control. To seal the deal, he offered to have one of his brothers



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stay behind Ayyubid lines. But the king’s proposal was quickly rejected by the recently triumphant Ayyubid army—which was soon able to capture the king himself and his other brother. On April 7, 1250, King Louis and his brother were put in iron chains and taken to Mansoura. In a scene that has been described by several historians and contemporaries, the king and his entourage were displayed, bound by ropes, on the deck of a boat that sailed down the Nile to Mansoura. The Ayyubid forces cheered from the east bank, while peasants and other residents of the area celebrated on the west bank. Coincidentally, Louis IX’s capture was described in the same language that he had used to describe the way his army treated Andalusian Muslims: “in chains hand and foot, and his two brothers as well, he was dragged back to Mansourah, and his soldiers tied with ropes, like so many cattle.” Ultimately, the king was imprisoned for a little less than a month in the house of Ibn Luqman, an important scribe and secretary for the Ayyubids (Figure 10.6). The house was located in the center of town between the mosque and the palace of the sultan, but it was a simple, basic dwelling devoid of the decorative details characteristic of Ayyubid structures of the time. Ibn Luqman was known to have a more distinguished residence in Cairo. His house in Mansoura was mainly an administrative office, from which he fulfilled his duties as a secretary to the sultan when the sultan was residing there. Louis IX’s imprisonment in this house was reported differently by the Crusaders and Ayyubid sources. But there is a general agreement that at a time when Turan Shah was beheading Frankish prisoners and casting them into the river, the king was treated well—and certainly much better than his brothers and most of his knights were treated. However, stories spread about the king’s refusal to wear the clothes that were sent to him by the new sultan or to accept an invitation to dine with him. Although it is difficult to confirm these stories, it is clear that Louis IX was not tortured during his imprisonment. Nevertheless, his army felt that he did not receive the treatment befitting a king. The “Letter of St. Louis upon his Captivity and Deliverance,” referred to above, details the conditions upon which the freedom of the king and other members Figure 10.6 The house of Ibn Luqman as it of the Frankish army were granted by appears today. It served as a jail for Louis IX the Ayyubids: during his captivity in Egypt

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Some days after our captivity, the sultan proposed a truce to us; he demanded earnestly, but without threats, that Damietta and all that it contained should be given up to him without delay; and that he should be indemnified for all the losses and all the expenses he had incurred up to that day, from the moment the Christians entered Damietta. After many conferences, we concluded a truce with him for ten years, on the following conditions: [. . .] (De Joinville 1995: 221) On our part, we consent to give up Damietta, with eight hundred thousand Saracen byzants, for the liberty of the prisoners, and for the losses and expenses of which we have just spoken (we have already paid four hundred), and to deliver all Saracen prisoners which the Christians have made since we have been in Egypt, as well as those who had been made captives in the kingdom of Jerusalem, since the truce concluded between the aforesaid sultan and the aforesaid emperor. All our household goods, and those of all others who were at Damietta, shall be, after our departure, placed under the care of the sultan, and be transported into the country of the Christians when an opportunity shall offer itself. [. . . ] The sultan was bound to give safe conduct to the countries of the Christians to those who should wish to depart by land. (De Joinville 1995: 222)

The Ayyubid version of the story, meanwhile, exalted the bravery of their forces. This version, for example, was contained in a letter from Turan Shah to the emir Jamal-al-Din ibn-Yaghmur, the governor of Damascus: From his son Turanshah. [. . .] On Monday, the first day of this auspicious year, God heaped His blessings on Islam. We had opened up our treasure stores, spent our monies, distributed our weapons, and had mustered the Arabs and volunteers and a multitude only God could assess. They came from every deep valley and lofty distant place. On the night of Wednesday, the Franks abandoned their tents, their monies, and their heavy baggage and moved toward Damietta in retreat. But our swords did not cease to fall upon their backs throughout the night, and shame and disaster was their lot. When we came to the morning of Wednesday, we had killed thirty thousand of them, not counting those who had cast themselves into the deep waters. As for the prisoners, speak of the sea [for great quantity] and you will not err. The Frenchman sought refuge at al-Munyah and asked for safe conduct, which we granted him, and likewise we treated him with honor. We have taken possession of Damietta with the aid and power of God, and His glory and greatness. (Cited in al-Shayyal 2000: 192)

Although the two accounts are not contradictory, it is interesting to note the role that propaganda played on both sides in the conflict. Thus, just as Shajar al-Durr had successfully hidden her husband’s death to help his army and state, a letter from the order of St. John, written around May 1250, was circulated in France assuring its people that the king had slain the sultan of Egypt in a fierce battle. Indeed, this report was circulating at the very moment when negotiations to free Louis IX were at their



Crusaders on the Nile

peak between Shajar al-Durr, the wife of the former sultan, and Queen Marguerite de Provence, the king’s wife. The leading role that Shajar al-Durr played in these negotiations reflected a new crisis in the Ayyubid camp. As a Mamluk, she had been born a slave before becoming al-Salih’s wife. And when Turan Shah attempted to isolate her from her Mamluk supporters, she conspired with some of them, including Baybars, to have him killed in Fariskour. It was thus that she emerged as sole ruler of Egypt during the three weeks when negotiations for the release of Louis IX were ongoing. The final deal, as mentioned earlier, called for the Crusaders to leave Egypt, return Damietta, and pay a heavy ransom of 400,000 dinars in return for Louis IX and his remaining entourage. When half the amount was paid, Louis IX was released to join his army on a ship stationed in the Mediterranean. When the other half was paid some weeks later, the rest of his entourage, including his brother, were also released. That Shajar al-Durr, a woman who was initially a slave in al-Salih’s court, could ascend to the throne of Egypt was a startling and dangerous development for a male-dominated Muslim society in the thirteenth century. Hence, she was very careful to keep a low profile so that her authority could not be directly challenged. But her rise to power nevertheless created much controversy. And when news of it spread, the caliph in Baghdad sent a letter to the emirs mocking them and asking if there was no man in the kingdom capable of filling al-Salih’s shoes. Ultimately, Shajar al-Durr was advised to marry and pass her authority on to a man. A few weeks later, she did marry the Mamluk general Ezz al-Din Aybak. This, however, ended the Ayyubid Dynasty and ushered in the dynasty of the Mamluks, slave kings who would rule Egypt for the next two and a half centuries. For his part, after he was released, King Louis spent a few years in the Latin kingdoms of Acre, Caesarea, and Jaffa, using his wealth and power to consolidate Christian control there. Then, in the spring of 1254, he and his army finally returned to France. During this time, Louis was in constant contact with the rulers of surrounding regions—not only those of the Islamic empire. For example, during his time in Acre, he exchanged letters and sent emissaries to both the Ayyubids (trying to ensure the peace with them) and the Mongols (urging them to fight with him against the Ayyubids and their Mamluk mercenaries). The king also dispatched an envoy, the Franciscan William of Rubruck, to the Mongol court, and this envoy is reported to have spent several years in residence there. Louis IX’s efforts as a Crusader were never a great success. Nevertheless, his campaigns for the Holy Land, his imprisonment in Egypt, and his devotion to the cause brought him much attention and admiration from his people and from the Pope. From the start, he was convinced that he was sent by God to help spread and defend Christianity. He harbored a

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River great love of the Church and often displayed detailed attention to matters of the state. Indeed, everything he did was an action which he perceived to be for the glory of God and in the service of his people. It is not surprising, then, that after his death he was canonized as St. Louis, and that his saintly name would subsequently be given to churches, places, and cities around the world. Bibliography Al-Maqrīzī, Ahmad ibn ‘Ali. 1972. Al-Suluk Li-ma’rifat Duwal al-muluk. Cairo: Lajnat al-Ta’aleef Wal-tarjama. Al-Maqrīzī, Ahmad ibn ‘Ali. 1980. A History of the Ayyūbid Sultans of Egypt, R. J. C. Broadhurst, trans. Boston, MA: Twayne. Al-Muqaddasi, Shams al-Din. 1994 [999]. Ahsan al-Tagasim fi Ma’rifat al-Aqalim: The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions, Basil Collins, trans. London: Garnet. Al-Shayyal, Jamal al-Din. 2000. Mujmal Tarikh Dumiat, Siyasiyan Wa Iqtisadiyan. Cairo: Maktabat al-Thaqafa al-Diniyah. De Joinville, Jean. 1874. Histoire De Saint Louis Credo et Lettre à Louis X, 2nd edition, Natalis de Wally, trans. Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot Freres. De Joinville, Jean. 1995. Vie De Saint Louis, Jacques Monfrin, trans. Paris: Dunod. Gabrieli, Francesco. 1957. Arab Historians of the Crusades. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Ibn Wasel. 1971. Mafraj al-Kurub. Cairo: Dar al-Kutub. Khusraw, Nasir-i. 2001 [1050]. Nasir-i Khusraw’s Book of Travels: Safarnamah, W. M. Thackston, trans. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers. Mayer, Hans Eberhard, and John Gillingham. 1988. The Crusades. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Michaud, Joseph François. 1891. The History of the Crusades, vols. 3 and 4, W. Robson, trans. New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son. Omran, Mahmood Saïd. 1685. Al-Hamla al-Salibiya al-Khamisa. Cairo: Dar al-Ma’aref. Taaffe, John. 1852. The History of the Holy, Military, Sovereign Order of the St. John of Jerusalem; Or, Knights Hospitallers, Knights Templars, Knights of Rhoades, Knights of Malta, book 2. London: Hope. Vitry, Jacques de. 2012. Lettres. Christian–Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History, Vol. 4: 1200–1350, David Thomas and Alexander Mallett, trans. Leiden: Brill. Wedgwood, Ethel. 1906. The Memoirs of the Lord of Joinville: A New English Version with Illustrations. London: John Murray. Yusuf, Nicolas. 1959. Tarikh Dumiat Munthu Aqdam al-’Usur. Al-Ittihad alQawmi Bi Dumiat. Cairo: Dar al-Nahda. Zaki, ‘Abd al-Rahman. 1960. Ma’rakat al-Mansoura wa Atharaha fi al-Hurub al-Salibiya. Cairo: Dar al-Ma’aref. Ziyara, Muhammad Mustafa. 1961. Hamlat Louis al-Tase’ Ala Masr. Cairo: A’tabis al-A’ala.

Ch a pter 11

Cities of the Blue Nile: Lake Tana and the Ethiopian Empires A thick fume, or haze, covered the fall all round, and hung over the course of the stream both above and below, marking its track, though the water was not seen. It was a magnificent sight that ages, added to the greatest length of human life, would not efface or eradicate from my memory; it struck me with a kind of stupor, and a total oblivion of where I was, and of every other sublunary concern. —James Bruce (quoted in Moorehead 1962: 24)

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pon the sight of the Tissisat Falls in 1770, the Scottish explorer James Bruce was mesmerized by how the river appeared to have fallen “in one sheet of water, without any interval.” The river exhibited a force and noise so powerful and magnificent that he even felt “perfectly dizzy” (Moorehead 1962: 23). Despite the exaggeration found in many of Bruce’s accounts, his feeling of dizziness at the most magnificent sight he had ever experienced beautifully captures the hydraulic characteristics of the Tissisat Falls, at which the water of the Blue Nile begins its journey to the sea. And it is the underlying geography that created the cataract that has historically defined the river’s cultural relationship with Ethiopia, a country of mountains at one of the most important sources of the Nile (Figure 11.1).

Figure 11.1 The Tissisat Blue Nile Waterfall

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River The Ethiopian highlands have long provided the Nile with most of its water as well as with the silt that has fertilized the Nile valley and delta. Ancient Egyptians referred to Ethiopia as the Land of Punt, or God’s land. They managed to travel there by a variety of routes—by land following the Upper Nile and the Blue Nile and by way of the Red Sea. Of the ex­peditions sent from Egypt to Ethiopia in antiquity, a particularly important one was the maritime expedition dispatched by Queen Hatshepsut (r. 1479–1458 bc), the story of which was inscribed in hieroglyphics on the walls of her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri in Thebes. When the expedition returned, it brought various items from Ethiopia to Egypt, including myrrh, gold, ebony, cinnamon, and incense. Added to these Ethiopian imports were slaves. Hatshepsut’s brother and successor Thutmose III (r. 1479–1425 bc) also sent an expedition to Ethiopia, in 1446 bc. And an expedition during the reign of Ramses III (r. 1198–1167 bc) was recorded as one of the last Pharaonic expeditions to the Land of Punt. While inscriptions from ancient Egypt indicate the age-old pattern of exchange between the two countries, it was the ancient Greeks who coined and popularized the term Ethiopia (“Land of Burnt Faces” in Greek) to refer to the territory. The Greek poet Homer described ancient Ethiopians as living at “the farthest outposts of mankind” (Odyssey I, 22–3). And the Greek historian Herodotus similarly observed that the Ethiopians inhabited the “ends of the earth” (Pankhurst 2005: 19). It was the Ptolemies, however, who resumed the history of exchange between Egypt and Ethiopia by dispatching expeditions there, primarily to hunt elephants, which were often used in war. Ptolemy III Eugertes (r. 246–221 bc), for instance, was known to have visited the harbor of Adulis on his way to an elephant hunt, and this would later become the principal port of the Ethiopian Empire. The Crusades of the Middle East brought renewed European interest in Egypt, and later in Africa more widely. Legends surrounding Ethiopia and its mythical power over the Nile became known in Europe by the end of the thirteenth century. And these gained in prominence when associated with the myth of Prester John (Prete Janni), a mythical Christian ruler who was supposed to hold the power to defeat the expanding influence of Islam. For example, it was claimed that he had the ability to divert the water of the Nile and hence cause famine in Muslim lands. European pilgrims and visitors to the East returned home with stories they had been told that reinforced these myths. However, following the arrival of the Portuguese in Ethiopia in the early sixteenth century and the discovery of the source of the Blue Nile by Jesuit fathers in the early seventeenth century, the myth surrounding Ethiopia’s ability to control and divert the Nile began to peter out. By the early eighteenth century, the idea had largely been abandoned.



Cities of the Blue Nile

The Portuguese discovery of an alternate route to India around the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa was indeed a pivotal event in the history of the region. The Portuguese were particularly well received in Ethiopia, a Christian country which had remained isolated for centuries. Solidifying the relationship, the Ethiopian emperor invited a Portuguese military mission to help repulse an invasion by the neighboring Somali clan, and subsequently the Portuguese enjoyed great privilege to travel and trade freely in Ethiopia. Soon after, they were also able to explore the interior of Egypt and visit many remote parts of that country. It was this relationship that made it possible for the Jesuit fathers Pedro Paez and ­Jeronimo Lobo to find a river that Ethiopians called Abay Wenz (“the Great River”) at the outlet of Lake Tana, which they claimed was the source of the Blue Nile. The Scottish explorer James Bruce would later revisit and document the lake. With a burning desire to trace the course of the Nile, within a few years of being appointed British consul at Algiers in 1762, Bruce had embarked on a journey up the Nile. But his trip did not go smoothly, and he encountered many dangerous moments. Since the route up the Nile eventually seemed too perilous, he decided to try a sea route. It was thus via the Red Sea coast that Bruce was finally able to reach Gondar, then the capital of the Ethiopian Empire, which he would later describe extensively in his travel accounts. After staying a while in Gondar and befriending the court, Bruce was finally allowed to resume his journey to Lake Tana. And it was in 1770, when he reached the Tissisat Falls, that he was convinced he had found the source of the Nile. After Bruce, many other European travelers would visit Ethiopia, and they would produce vast amounts of travel literature on the country’s natural beauty and wildlife. Notable among them was the British explorer and scholar Richard Burton (1821–90), who once spent some days in the Muslim walled city of Harar. The Blue Nile starts its journey at the spring of Skala, far to the east of the Nile valley. On its way to Lake Tana, it tumbles over rapids and waterfalls through the valley of Gish. Lake Tana, however, lies in the heart of Ethiopian highlands, and it is fed by a variety of rivers and streams that come from the surrounding mountains. From a height of 1,800 meters above sea level, water from the lake must then also flow steeply downhill to reach Khartoum and the convergence with the White Nile. Compared with the White Nile, the Blue Nile is relatively short. However, because of the great amount of seasonal rainfall in the mountains of Ethiopia, the Blue Nile provides almost 70 percent of the maximum monthly flow of the main Nile once it becomes a single river. Throughout history, human settlement in Ethiopia has always been characterized by geographic isolation. Situated between the Tropic of Cancer and the Equator, most of the country is mountainous, and most of its settlements were built on the highlands for reasons of health and

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River defense. From the former perspective—in contrast to the high mountains that become icy cold at night, or the lowlands with their torrid climate— the highlands were relatively temperate, providing an ideal condition for human habitation. From the latter perspective, a key imperative of the rulers of Ethiopia was to defend the seat of the royal court from their enemies and to be able to lead expeditions and military campaigns as efficiently as possible. This made it advantageous to move their capitals frequently, producing towns like Aksum, Lalibela, and Gondar. Yet, once they settled in a locality, they would build fortresses of stone in the mountains, making their empires almost impenetrable territory. The Christian kingdoms entrenched in the mountains around the upper reaches of the Blue Nile have been likened in both cultural and economic terms to the early Muslim caliphates that inhabited the Arabian Desert. Yet their religious and geographic isolation led them to be largely immune from external threat. Even the European colonization of ­Ethi­opia was never as successful or long-enduring as in other African regions. Indeed, it is often said that Ethiopia was the only major African country to have defeated European colonialists. The peoples who settled in the watershed of the Blue Nile could build few cities directly built on the banks of the river because it was both unpredictable and violent (Figure 11.2). This was particularly true in Ethiopia, which up to the seventeenth century had no tradition of designating a fixed capital city. Instead, between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, Ethiopian emperors lived in mobile royal camps, which they moved frequently. What cities did exist were mostly built in the mountains and near the tributaries that poured into Lake Tana. The rulers of Ethiopia in later times also believed that capitals in places whose name began with the letter G would bring triumph over their enemies. This prophecy appears in the names of capital cities such as Guzara, Gorgora, Gommange, and Gondar. The Kingdom of Aksum, one of the oldest in Ethiopia, occupied what is present-day Eritrea and northern Ethiopia from 100 to 940 ad. Its namesake capital was a thriving trading center, which benefited from access to both the Red Sea and the Upper Nile, and so the Kingdom connected India to the Roman Empire and the Mediterranean. The Aksumites had practiced a polytheistic religion, which included the worship of the crescent-and-disc symbol used in southern Arabia, before they adopted Christianity during the reign of Emperor Ezana. Frumentius, a Syrian Christian who founded the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, is said to have converted Ezana to Christianity in the fourth century. Appointed bishop of Ethiopia around the year 330, Frumentius was in close contact with the Church of Alexandria. And although there was no direct relation between the churches in the two regions, it is probable that the Church of Alexandria had some influence on the development of Christianity in Aksum.



Cities of the Blue Nile

Figure 11.2 Settlements of the Blue Nile region

The Aksumite Empire is known for a number of accomplishments, among which were creating its own alphabet, the Ge’ez script, and issuing its own coins. During its heyday, Aksum was the most powerful state between the Eastern Roman Empire and Persia. Its prominence in politics and economics was evident in the fact that it was one of the first African countries south of the Sahara to mint coins. These were useful to simplify trade with a variety of countries, from Egypt in the north to India and Ceylon in the east. They also symbolized the power of the empire.

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Giant obelisks built to mark emperors’ tombs were among the works of architecture that illustrated the prosperity of the Aksumite people. Designed to symbolize multi-story palaces, they were decorated with doors and windows. The largest of Aksum’s obelisks measures about 33 meters high, which was much taller than any Egyptian obelisk. The Islamic empire’s takeover of the Red Sea region and later the Nile valley, however, came to isolate the Christian empire. And as trade diminished, the city of Aksum also declined. Most importantly, Aksum lost contact with its principal markets in Alexandria. Thus, when James Bruce visited the ancient capital in the late eighteenth century, Aksum was a city where only remnants of the past, from tall obelisks to ruins of temples, hinted at its former glory (Figure 11.3). After several centuries, Aksum was replaced by another capital, Lalibela. Founded by Emperor Gebre Mesqel Lalibela (r. 1181–1221) and bearing his ­ name, the city was intended to serve as Figure 11.3 The Aksum Obelisk a new Jerusalem, since the old Jerusalem had been recaptured by Muslims from the Crusaders in 1187. Legend had it that a swarm of bees had surrounded Lalibela when he was born, and his mother saw this as an auspicious sign. As a prediction that he would one day become emperor, she thus gave him the name Lalibela, meaning “the bees recognize his sovereignty.” Lalibela remained the capital of Ethiopia from the late twelfth century through the thirteenth century. It is now the oldest city on a tributary of Lake Tana. One of the holiest cities in Ethiopia, it was once a center of pilgrimage for Ethiopian Orthodox Christians. Its layout and the names of its major buildings were all symbolic representations of Jerusalem and were designated according to the names and patterns that a young Lalibela had observed on a visit to Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Even Lalibela’s river was named the River Jordan, and a local hill was given the name Calvary. Located at roughly 2,500 meters above sea level in the Lasta Mountains, Lalibela features 11 monolithic rock-cut churches, 10 of which were built during Lalibela’s reign. The churches, which required a remarkable



Cities of the Blue Nile

array of skills to build, were constructed not merely as a sign of religious devotion: they were also built to give legitimacy to the new capital as a place of pilgrimage. The architecture of Lalibela bears testimony to the exceptional building skill that existed in medieval Ethiopia. Each church was carved from a single piece of rock; however, the vast blocks were first hewn from the mountain, and it was only then that they were hollowed out, leaving only columns to create a hierarchy among different sacred spaces, such as naves, aisles, and transepts. The details and decorations found in the interior spaces were a reflection of the complex and elaborate skills of the architects and masons. Although some motifs may reflect nonindigenous characteristics, most notably an Indian influence, the principal architectural features of the churches were primarily of the Ethiopian architectural tradition, as found in Aksumite buildings. It is also worth noting that the monolithic churches of Lalibela bear little resemblance to architectural examples in other regions. Even the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri, built in ancient Egypt, differs from the Ethiopian examples: while the Egyptian architecture was not entirely separated from the mountain, the Lalibela churches were detached from the surrounding rock on all four sides, as if they were standalone objects. The pits in which the giant church blocks stood had thus first to be carved out vertically from a rocky hill before the interiors of the actual churches could be carved out horizontally from the sculpted rock. The powerful spirituality of the monolithic rock-cut churches in ­Lalibela mesmerized a number of Portuguese explorers and priests who visited Ethiopia in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. And the wells built next to many of the churches, which seemed to bring water up to the top of the mountain ridge on which Lalibela was located, reveal the sophistication of the engineering skills used in their construction. The largest of the Lalibela churches is Medhane Alem (“Savior of the World”); it measures 33.5 meters long, 23.5 meters wide, and 11 meters high, and features many lines of interior columns and arches. But probably the most elegant is Bete Giorgis (the Church of St. George), an excavation in the form of a Greek cross measuring 12.5 meters by 12 meters in plan and 12 meters in height (Figure 11.4). Lalibela, too, was soon abandoned by succeeding rulers, and a new administrate center, Imfraz, situated near another tributary of Lake Tana, was founded during the reign of Emperor Menas (r. 1559–63). Following his tradition, subsequent rulers of Ethiopia also began to stay near Lake Tana during the rainy season. Built in the mountains overlooking the northeastern shore of Lake Tana, Imfraz occupies an important place in the history of settlement in Ethiopia. Menas had moved from the southeast of the empire to the Lake Tana region so he could link trade

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Figure 11.4 Bete Giorgis (the Church of St. George) at Lalibela

routes with the Gulf of Aden ports to those of the Red Sea, including his own port, Massawa. The towns established in the Lake Tana area around this time differed from earlier “moving capitals,” since they featured stone fortresses to protect them. They were also the sites of churches built of stone, sometimes with the help of foreign craftsmen, including Turks, Indians, Portuguese, and Egyptians. Menas’s son, Emperor Sarsa Dingil (r. 1563–97), established a royal camp at Imfraz in 1571 and constructed a square building for himself. Returning from his expeditions in 1578, Dingil decided to build a royal



Cities of the Blue Nile

palace at Imfraz. By 1586 he had erected a fine makfad, or fortress, along with sundry other dwellings for his soldiers. His victory over the Turks at Debarwa in Tigray allowed him to incorporate captured Turkish soldiers into his army, and they may have been employed in construction work at Imfraz. But Dingil did not stay at Imfraz for the entirety of his reign, ultimately leaving the town for settlements in the north. Imfraz was first visited by the French physician Charles Poncet around 1700. He described the town then as not as big as the capital, Gondar, but as situated in a more pleasant location, and with better-built houses. In 1770 James Bruce also came to the Imfraz and described it as a large village of about 300 houses with a pleasant view of Lake Tana. The palace they observed during their visits resembled a two-story fortress with a single rectangular tower and two domed angle-towers; the building still stands on a hill above Lake Tana in an area known as Guzara. In fact it is debatable whether the Guzara castle is the building they saw, and indeed whether this structure was even in existence during the reign of Emperor Dingil. However, its architectural similarity to the royal complex built later in Gondar suggest the Guzara castle did serve as a prototype for what would later be developed in Gondar. Another important city in the Blue Nile region is Gorgora. Located at the north end of Lake Tana on a small peninsula jutting into the lake, it was the first capital of Emperor Susenyos (r. 1606–32). The first camp (katama) here was erected around 1611; this was about when Pedro Paez visited Gorgora, bringing with him a number of Indian workmen, including stone masons, who would make an important contribution to Ethiopian architecture. Paez eventually managed to convert the emperor to Roman Catholicism and began to build the first Portuguese-inspired building in the country there in 1619. The ruins of a large church built of dry stone at Gorgora remain as fragments of this historical encounter. Following the completion of the construction, Susenyos asked Paez to build a new palace nearby. Instead of using limestone, which was typically used in European palaces, Paez raised large and strong walls of both clay and square-cut stone. The emperor soon requested that the Jesuits build another royal church next to his palace. The new church differed from its predecessors in that, while the first church and the palace had been built in freestone, the royal church was constructed with mortar, which had only just begun to be used in Ethiopia. Moreover, the new church featured Indo-Portuguese Baroque ornament, an influence from the Portuguese missionaries and Indian craftsmen who came to Ethiopia with the Portuguese. Although Imfraz was the first royal settlement built adjacent to the Lake Tana area, Gorgora remains the first of the capitals in the Lake Tana area with reliable historic records. Its proximity to Lake Tana was certainly among the chief factors in making Gorgora the seat of royal court. But

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River at the same time, its proximity to Lake Tana increased the prevalence of waterborne diseases such as malaria, and it became necessary to find a new, healthier settlement site, in a more mountainous area. Known also as Gommange, Danqaz, located to the northeast of Lake Tana, thus became Susenyos’s second capital. And around the time Susenyos established his first residence there in 1617–18 the technique of building with stone blocks and mortar, instead of freestone, began to be used generally in the construction of important buildings. At its peak in the late 1620s and early 1630s, Danqaz was a settlement of as many as 900 hearths. The palace was constructed in 1629–30 by stone-carvers and mortar-makers under the direction of a Muslim Indian architect with the assistance of an Egyptian head workman. The Danqaz palace featured a large subterranean cistern with 12 vaults and an internal staircase, a space to hold water, unprecedented in Ethiopia. The palace had conical towers at its four corners which offered a mesmerizing view of the surrounding land. The Jesuits also built a Roman Catholic-style church in Danqaz, which took the form of a Latin cross with well proportioned carved arches. Following Susenyos’s abdication in 1632, Danqaz, too, however, lost its prominence, as Susenyos’s son and successor, Fasiladas, founded a new capital, in Gondar, 40 kilometers away. Aside from the tradition of new capital cities in Ethiopia, Danqaz’s decline may have had to do with a shift in Christian affiliation. After his accession to the throne, Emperor Fasiladas (r. 1632–67) immediately restored the official status of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and sent for an envoy to the Patriarch of Alexandria to resume diplomatic and trade relations with that city. Fasiladas also claimed to be a descendant of King Solomon and identified his own kingdom as an extension of the Solomonic dynasty, the embodiment of proper Judaism. And, as if to signify his standing in the region, during the final years of his reign, Fasiladas dispatched an embassy to India to congratulate Aurangzeb when he came to the throne of the Mughal Empire. Indeed, Fasiladas’s throne name was ‘Alam Sagad, which means “To Whom the World Bows.” The jewel of historic Ethiopian cities, Gondar is located north of Lake Tana, on the Lesser Angereb River. It is surrounded by fertile areas in an upland encircled with mountain ridges, which might have factored into Fasiladas’s decision in 1636 to establish the town as the permanent seat of his royal residence. As with the case of Danqaz, Gondar was also probably considered healthier than areas nearer to Lake Tana, which were prone to waterborne diseases. Its location along one of the tributaries that connect to Lake Tana must have been another important element in choosing it as a site. The valley of Gondar is surrounded by mountains on three sides, but it is open to Lake Tana to the south. Moreover, the site was located on routes between the once-prosperous commerce centers in the south and the port of Massawa in the north.



Cities of the Blue Nile

Fasiladas embarked upon constructing his palace in the late 1630s or early 1640s. Built with mortar, it was a two-story structure with a square castellated tower and four round corner towers. Like the Danqaz palace, Fasiladas’s castle had a large cistern. The Yemeni ambassador Hasan Ibn Ahmad al-Haymi, who visited Gondar in 1641, recorded that the builder was an Indian. Gondar was significant in the urban history of Ethiopia because, unlike the earlier settlements of Imfraz, Gorgora, and Danqaz, it remained a capital for centuries. Such relative permanence had a huge impact on its architecture because it enabled foreigners to transfer a variety of masonry, carpentry, and other buildings skills to Ethiopia. The “Gondarine style of architecture” refers to a hybrid architectural style influenced by the Baroque style. Fasil Ghebbi (the Royal Enclosure) is among the buildings constructed during the reign of Emperor Fasiladas, and elements of it still partially survive (Figure 11.5). The residence complex of Fasiladas and his successors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it contained palaces, monasteries, a banqueting hall, stables, library, and churches. The surrounding wall has a total length of 900

Figure 11.5 The Fasiladas castle (Fasil Ghebbi) at Gondar

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Figure 11.6 The Fasiladas Bath

meters and it features 12 entrances and three bridges. The palace’s six major building complexes and other ancillary structures would later be used as a military headquarters during the Italian occupation. Fasiladas was a prolific builder. In addition to his own palace complex, he built a rectangular pool now known as the Fasiladas Bath, which features a beautiful building in the middle that appears to be floating on the water (Figure 11.6). Fasiladas is also credited with erecting a number of stone bridges over the Blue Nile. Sebara Dildiy (“Broken Bridge” in Amharic) is among those that remain. He also built the Cathedral Church of St. Mary of Zion at Aksum, which is now known as the “Old ­Cathedral,” as it stands next to a new cathedral built by Emperor Haile Selassie in the 1950s. Fasiladas died at Azazo, 8 kilometers south of



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Gondar, and his body was buried at a monastery named St. Stephen’s on Daga Island in Lake Tana. With the founding of Gondar as a permanent capital, especially during the reign of Iyasu I (r. 1674–97), the royal court now occupied a fortified compound, not a mobile camp. Its inhabitants also followed suit by settling permanently in the town instead of moving around, and by the seventeenth century the population of Gondar had increased to more than 60,000. In contrast to the grandiose architecture of a royal court built of stone, however, the majority of inhabitants lived in squalid villages located east of the palace complex. Thus, when the French physician Charles Poncet visited in Gondar in 1692, he described the houses of Imfraz as being better built than those in Gondar. Most of the houses in Gondar were conical in shape, built of clay, and covered with thatched roofs. Gondar was still the seat of government by the time James Bruce visited the city in 1770. The principal city of Ethiopia, it then contained some 10,000 households. Bruce took quarters in the Muslim section of the city, where clay huts with conical roofs were the typical dwelling form. By contrast, the king’s palace was a large square building with towers and a wall, looking down to Lake Tana. Gondar’s standing as a capital city, however, would ultimately be challenged, too, when Emperor Tewodros II (r. 1855–68), who claimed to be descended directly from both King Solomon and Alexander the Great, moved his seat of power to Magdala (present-day Amba Mariam) in 1855. It was there that he built a new series of mountain fortresses and where he ran foul of the British Empire. Britain’s policy at the time was to develop diplomatic relations with all the countries bordering the Red Sea, to protect access to it as a trade route. However, Emperor Tewodros had taken some European diplomats and missionaries hostage to try to induce the British to send skilled workers to his kingdom. Britain did not respond to his request, but instead ordered a general, Robert Napier, to lead a military campaign against Ethiopia in 1867. Napier’s forces marched from the Gulf of Zula on the Red Sea to Magdala near Lake Tana. Confronted by imminent defeat, Tewodros II committed suicide in his fortress, which was soon captured by the British, looted, and burned. His tragic end notwithstanding, it is no exaggeration to say that the history of modern Ethiopia began with Tewodros II. He was a unique figure in that he did not fear Queen Victoria’s British Empire and chose death before dishonor. It is no wonder that he left an unforgettable legacy in Ethiopia. The rise of the Islamic state led by the Mahdi in neighboring Sudan was the major threat to Ethiopia in the nineteenth century. And in an act of defiance to British rule in Sudan, the Mahdi’s successor, Khalifa Abdullahi, decided to invade Christian Ethiopia, where he captured its most important city, Gondar, in 1887. The Italians, who controlled the trade on the Red Sea, had occupied the port of Massawa in 1885. However,

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River the Italians were soon roundly defeated at the Battle of Adwa in 1896 by Ethiopia’s well equipped force under the command of the reforming and modernizing Emperor Menelik II (r. 1889–1913), who had founded the new capital city of Addis Ababa (“New Flower”) in 1886. The battle was recorded as one of the greatest victories of an African over a European army. Indeed, Ethiopia’s victory over the Italian army has been likened to Japan’s triumph in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War. Adwa made the country a living symbol of African independence, and Ethiopia continued to exert great influence on pan-African sentiments, particularly in religion. Thus, when Ras Tafari was crowned negus (“king” in Amharic) in 1928, it gave birth to the Rastafarian movement in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Rastafarians revered Ras Tafari and the future Emperor Haile Selassie (r. 1930–74), who succeeded him, as the incarnation of an African messiah. Meanwhile, however, the Italians under the fascist government of Benito Mussolini were turning their colonial eyes to Ethiopia, hoping to avenge the Battle of Adwa. Their ambitions in Ethiopia were finally brought into the open by General Emilio De Bono, who attacked Ethiopia from Eritrea in 1935, and by his successor Pietro Badoglio, who subsequently captured the capital city of Addis Ababa. Along with Eritrea and Somalia, Ethiopia was subsequently integrated into an Italian colony entitled Africa Orientale Italiana (AOI). But following the Italian alliance with Germany in World War II in 1940, British forces attacked East Africa in 1941, and ultimately ended Italian colonialism there. Emperor Haile Selassie, who had gone into exile during the Italian occupation, returned to Ethiopia from his exile in England. His exile and return caused him thereafter to be portrayed as the father of national independence, until his downfall in a military coup in 1974 and his death under mysterious circumstances in 1975. Before much was known about the source of the White Nile, Ethiopia’s geography had generated many legends and myths about the Blue Nile. Ethiopia’s alleged control of its waters had long been the source of an uneasy relationship with Egypt. The idea that Ethiopian rulers could divert the Blue Nile may be traced as far back as the second half of the eleventh century, when a series of famines was believed to have been precipitated by Ethiopian power over its flow. However, it was only in the mid-twentieth century that this idea became a possibility, as newly independent African countries began to consider the construction of dams for economic development. By the mid-1950s, Ethiopia had become a party to Nile water negotiations between Egypt and Sudan, following the independence of the latter in 1957. At the time, Emperor Selassie was aggressively seeking the support of the United States to develop the Blue Nile as a resource for irrigation and hydroelectric power generation. A survey team of engineers brought in from the United States studied the gorges of the river in detail,



Cities of the Blue Nile

flying in helicopters. Updating British-inspired studies of the Nile basin in Egypt, five years of investigation of the Blue Nile by American experts pointed conclusively to the tremendous tool for economic development that would be created by damming it. Their work did much to rekindle age-old fears of Ethiopian control of the Nile. The alleged power of Ethiopia to control downstream flows of Nile water has determined Ethiopia’s foreign relations to a significant degree since then. Despite its almost impenetrable geography, Ethiopia’s location at the source of the Blue Nile, as well as its status as an important trade hub on the Red Sea (until the creation of the separate state of Eritrea in the north in 1993), attracted travelers and visitors from around the world in the twentieth century. Not only did its immediate neighbors, Egypt and Sudan, develop a geographic interest in the nature and culture of Ethiopia, but European missionaries and pilgrims also continued to visit Ethiopia, the mythical land of Prester John. Up to the mid-twentieth century, the primary purpose of constructing dams on the Nile had been to store sufficient amounts of water to survive the annual dry season. Since the 1950s, however, dams have been built to generate electricity and stimulate development. More often than not, dams have also been promoted as a symbol of national sovereignty. The Renaissance Dam now under construction on the Blue Nile, with Italian engineering technology and international funding, will be the largest such dam in the world. Its capacity to hold enough water for all the people of Egypt and Sudan has caused great geopolitical tension in the region, since it could be used in potential future conflict either to flood them or to bring disastrous famine. With climate change, Ethiopia may in the twenty-first century hold the fate of the Nile, oscillating between a giver of life or a killer of communities. Bibliography Addis, Solomon. 2006. A History of the City of Gondar. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Collins, Robert O. 2000. “In Search of the Nile Waters, 1900–2000.” In Haggai Erlich and Israel Gershoni, eds., The Nile: Histories, Cultures, Myths. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, pp. 245–67. Fernandez, Victor. 2017. The Archaeology of the Jesuit Missions in Ethiopia 1557– 1632. Leiden: Brill. Ludwig, Emil. 1937. The Nile: The Life-Story of a River. New York: Viking Press. Moorehead, Alan. 1962. The Blue Nile. New York: Harper & Row. Munro-Hay, Stuart. 2002. Ethiopia, the Unknown Land: A Cultural and Historical Guide. London: I. B. Tauris. Palumbo, Patrizia. 2003. A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Pankhurst, Sylvia. 1959. Ethiopia, a Cultural History. Woodford Green: Lalibela House. Pankhurst, Richard. 2000. “Ethiopia’s Alleged Control of the Nile.” In Haggai Erlich and Israel Gershoni, eds., The Nile: Histories, Cultures, Myths. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, pp. 25–37. Pankhurst, Richard. 2004. “A Tale of Four Cities: Late-16th and Early-17th Century Ethiopian Capitals and Their Turkish, Portuguese and Indian Connections.” In Manuel João Ramos and Isabel Boavida, eds., The Indigenous and the Foreign in Christian Ethiopian Art: On Portuguese–Ethiopian Contacts in the 16th–17th Centuries. Lisbon: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, pp. 3–15. Pankhurst, Richard. 2005. Historic Images of Ethiopia. Addis Ababa: Shama Books. Ramos, Manuel João, and Isabel Boadiva, eds. 2004. The Indigenous and the Foreign in Christian Ethiopian Art: On Portuguese–Ethiopian Contacts in the 16th–17th Centuries. Lisbon: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Tafla, Bairu. 2000. “The Father of Rivers: The Nile in Ethiopian Literature.” In Haggai Erlich and Israel Gershoni, eds., The Nile: Histories, Cultures, Myths. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, pp. 153–70. van Donzel, Emery. 2000. “The Legend of the Blue Nile in Europe.” In Haggai Erlich and Israel Gershoni, eds., The Nile: Histories, Cultures, Myths. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, pp. 121–9.

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Rosetta and the Discovery of Ancient Egypt: Where the Nile Meets the Sea Passing through some low sand hills interspersed with palm trees, we soon afterwards arrived at Rosetta. This town makes no show on the land side, but on entering it we found that it was much larger and better built than Alexandria. It has however a gloomy appearance, the houses, which in general are four storeys high, being constructed with very small dark-colored bricks, bedded in thick layers of white mortar and having a great number of closed small windows . . . Nothing can be more striking than the difference in the character of the scenery on the land side and on the river side of Rosetta. On the one there is nothing to be seen but heaps of sand and a few struggling palm trees. On the other, the Nile rolls his slow and majestic course through lofty fields and gardens. — John Fuller (1819; from Narratives of a Tour through Some Parts of the Turkish Empire, London, 1829)

I

n July 1799, a French lieutenant by the name of Pierre-François Bouchard found a dark-colored stone tablet at an ancient fort near Rosetta, a town located in the eastern Nile delta (Figure 12.1). Recognizing that the tablet seemed to be inscribed with several scripts, and hence in several languages, the lieutenant informed his superiors under General Jacques-François Menou, who was then serving as governor of Rosetta, of his discovery. Bouchard was in Egypt as part of Napoleon Bonaparte’s military campaign to the East in 1798–1801, a campaign which coincided with the burgeoning interest in Egypt among Europeans. The tablet turned out to be engraved in Egyptian hieroglyphs, ancient Greek, and Demotic (a hitherto unidentified language). The official newspaper of the French expedition, Courrier de l’Égypte, featured the historic discovery of the stone in September 1799. Egypt’s hieroglyphic language had remained untranslated until then, and thus the stone seemed to offer a potential key to deciphering it—and hence a means to resolve the age-old mystery of ancient Egypt. Within months, the discovery garnered widespread public interest across Europe, and the tablet became known as the Rosetta Stone, after the town where it was discovered. Rosetta was an important city in the lower Nile delta during Napole­ on’s time. It lay in a strategic location on the Mediterranean at the western

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Figure 12.1 The fortress at Rosetta where the Rosetta Stone was discovered

outlet of the Nile (Figure 12.2). At that time it had probably been the most important port on the Mediterranean in Egypt for several cen­ turies—even more important than its sister city, Alexandria, 65 kilometers to its west. Open to the Mediterranean world as a trading center, it had been populated over time by citizens of different national origins. Supported by its agricultural hinterland and connected to the rest of Egypt by the Nile, it was bound to play a leading role in Egypt, the region, and the Mediterranean. As a city, Rosetta existed in an area shaped over centuries by the floods of the Nile, the unpredictability of the sea, the movement of sand, and in the last millennia by human conflict. In a race to maintain its connection to the sea, it had long been on the move northward, as the alluvium of the Nile, accumulated over thousands of years of flooding, kept expanding out to sea. Indeed, the larger region to which Rosetta belonged consisted largely of fields enriched by mineral-laden silt washed down from as far away as the Ethiopian highlands. It was this silt that had guaranteed the fertility of the area since antiquity, making it renowned for its varied agricultural products, including rice, wheat, barley, sugarcane, grapes, oranges, and dates. While Rosetta was not an ancient Egyptian city, settlement in the region dated back to the proto-dynastic era, before King Menes unified



Rosetta and the Discovery of Ancient Egypt

Figure 12.2 Map of Rosetta on the Nile delta and its connection to Alexandria

Upper and Lower Egypt. Some have suggested that Menes captured a town on a branch of the Nile then named Khito. During the Ptolemaic era, the town was then renamed Poulbotine after the Poulbotinium temple, a religious shrine dedicated to the worship of Queen Cleopatra. And during the Coptic age, the town was known in the Demotic language as Rashit. With the Arab conquest of Egypt, and possibly out of convenience, the town’s name was later changed to Rashid—an Arabic word meaning “mature.” During the European Crusader campaigns, and later, after colonial conquest by the French and the British, the town came to be known by its Latin name of Rosy, or Rosetta in English. During the early Middle Ages, the town became a thriving hub of seaborne trade. In the second half of the ninth century, a fort was built in Rashid/Rosetta by order from Baghdad. The Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’amun, who ruled not only Egypt but much of the Middle East, wanted the fort built on the remains of the ancient Ptolemaic city in an attempt to defend Egypt against more aggressive Byzantine incursions. Along with Alexandria and Damietta, Rosetta dominated the north coastal region of Egypt. Yet, after the founding of Cairo in 969, Alexandria ceased to function as a trading center, and the medieval town of Rosetta grew in tandem with Damietta, which sat on the other important branch by which the Nile reached the Mediterranean. During the Seventh Crusade, in 1249, Louis IX of France occupied Damietta, on the eastern edge of the Nile delta, and the occupation alerted the Mamluks, who ruled Egypt at the time, to the importance

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River of defending Rosetta with a garrison. Soon after, Rosetta also became an important trading harbor. And with rapid growth, the wealthy merchants there built large houses with gardens of vines, fruit-bearing trees, and other greenery. A number of mosques, inns, and public baths, adorned with exquisite decorative inscriptions and woodwork, were also constructed in the city. However, it was not until after the arrival of the Ottomans in Egypt in 1517 that the town came to full prominence. Its fort was then also rebuilt by the Mamluk sultan Qait Bey. Rosetta continued to thrive for almost three centuries, reaching a peak of prosperity in the eighteenth century, with vast gardens, orchards, and plantings of date palms. When the French traveler Jean de Thévenot visited in 1655, he recorded that Rosetta had several grain mills for wheat, a sugar factory, a paper mill, a marble-cutting factory, and a large cemetery outside the city. And when Napoleon’s army arrived in 1789, they noted the city’s advanced water tanks, many of which were built with recycled stone from ancient Egyptian temples nearby (Figure 12.3). As the westernmost urban settlements of the Nile delta, Rosetta and Alexandria are often considered sister cities. The relationship between Rosetta and Alexandria is an important and long-standing one, based not only on geography and history but also on social lineages and business connections. Geographically, the two cities have always been connected by a narrow spine of land sandwiched between Lake Idku to the south and the Mediterranean to the north. The lake, which opens into the sea through a very narrow strait, had been in existence since the time of the

Figure 12.3 View of Rosetta around the time of the Napoleonic campaign



Rosetta and the Discovery of Ancient Egypt

earliest Egyptian dynasties. Its name, Idku, however, was derived from the Demotic language used in Egypt during Coptic times, and meant “the elevated hills,” in reference to the irregularity of the land that surrounds it. The lake was used for fishing, and its shores had long been inhabited, as evidenced by archaeological findings in the area. A road connecting Rosetta to Alexandria appears to have been built in the Ptolemaic era, and it was referred to in the later writings of Roman, Arab, and Mamluk travelers, visitors, residents, and administrators. Historically, Rosetta and Alexandria have often been controlled by the same administration, either because they belonged to the same government unit or because they were located in a region controlled from elsewhere. During much of the time when the area was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, the Rosetta and Alexandria governors often reported directly to the sultan in Constantinople, while every other city in Egypt was ruled by and governed from Cairo. This gave the two cities a certain degree of independence from the rest of Egypt, a status which allowed them to acquire different political and trade connections and ultimately resulted in their cosmopolitan constitution. Socially and economically, the big families of Rosetta and Alexandria were always close, with many intermarriages between them, a condition that in some cases continues to exist. The connection may be seen not only from family names, but also from the migration and exchange of populations that occurred when the fortunes of the two cities changed. Families from Alexandria owned businesses in Rosetta, and vice versa. When Rosetta was under direct control of the Ottoman sultan, the city was also subject to Ottoman land laws, and these opened opportunities for wealthy foreign residents of the Ottoman Empire to own land and businesses there. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Alexandria and Rosetta had the highest percentages of non-Egyptian residents when the French arrived in 1798, and even for many decades later. In terms of their built environments, there were also strong connections between the two cities, at least until the beginning of the nineteenth century. The similarity of their climate resulted in the two cities taking a similar built form. In addition, their relative isolation on account of the lakes that surrounded them and the environment of the region led to the use of similar building materials and techniques. And throughout specific periods of their history, possibly because of the migration and exchange of craftsmen, the architectural styles of the two cities often resembled each other. Politically and economically, the fates of Rosetta and Alexandria have also been intertwined in an unusual and inverse relationship. For centuries it was Alexandria that served as the major trading harbor on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. Indeed, it was only from the Middle Ages through the early nineteenth century that the city sank into a state of disrepair.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River During that period, the canals which provided Nile water to it silted up and Lake Mareotis began to shrink. The city named after the conqueror of the ancient world lost its function of connecting the Mediterranean to the Nile. But the same conditions raised the fortunes of Rosetta, to the east. With a similar position between land and sea, Rosetta largely assumed Alexandria’s former role of connecting Egypt to the rest of the Mediterranean. Indeed, when Napoleon arrived in Egypt, Alexandria had shrunk to a small town with a population of 8,000 people, while Rosetta had a population possibly three times as great. The relative fortunes of the two cities, however, would once again be reversed in the first half of the nineteenth century with the digging of the Mahmoudiyah Canal, which provided Alexandria with a new direct source of fresh water as well as a navigation channel reconnecting it to the Nile. Rosetta was built and rebuilt several times, but the current city is mainly a product of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The builders and architects of Rosetta were often foreign residents, and so its architecture was characterized by an eclectic style. In the eighteenth century, the majority of houses which accommodated the wealthy were three stories high. Those built by the native Mamluk elite had an Ottoman appearance, while those inhabited by foreigners displayed Neo-Baroque influences. The houses were often built with burnt-clay bricks of both dark-brown and light-red colors. A particular style of brick-laying, similar to Flemish bond, in which dark-brown bricks were surrounded by lighter red ones, emerged, particularly for Rosetta’s big houses. This gave the city’s residential architecture its distinctive appearance, a style that seems to have migrated to Alexandria by the eighteenth century. The interiors of houses occupied by Muslims usually had a harem, or a section for women, while those of foreign residents did not. Many houses had round corners, usable rooftops, and terraces; and their front doors were often decorated and their windows accentuated with metal grills or mashrabiyas (balconies adorned with wooden latticework) (Figure 12.4). One of the most decisive moments in the history of Rosetta was Napoleon Bonaparte’s arrival in the spring of 1798. Aboard the ship L’Orient, en route to Egypt, Napoleon had written a proclamation to the predominantly Muslim inhabitants of Egypt: For some time now, the Beys who govern Egypt, have insulted the French nation and have excluded our merchants; the time for retribution has come. For too long now, this bevy of slaves, bought in the Caucasus and in Georgia, has tyrannized the most beautiful part of the world; but God, on whom all depends, has ordered that their empire be brought to an end. People of Egypt, they will tell you that I come to destroy your religion—do not believe it. Tell them I come to restore your rights, to punish the usurpers, and that I respect God, His Prophet Muhammad, and the Qur’an, far more than do the Mamluks. (Dailey-Chwalibog and Gignac 2009: 43)



Rosetta and the Discovery of Ancient Egypt

Figure 12.4 Rosetta’s distinctive residential architecture

Published in Arabic, the proclamation thus described Napoleon as a servant of Allah and of the Ottoman sultan, and declared his purpose to be the liberation of Egypt from the oppression and abuses of power of the Mamluks, who had ruled Egypt for more than five centuries. Although the idea of French colonization of Egypt had been lurking since the time of the Crusades, Napoleon thus sought to legitimize his military invasion by invoking the greater good of the Egyptian people. But his real motivations and political aims were far more complex, ranging from economic interests, to imperial expansion, to overpowering political rivals at home, to challenging British influence as represented in the Orient by the East India Company. Due to the growing weakness of the Ottoman Empire, Napoleon saw Egypt as an almost defenseless territory and an easy conquest. Driven by

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River pragmatic aims, he viewed himself as a visionary who would spread the principles of Enlightenment and the French Revolution to the Orient. Yet, extending the domination of the French Empire to three continents was ultimately his main ambition. In his memoirs, he wrote, “I saw myself founding a religion, marching into Asia, riding an elephant, a turban on my head and in my hand the new Koran that I would have composed to suit my needs” (as cited in Stewart 1968: 173). Napoleon’s proclamation created much excitement and commentary when it reached the people of Cairo. Al-Jabarti, an Egyptian writer who witnessed Napoleon’s arrival and devoted much of his writing to understanding the French, would later deliver a scathing critique of it and ridicule its stylistic and grammatical inadequacies. But Napoleon’s manifesto convinced him that any resistance by Egyptians would be met with harsh retaliation. When his fleet landed near Alexandria, Napoleon promised his soldiers riches. He then reminded them of their greater mission: The people with whom we are going to live are Mohammedans; their first article of faith is this: there is no other God than God, and Muhammad is His Prophet. Do not contradict them; behave with them as we did with the Jews, and with the Italians; show respect for their Muftis and their Imams, as you have for Rabbis and Bishops. For the ceremonies that read from the Qur’an, and for the Mosques, show the same tolerance that you have shown for the convents and the synagogues, for the religions of Moses and of Jesus Christ. The Roman legions protected all religions. Here you will find different practices from those in Europe; you must grow accustomed to them. [. . .] The first city we will encounter was built by Alexander [the Great]. With each step we will forge great memories, worthy of inspiring the competitive nature of the French. (Dailey-Chwalibog and Gignac 2009: 39)

Jacques-François Menou had been the first of Napoleon’s generals to set out for Egypt, and he was the first Frenchman to land. Napoleon and General Jean-Baptiste Kléber then joined Menou at night at Alexandria’s Fort Marabou, where the first French flag was hoisted in Egypt. Napoleon was informed that there would be resistance, so he rushed to get additional forces ashore. Admiral François-Paul Brueys d’Aigalliers headed toward the Bay of Aboukir before disembarking in the old port of Alexandria, and General Louis Desaix went southeast toward the desert and reached the town of Damanhour, 42 kilometers southeast of Alexandria, on July 6. After Kléber was put in charge of Alexandria, Napoleon and the main body of French troops then left for Cairo. Meanwhile, General Charles Dugua marched on Rosetta, to which General Menou was assigned as governor following its capture. Control of Rosetta’s port opened a route for the French fleet to proceed up the Nile and arrive at Rahmania, a town situated on the Nile, to rejoin the army. After procuring provisions



Rosetta and the Discovery of Ancient Egypt

for their next march, the French army then departed at night and arrived near the village of Imbaba on the west bank of the Nile, facing Cairo. The French soon thereafter plunged into a battle with the Mamluk cavalry, led by Murad Bey. At 25,000 men, the French force was almost double the 15,000 Mamluk troops. The French army was victorious, but only at the expense of 300 of its soldiers and thousands of Egyptians. After this decisive victory, in what was later called the Battle of the Pyramids, as it had occurred on the Giza side of the Nile, the French army entered Cairo. And following the takeover, Napoleon wasted little time trying to win over his new subjects by participating in local festivities and events. As he had announced in his proclamation, he cast himself as the new ruler of Egypt, one who would bring civilization to Egypt. He began by creating a new local administration in Cairo, based on the governing structures of a European city. After the Battle of the Pyramids, the French transport ships began their journey back to France, but the fleet first had to stop on the northern coast of Egypt to reprovision. Meanwhile, a British fleet led by Admiral Horatio Nelson approached along the coast, and, after a search for the enemy fleet that had lasted weeks, on August 1, 1798, Nelson discovered the French warships in the Bay of Aboukir. The French ships were anchored in a way that exposed only one of their sides to enemy fire while the other was protected by the shore. However, British tactics, as it turned out, were even more skillful, and half the British warships squeezed between the land and the French naval line, allowing them to fire on the French fleet from both sides. The near-complete defeat of the French fleet ensued in only a few hours, as most of the French ships were captured, destroyed, or fled. This battle would later be called the Battle of the Nile, despite the fact that its site had no connection to the river. It ultimately prevented Napoleon from consolidating French power in the Mediterranean. The disastrous defeat forced Napoleon to turn his campaign from the sea to the land, but it did not thwart his plans to establish a French presence in Egypt. In his proclamation, Napoleon had emphasized the long “friendship” that had existed between France and the Ottoman Empire. But this was certainly contradicted by the French intervention in Egypt. Furthermore, upon hearing of the French defeat at the Bay of Aboukir, the Ottomans sprang into action to end Napoleon’s campaign. In Istanbul, the Ottoman Sultan Selim III prepared to send two armies to Egypt to wage war against France. Rather than waiting to be attacked, however, Napoleon decided to act first, by starting an offensive in Syria. But after conquering several cities there and confronting both Ottoman and British forces, Napoleon’s army suffered an outbreak of the bubonic plague, and he had no choice but to return to Egypt. Although his Syrian campaign thus failed, on his return he defeated additional Ottoman forces waiting for him outside Alexandria.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Back in Cairo, the French army initially rested. But when he heard that the Mamluk General Murad Bey was descending the Nile from Upper Egypt with a new force, Napoleon headed out to Giza to attack him. And upon hearing that Ottoman ships had arrived at the Bay of Aboukir and threatened French forces nearby, instead of returning to Cairo, he marched his army back to Alexandria. On July 25, 1799, at what would later be called the Battle of Aboukir, Napoleon’s army attacked this new Ottoman force, inflicting a great number of casualties. The victory in the land battle enabled Napoleon to restore his reputation to a certain extent after the earlier naval defeat at Aboukir at the hands of the British. In the meantime, Napoleon was considering ending his stagnating military campaign in Egypt—especially since he had insufficient forces to continue it. He also sensed that it would be difficult to hold Egypt. And not only did British and Ottoman military forces threaten him there, but internal turmoil in France required his attention. In August 1799, Napoleon thus departed Cairo for the Nile delta and then France. Accompanying him were a group of scholars, including the mathem­ atician Gaspard Monge and the chemist Claude Louis Berthollet, as well as several of his generals, including Louis-Alexandre Berthier, Joachim Murat, Jean Lannes, and Auguste de Marmont. When the remaining soldiers in his army, however, learned that he had departed and appointed General Kléber as their new commander-in-chief, they were infuriated, because it suggested that Napoleon planned to abandon them. But they were soon relieved to hear from Kléber that Napoleon planned to return with reinforcements from France. Eighteen months after he left on his Egypt campaign, Napoleon arrived back in France in October 1799 to deal with local troubles. Put in charge of governing the country in Napoleon’s absence, Kléber was immediately thrust into a precarious situation. In order to ensure the safe retreat of his troops from Egypt, he first had to negotiate a treaty with the Ottomans and the British. Thus, in January 1800, Kléber signed a treaty with Sidney Smith, commander of the British fleet, which promised a peaceful evacuation of the French troops. But, as the withdrawal commenced in February, the British admiral George Keith refused to follow its terms, and attacked the French. In March, Ottoman forces then encountered Kléber as they were approaching Cairo. Although greatly outnumbered, the French managed to defeat the Ottomans, only to be confronted with a popular rebellion in Cairo, which lasted more than a month. These events finally came to an end when Kléber was assassinated by a young Syrian by the name of Suleyman al-Halabi in June 1800. It was under these conditions that the elderly General Menou became governor of all Egypt in 1800. Born in Boussay in central France, Menou was a liberal nobleman. But when he assumed the position of commander-in-chief, he failed for a variety of reasons to gain the support



Rosetta and the Discovery of Ancient Egypt

of the remaining French army. His position was no less challenging than Kléber’s, however, as a new combined Ottoman–British force was fast approaching. Before assuming overall command, Menou had been governor of Rosetta for two years. While there, despite the resistance of the local population to French occupation, he had adhered to Napoleon’s operational policy not only by respecting Islam but also by utilizing Islam as a political ideology and dealing with the people of Rosetta as if their national identity was simply Islamic. But Menou went further, converting to Islam under the name Abdallah, possibly so he could marry Zubaida al-Bowab, the daughter of one of Rosetta’s noble families, who claimed to be descended from the Prophet of Islam, Mohammed. Although interracial marriages were not unusual, and many French soldiers chose to marry local women instead of living a celibate life or frequenting the brothels, Menou’s marriage was not celebrated by his soldiers. In Egypt, however, conversion to Islam was obligatory for such marriages, even if Egyptians such as al-Jabarti expressed their indignation at it insincerity. But for Menou, conversion to Islam may have been an entirely consistent with his view that association between local Egyptians and their French colonizers was necessary. Menou was a believer in the deist doctrine, a faith prominent in Western Europe during the Age of Enlightenment. Rather than following a particular organized religion, deists believed in reason and observation of the natural world, and they rejected the validity of all prophecies, miracles, and supernatural events. This belief may have made it easier for Menou to embrace Islam as a political and social convenience. However, his conversion brought scorn from his comrades, whose respect he had already lost after falling behind several times when leading troops in the Egyptian campaign. Menou was thus not eager to take over after Kléber’s death. But his age and rank made him the next general in the line of command. As the Anglo-Ottoman alliance commenced its land offensive, the French under Menou were defeated by the British at the  Battle of Alexandria on March 21, 1801. The fort in which the Rosetta stone was discovered (now called Fort Julien, after a French general who died in the campaign) was captured in April, and Cairo then fell a few months later. Menou’s remaining army fled to Alexandria, where Menou finally surrendered on August 30. Menou claimed the Rosetta Stone as his private property, but recognizing the stone’s significance, the British General John Hely-Hutchinson, who presided over the surrender, did not accept his claim. Signed by representatives of the British, French, and Ottoman forces, the Capitulation of Alexandria stipulated the terms and conditions for the transfer of all French possessions in Egypt. Thus were the British able to acquire a large number of Egyptian antiquities, including the

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Rosetta Stone. Under the terms of the surrender, however, Hutchinson did allow the French army to be repatriated to France in British ships. The Treaty of Paris on June 25, 1802, then brought an end to all hostilities between France and the Ottoman Empire, thereby returning Egypt to Ottoman rule. It was evident that, as he left Egypt, Menou was treated like a Muslim by the new Ottoman governor. His Egyptian wife, however, was not allowed to leave with him, although he was later successful in negotiating her departure. It seems she ultimately lived with him in France and Italy until her death. Menou’s principal contributions to France were to come later, in Italy. And eventually he was named Knight of the Order of the Iron Crown in 1807, before being appointed governor of Venice, where he died on August 13, 1810. His name is inscribed on the south side of the Arc de Triomphe. But Menou will always be remembered for his relationship to Rosetta, and Rosetta will always remain significant because of the stone. The relationship between the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire worsened considerably soon after the defeat of the French expedition. With growing colonial ambitions and an expanding fleet, Britain wanted to establish a presence in the Mediterranean to secure trade routes, es­ pecially for coffee from Yemen. Hence, the British, too, ultimately decided to attack the increasingly weak Ottoman Empire. And Rosetta would play an important role in this political game. Seizing on new internal conflict in Egypt—whose new governor, Mehmed Ali (r. 1805–48), was occupied with fighting the Mamluks—the British decided to send a fleet and ground troops to Egypt headed by General Alexander Mackenzie Fraser. Fraser agreed with one of the important Mamluks, Ali Bey al-Salanki, to take control of Egypt’s Mediterranean ports and then occupy the rest of the country. In early 1807, Fraser’s force landed in Alexandria, and the city surrendered as easily as it had to Napoleon nine years earlier. But as the British attempted to move inland, Rosetta became the site of a crucial battle between local inhabitants and the British forces, on March 31, 1807. The fighters of Rosetta waited in their houses quietly for the British to enter the town, then rose up and slaughtered them. Of the force of a 1,000 men which had attacked the city, 170 were killed, 250 were wounded, and another 120 were taken prisoner. The fierce resistance of Rosetta ultimately led to the defeat of Fraser’s army, which evacuated the city following the signing of a treaty with Mehmed Ali. The Rosetta Stone would later make the most valuable contribution of any archaeological artifact to knowledge of ancient Egypt. Napoleon had already founded a new scientific center in Cairo, the Institut d’Égypte. And the stone, known in French as La Pierre de Rosette, had been transported there in August 1799 for scholarly examination before it was appropriated by the British. Upon its arrival in Cairo, the Institut’s



Rosetta and the Discovery of Ancient Egypt

scientists had made lithographic copies of the stone’s inscriptions by covering its surface with printer’s ink and pressing sheets of paper onto it, and these copies had been distributed to interested scholars across Europe. But after the stone arrived in the British port of Portsmouth as a spoil of war in February 1802, it was transported to the headquarters of the Society of Antiquaries in London, where additional plaster casts of it were made to be sent to British universities. Eventually, lithographic copies and plaster casts of the inscriptions on the stone were circulated to a wide range of European museums, universities, and scholars. But the scholars who endeavored to decipher it soon became baffled by the fact that each hieroglyphic sign appeared to have a different meaning each time it was used. Among the first technical experts to examine the stone were the linguist Jean-Joseph Marcel and the inventor Nicolas-Jacques Conté. Marcel had identified the middle text as written in the Egyptian Demotic script, and Conté had helped reproduce the inscription for analysis by using the stone as a lithographic printing block. But the British physicist Thomas Young (1773–1829) also deserves attention. A man of science who maintained a great interest in linguistics and who even invented the term “Indo-European,” Young had first been introduced to a Demotic papyrus transported to London from Thebes in 1813. Then, at a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries of London held in 1814, Young spectacularly provided a complete translation of the Demotic text of the Rosetta Stone. His curiosity and meticulous attention to detail thus established him as the first person who had been able to read a Demotic text since the end of the Roman Empire. Young then devoted the last 15 years of his life to deciphering the system of Egyptian hieroglyphics that also appeared on the stone. Although the conventional wisdom of the day held that hieroglyphics were merely an aggregate of symbols impenetrable to decipher, Young had a hunch that Demotic writing had actually descended from them as a complex linguistic system based on rational rules. But it was the French scholar of classics Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) who was eventually given credit for deciphering the riddle of the hieroglyphic system using the Rosetta Stone. On September 27, 1822, Champollion, often called the father of Egyptology, addressed the French Royal Academy of Letters, where he argued that Demotic writing was not a full alphabetic script but a vernacular form of hieroglyphics. As scholars such as Champollion and Young were able to show, the tablet contained three versions of the same decree by the priests of Memphis in 196 bc commemorating the divine rule of Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The stone was thus established to be the first ancient Egyptian multilingual text discovered in modern times. By the late Ptolemaic period, usage of the hieroglyphic script was specialized and confined to a small group of people. And few Egyptians understood the language at all by the fourth century ad. Indeed, after the Roman Emperor Theodosius

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River I ordered the closing of all non-Christian temples in 391 ad, hieroglyphs ceased to appear entirely—with the last known inscription in which they were used dating from August 394 at the island of Philae in Upper Egypt. It was probably around this time that a temple at the royal town of Sais, on one of the branches of the Nile, was closed. The stone discovered by the French expedition seems to have been a fragment of a stela displayed within this temple, which was later broken apart before or during its journey to the Nile delta. It was then named the Rosetta Stone after the town where it was discovered by the French. By then, of course, Rosetta had lost its prominence in Egyptian affairs, culturally at least, a condition that would allow its name to achieve new fame with the discovery of the stone (Figure 12.5).

Figure 12.5 The Rosetta Stone



Rosetta and the Discovery of Ancient Egypt

Although Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt failed, the arrival of the French at the turn of a new era brought Egyptians face to face with the Euro­pean “other” for the first time in centuries. The Napoleonic expedition would usher in an era of intermittent European colonization of Egypt that lasted for decades, but would also open up Egyptian society to the ideas of modernity and industrialization absent under Ottoman rule. Not only did French military superiority inspire a desire among some Egyptians to learn from the West, but it brought technological advancements and modern engineering that were seen by some as beneficial for a new Egypt. The modernization of Egypt came to fruition with the Albanian Mehmed Ali. Born in Macedonia, he was appointed governor of Egypt by the Ottoman sultan in 1805 after the evacuation of the French forces. Mehmed Ali transformed Egypt into a modern state. Among other initiatives, he invited European experts to create a new infrastructure for irrigation and industry, including construction of the Mahmoudiyah Canal, which would connect Alexandria to Cairo. Completion of the 77-kilometer canal in 1820 revived the long-lost role of Alexandria as a conduit between the interior of Egypt and the Mediterranean world, and it catapulted Alexandria to prominence again as a regional maritime trading hub. In total, as many as 32 canals and 41 dams and barrages were eventually constructed during his reign, converting great areas of desert into farmland to increase agricultural production. Egypt’s modernization and the completion of the Mahmoudiyah Canal, however, also brought the demise of Rosetta as a center of maritime trade. Eventually, it was recognized that the water channels around Rosetta were too difficult to maintain because of the constant silting up of the Nile. As a port, Rosetta was at times almost impossible to enter from the Mediterranean, and it was never easy to navigate into it from the Nile. This made it difficult to travel from Cairo to Rosetta or even to Alexandria by boat. Nor was it any easier by land, because of the large number of canals, small lakes, and wetlands that surrounded the city. The introduction of railways to Egypt in 1851, however, connected Cairo to both Rosetta and Alexandria. It also connected the two cities to each other, further enhancing the movement of people between them. By the end of the nineteenth century, with the establishment of the Suez Canal as a global navigation hub, Alexandria continued to prosper, finally replacing Rosetta as Egypt’s golden gate on the Mediterranean. This is why some believe Alexandria was figuratively rebuilt in the nineteenth century with stones from the ruins of Rosetta. Meanwhile, the new city of Port Said at the northern entrance of the Suez Canal became Egypt’s silver gate. And Rosetta, it turned out, was not even able to maintain bronze status, an honor that went to its eastern sister, Damietta, located where the other important branch of the Nile meets the sea. Rosetta ultimately faded into history, as its functions, trade, and population declined. It

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River is now largely remembered only through the name of the famous stone discovered there. Although it was the French who deserve credit for discovering it, the Rosetta Stone has been on display in the British Museum since its arrival there at the end of 1802. However, based on its discovery in the city of the same name, the word “Rosetta” has now acquired iconic status, borrowed in various cultures whenever people want to name something they perceive to be innovative, explorative, or creative—in the music industry, in space exploration, or as a foreign-language learning program. When the stone was discovered by Napoleon’s men it immediately commanded attention because of its mystery and novelty. After all, the discovery of the stone was a tribute to the new France that was emerging following the revolution that had discarded the ancien régime. And the rivalry between the French and the British over possession of the Rosetta Stone and the subsequent competition to generate and control knowledge of ancient Egypt were a testament to the fervor and enthusiasm of this new era. In reality, the Rosetta Stone did not originate in or belong to Rosetta, but it was Rosetta that gave the stone its name. And, in turn, the stone immortalized the city. Bibliography Anani, Ibrahim. 1974. Rashid fi al-tanikh. Alexandria: Moasasat al-Shabab. Andrews, Carol. 1985. The British Museum Book of the Rosetta Stone. New York: P. Bedrick Books. Chandler, David G. 1966. The Campaigns of Napoleon. New York: Macmillan. Dailey-Chwalibog, Trent, and Brittany Gignac, trans. 2009. Proclamations, Speeches and Letters of Napoleon Bonaparte during His Campaign of Egypt. Chicago: DePaul University. Denon, Vivant. 1986 [1802]. Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt and the Campaigns of General Bonaparte, E. A. Kendal, trans. London: Darf. Downs, Jonathan. 2008. Discovery at Rosetta. New York: Skyhorse. El-Sisi, Abbas. 1979. Rashid: al-madiat al-baselah. Alexandria: Dar al-Qabas. Fremont-Barnes, Gregory. 2006. The Encyclopedia of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: A Political, Social, and Military History. Santa Barbara, CA: Abc-CLIO. Hassan, Nehad. 1999. Rashid fi al-a’sr al-p’thmani. Alexandria: Dar al-Thaqafa al-I’Limia. Ray, John. 2007. The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Solé, Robert, and Dominique Valbelle. 2001. The Rosetta Stone. London: Profile. Stewart, Desmond. 1968. Cairo: 5500 Years. New York: Crowell. Wallis Budge, E. A. 1929. The Rosetta Stone in the British Museum. London: Religious Tract Society.

Ch a pter 13

Khartoum and Omdurman: An Islamic State on the Nile in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan “I am the Mahdi, the Pasha shall believe me.” “How can you prove that?” “My time has not yet come.” “Soldiers will be sent against you.” “The Nile will swallow them up.” — A conversation between the Mahdi and a soldier of Gordon, the British governor of Sudan (from Ludwig 1937: 209)

T

oday, a wealthy visitor to the city of Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, has few options in terms of good accommodation. A series of sanctions enacted by the world powers has reduced the city’s number of five-star hotels to three, and the only distinguished one among them is the Corinthian. Oddly shaped like an egg, it faces north, located directly on the Blue Nile, in an upmarket district of the city (Figure 13.1). Residents of the city have come to nickname it “Qaddafi’s Egg,” because it was built by the former Libyan dictator as part of his expansionist project in Africa. Since most of the hotel’s rooms face the Blue Nile, anyone looking north from it would see the well cultivated Tuti Island and some residential neighborhoods. Looking east, one would see Old Khartoum, which once contained the palace of the much-decorated British Major General Charles George Gordon—a building that will play an important role in our story. Looking west, one would see the city of Omdurman, and, in the distance, the white dome which sits on the tomb of the Mahdi, the inspirational religious figure who led a revolt against British-backed rule in the early 1880s. Much more importantly, at closer range, one would see the meeting of the Blue and White Niles (Figure 13.2). This confluence of rivers has fascinated travelers and ex­plorers of Africa for decades. As the narrow Blue Nile pours down from the steep Ethiopian highlands, this is where its rapid waters meet the those of the wide, slow White Nile. At the intersection, Tuti Island is formed. Inundated often annually with mineral-rich silt from Ethiopia, it contains some of the most fertile land in the entire Nile basin.

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Figure 13.1 Qaddafi’s Egg: the Corinthian Hotel in Khartoum

Figure 13.2 The meeting of the Blue and White Niles



Khartoum and Omdurman

Figure 13.3 Charles Gordon

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Figure 13.4 The Mahdi, as portrayed in the nineteenth century

Khartoum’s name, some claim, was inspired by the form of the rivers that surround it, which are shaped like the trunk of an elephant (in Arabic khurtūm). It was at this oddly shaped site where the two Niles meet that the two main characters of our story met only once, and one brought an end to the life of the other during a time of havoc in the land of Sudan. It was here that Gordon established his residence as Governor General of Sudan in the 1870s (Figure 13.3.). One of his main assignments at the time was to confront Mohamad Ahmad, the so-called Mahdi, or “guided one,” who was creating instability in the region through his religious teachings (Figure 13.4). And it was here that the Mahdi defeated Gordon and established one of the first independent states to break away from the dominance of the British Empire. Although the story of Khartoum and Omdurman starts more than half a century before that battle, it is not an exaggeration to say that the story of the twin cities is also the story of these two men. Their encounters, triumphs, and defeats, which captured the imagination of Europeans in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, narrate the genesis of both cities and the development of their urban form. It is a story made further interesting because some who relayed it to us, like Winston Churchill (then a young officer in Her Majesty’s army), later become major world figures. Human settlement in the area of Khartoum and Omdurman goes back centuries. Excavations in 1945 concluded that weather conditions were

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River once much damper there. Indeed, fossils discovered along the riverbank indicate the existence of swamps, either caused by high local rainfall or high levels of Nile floods for long periods. The excavations also appear to suggest that there was a common fishing and hunting culture among the people in the area at a time when the climate was very different to the desert conditions that prevail there today. Many Sudanese believe that ancient Egyptian civilization sprang from this region. And researchers have likewise concluded that the early Predynastic people of Egypt arrived from the south. Some barbed bones found in Khartoum further suggest that early inhabitants of this area preceded Egyptian Predynastic settlement, and were possibly related to Mesolithic culture. In the Middle Ages, the area was part of the Christian kingdom of Aloa, which spread over a large territory and consisted of provinces in which there were 400 churches and many monasteries, some on the banks of the Nile and others at places inland. Aloa’s capital, Soba, was 21 kilometers south of Khartoum, on the east bank of the Blue Nile, in the area between the two rivers. Knowledge in general about the early kingdoms in the area around the junction of the two Niles remains vague. But in the middle of the twelfth century, the Arabian geographer Al-Idrisi wrote of the separation of the two Niles—namely, the Nile of Egypt, flowing from south to north, and the other, which he believed flowed from east to west, and upon the banks of which lay all the celebrated kingdoms of Africa. Over time, the Middle Eastern and East Asian slave trade politically weakened the Christian kingdoms of Sudan, and facilitated the spread of Islam, which in principle forbade slavery. In 1275, northern Nubia was conquered by the Muslims, and Soba was practically cut off from the mother church in Egypt. According to some chronicles, Christianity ceased to be the official religion of the area when Soba was destroyed by the founder of the Fung Dynasty in the sixteenth century. History continues to be unclear on the Khartoum area until the seventeenth century, when the Jesuits turned their attention to exploring the Nile eastward into the Ethiopian Highlands. The Swiss traveler Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, in his 1814 visit to Sudan, wrote: “there is no distinction made in these countries between villages and towns . . . Every inhabited place of any size is called Belad, and a small hamlet Nezle. The word Medina [city] is never applied to any place in this part of Soudan” (Kramer 2010: 1). Thus it was that Sudan entered the nineteenth century as an agrarian state without real cities. When the modern Egyptians invaded Sudan in 1821 they seem to have realized the significance of the confluence of the Niles, but they avoided settling on Tuti Island because much of it belonged to an important tribe. An English map of Africa dating from 1817 similarly does not show any settlement where the Blue Nile meets the White Nile. It was only in 1822 that Mehmed Ali, the ruler of Egypt, approved the development of



Khartoum and Omdurman

Khartoum on the south bank of the Blue Nile, and appointed Mohamed Osman Pasha as his first governor of Sudan. Although the site had previously accommodated only a few huts and was subject to frequent flooding, the governor built offices and residences there in mud brick, and the town soon acquired an administrative and commercial importance. A new governor, Khurshid Pasha, was appointed in 1826, and he continued the building activity by adding a mosque, a hospital, and a big government house. At the time, building with burned brick replaced the older method of construction with reeds and mud. Egyptians officially moved the administration of the whole region to Khartoum in 1834 and declared it a seat of rule. Modern Egyptian control of Sudan brought substantial change to the region. From the time of ancient Egypt all the way to the Mamluks, the area had been important to the Middle Eastern and East Asian slave trade. This trade, which spanned many more centuries and involved many more bodies than its Atlantic counterpart, was the precursor to that which flourished in Europe and the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And after Mehmed Ali massacred the Mamluks in Cairo, a few of them fled and established a minor state in nearby Dongola, where they attempted to continue it as a lucrative practice. But Mehmed Ali dispatched a force of 4,000 soldiers, who subsequently dispersed the Mamluks from Dongola and occupied Kordofan. The Egyptian occupation of Sudan that followed was initially disorganized, as Egyptian soldiers often lived off the land and exacted exorbitant taxes from the nearby population. They also destroyed many ancient pyramids in a search for treasure. Over time, they saddled the country with a parasitic bureaucracy, while expecting it to be both self-sufficient and a consistent source of wealth and resources for the metropole. The population of Khartoum was reported to be 15,000 around 1834. Originally, the city had no attractions, no industry, and no source of wealth. But within the span of one decade, under the rule of Khurshid Pasha, it was transformed from a military outpost to a proper town, and its population doubled. The new houses were built around inner courtyards, with separate kitchens and servant quarters. The town’s layout, however, was haphazard, with no particular plan except for the location of its port, which served as a point of embarkation for troops, and the develop­ment of large gardens. The gardens were full of date palm trees and abutted the Blue Nile, whose bank was lined with water wheels, used to irrigate them. Inland, there was an open-air bazaar, which was eventually replaced by a roofed one containing all kinds of goods. By the end of the 1840s, merchants and missionaries from Europe started to arrive in Khartoum. By then, it had developed into a full-fledged city. John Paterick, the British vice consul, left an account from that time. He mentioned that the city had a population of 60,000, and that it

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River contained the principal offices of the government and an arsenal for the construction and repair of boats. He noticed that the only structure made of stone was the Catholic mission. George Melly, a Liverpool merchant, also gave a good description of the city, in the winter of 1850. His first view of it was from a distance, where he wrote that one could observe the white government house and the minarets of the mosque. He also reported on his walk in the city’s gardens, which he described as full of vines, oranges, pomegranate, figs, and jasmine trees. In the 1860s, the slave trade was the most profitable business in Sudan. It was encouraged by the government in Cairo, as was trade in ivory and gum arabic. That policy, however, came under scrutiny when Ismail, the grandson of Mehmed Ali, came to power in Egypt in 1863. Ismail revitalized the Egyptian economy and was granted the title Khedive—sovereign prince—by the Ottoman sultan. After the Red Sea coast and its ports were ceded to Egypt, Ismail embarked on enlarging Egypt’s territory by organizing new provinces in the area of the Upper Nile. At the beginning of his reign, the Egyptian economy went through a period of rapid growth. The American Civil War had disrupted the supply of cotton from North America, and Egypt, being the second-largest producer of cotton in the world, was the main beneficiary. Ismail used the extra revenue to begin construction of the Suez Canal and embark on other modernization projects. But the money was never sufficient, and he eventually had to rely on exorbitant loans from European banks to finance his various enterprises. As slavery was being banned in much of Europe, Ismail, after some prodding from Britain, took steps to eliminate the trade in Sudan. However, this angered the merchant class, whose members were mostly from local Arab tribes. Further, the recruitment of Sudanese as forced labor in Ismail’s modernization projects created great discontent among the local population. Slavery had been a major institution in Sudan for much of the century. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children from its southern regions had been captured and sold all over the Middle East. The horrors associated with the slave trade created great European concern, and eventually an interpreter in the English court by the name of Samuel Baker was recruited by Ismail to subjugate Equatoria and end the slave trade. Baker Pasha, as he was later called, organized his campaign with the help of several regiments and a bodyguard composed of 40 snipers, which he nicknamed the “40 thieves.” However, Ismail’s in­consistent policies eventually made Baker’s mission impossible. In particular, Ismail appointed an Arab slave trader by the name of Al-Zubair to be governor of the newly created province of Bahr Al-Ghazal. Al-Zubair expanded his slave trade and accumulated considerable wealth. When he rebelled against Ismail, an Egyptian force was sent to subjugate him, but he defeated it and continued to manage his territory throughout Baker’s administration.



Khartoum and Omdurman

The story of how Charles George Gordon came to be the governor general of Sudan in 1879 is an interesting and important one. Gordon was born in Woolwich in 1833, a garrison suburb on the Thames. He came from a religious military family, and was raised on the values of both the army and the church. Although he wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father and brothers and join the Royal Artillery, he ended up being commissioned in the Royal Engineers, who were in charge of building bridges, canals, and trenches, and erecting defensive mechanisms. His first foreign posting was in China, where he distinguished himself as an inspirational figure. With the introduction of Christianity and the arrival of missionaries, newly evangelized Chinese peasants rose against the corrupt control of their cities mainly by merchants in what became known as the Taiping Rebellion. To counter the uprising, Shanghai’s merchants organized an army of mercenaries and some Taiping deserters, and asked Gordon to lead it. He skillfully outmaneuvered the Taiping forces by launching gunboats on the canal system around Shanghai, and finally succeeded in eradicating them around 1862. Gordon’s victories were recognized both in China and at home. The Manchurian Qing emperor appointed him to the rank of mandarin, or field marshal, and the empress gave him a solid gold medal. Queen Victoria made him a Companion of the Bath. Journalists reporting on his victories dubbed him “Chinese Gordon,” and made him a hero back in England. In the early 1870s, Gordon joined an international com­mission regulating free navigation on the Danube River. And in 1873, while attending a reception at the British embassy in Constantinople, he met the Egyptian prime minister, Nubar Pasha, who invited him to serve the khedive as a successor to Samuel Baker. Gordon, who was a true adventurer, was ready to return to military life. And his sense of mission was now strengthened by abolitionist missionary zeal. In the meeting between Khedive Ismail and Gordon, the khedive emphasized the need to protect the liberty of those who were being captured and sold by the slave traders. Accepting his assignment and the title of governor of Equatoria, Gordon praised the khedive, and further endeared himself to him by accepting a much lower salary than Baker. He later commented that he wanted to show the khedive and his people that “gold and silver may be powerful but not as powerful as God” (Kramer 2010: 40). The khedive was so impressed by Gordon’s stance that he is reported to have remarked, “When that man comes into the room, I feel like I am with my superior” (Kramer 2010: 40). The geographical borders of Gordon’s authority were never clearly defined. In principle they extended hundreds of kilometers south of Khartoum, all the way to Lake Victoria. To the east, the border was assumed to be the Indian Ocean. Gordon started by building a chain of forts running south toward the Great Lakes, each at a day’s journey from the one above

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River it. One of Gordon’s first problems was how to deal with the governor of Khartoum, Ismail Ayoub Pasha, who was complicit with Al-Zubair in the slave trade. Al-Zubair by now was the informal king of Sudan’s southern and western Bahr Al-Ghazal and Darfur districts. Still a grand slave trader, his continued service as governor was meant only to guarantee his subservience to Cairo. Gordon’s presence did not end the slave trade, but it did disrupt the flow of slaves down the Nile toward Egypt, diverting this flow eastward, to the port of Suakin on the Red Sea. Developments in Sudan during this period cannot be understood without reference to what was going on in Egypt. In building his grand project, the Suez Canal, Ismail borrowed extensively from British and French banks. However, when Egypt failed to pay interest on the loans, he was forced to abdicate in the face of pressure from an Anglo-French commission put in place to manage the Egyptian economy. Soon after he was succeeded, in 1877, by his son Tawfik, Gordon resigned as governor general of Sudan, and the illegal slave trade resumed. Sudan consequently also fell into disarray, and the economy disintegrated. It was in this climate that the second major figure in our story makes his appearance. Mohamad Ahmad, the son of a Dongola boat builder, was a man who combined personal charisma with religious zeal. His sermons attracted many followers, including a calculating man from Darfur by the name of Abdullahi. With the help of the latter, Mohamad Ahmad declared himself the Mahdi, the “awaited guide” in Islam who will redeem the faithful. Soon after, he called for a return to a puritan form of Islam, the banning of alcohol and tobacco, and the strict segregation of women. He then declared jihad against the Turks, the Egyptians, and the British. And in a manner reminiscent of the Prophet Mohammed in the early days of Islam, Mohamad Ahmad marched to Kordofan, where he gained many followers who called themselves the Ansar, or “the supporters.” In 1882, a year of great turmoil in Egypt that ultimately resulted in its direct occupation by the British, the Ansar, armed only with spears and swords, overwhelmed the Egyptian garrison at the southern outpost of Al-Ubayyid and seized their rifles and ammunition. Capitalizing on this success, the Mahdi then declared the establishment of an “Islamic State,” in a way not so different from that seen in the second decade of the twenty-first century with the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS). Concerned about their important garrisons in Khartoum and to the north, the British reappointed Gordon governor general of Sudan and ordered him to evacuate all foreigners, government officials, and troops from the area. However, by 1884, he realized he might not be able to extricate the garrisons, and he called for reinforcements from Egypt and Britain. London responded late, however, and sent only a small force, which arrived in January 1885 to find that Khartoum had already fallen to the Ansar. They also learned that Gordon had been killed and, to their horror,



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that his severed head had been delivered to the Mahdi by the Ansar. As the news was reported back home in England, many felt great sadness for Gordon, who was still considered a hero, “Chinese Gordon.” His killing, the subject of news reports and novels, ignited a burning desire among the British for revenge—a cause that was to last more than a decade. Queen Victoria wrote personally to Gordon’s sister, expressing grief and great regret that support for Gordon had arrived too late. Khedive Tawfik of Egypt likewise eulogized him: “In his own death, Gordon has lost nothing but has gained the glorious object he so fervently desired, the attainment of which his life was so nobly devoted” (Green 2007: 200). But the success of the Mahdi (and later of his successor, Khalifa Abdullahi) also brought the prospect of Arab revolt against the presence of British forces in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East. Having inherited Gordon’s printing press, the new rulers of the Islamic State printed hundreds of proclamations, and distributed them throughout the countryside. Thousands were massacred after Khartoum fell, and many others were enslaved by the Mahdi’s army. Several foreigners who were in the service of the khedive or who were merchants were held as hostages. And surviving women were rounded up and taken to the small village of Omdurman on the western bank of the White Nile, where they were distributed as wives and concubines for the Mahdi and his forces. The Mahdi eventually took over the best gardens of Khartoum, while his right-hand

Figure 13.5 The Mahdi’s house

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River man, Abdullahi, took over the grounds of Gordon’s palace. His army, mainly consisting of the Ansar, moved into the houses of Egyptians who had been part of Gordon’s administration. The Mahdi would later build a big house in Omdurman to accommodate his growing family. There he developed a taste for Persian rugs and dressed in fine linen and silk shirts (Figure 13.5). In the summer of 1885, typhus and smallpox broke out, and the Mahdi fell ill with a severe fever. His followers, thinking him invincible, could not believe the news. But within days, the Mahdi, recognizing that he was dying, declared Abdullahi his successor. Abdullahi, who was now called Khalifat Al-Mahdi following the tradition of the Prophet to designate his successor “caliph,” gathered the faithful outside the Mahdi’s house and asked them to submit to him as their new ruler. Abdullahi, who could not read or write, inherited an empire that extended from the borders of Upper Egypt in the north to the sources of the Nile in the south, and from the Red Sea in the east to the desert-like provinces of Kordofan and Darfur to the west. Yet, like many rulers who fear that their authority may be contested, Abdullahi soon set out to eliminate all competitors from among the circle of the Mahdi and to subjugate all tribes that might oppose his accession to power. The Islamic State (which was called the Mahdiyah by the British) now controlled much of the Sudan. It imposed strict Islamic Sharia law on its residents and claimed to represent not simply a state but a universal movement. For his part, Khalifa Abdullahi went about modifying Islam’s five principal pillars, adding his name to the call for prayers; substituting the hajj, or pilgrimage, with service in the jihad; and deciding that the paying of alms, or zakat, was the function of the state, which would collect it as a tax. Khalifa Abdullahi also created a permanent administration and appointed many men from his tribe, and from among his supporters in Kordofan, who were now also called Ansar, to key positions in it. He then appointed men from his tribe as emirs of the provinces that the Mahdi’s forces had taken over. Finally, he ordered his troops to leave Khartoum, with its damaged and disintegrating buildings, and assigned them to settle around his camp in Omdurman, giving birth to the Omdurman of today. The site of Omdurman, on the west side of the White Nile where the Blue and White Niles meet, has been inhabited since the Neolithic era. But the first mention of a town there by that name appears in the eighteenth century, in an Arabic biographical dictionary. The origin of the name—“the mother of Durman,” in Arabic—is a mystery. The name first appeared on maps in the early nineteenth century and in the travel accounts of the exporter W. G. Brown, who visited Sudan in the final years of the eighteenth century. Visitors to the area in the nineteenth century, however, continued to refer to Khartoum as a town, and to Omdurman as a village or an agricultural settlement. When General Gordon arrived



Khartoum and Omdurman

in 1884, he built a small fort in Omdurman to protect Khartoum from the west. This structure was seized by the Mahdi’s forces before they attacked Khartoum, and it later became the capital of the Mahdiyah. The decision to make Omdurman the capital of the new state was probably not made by the Mahdi himself; most of his writings indicate his larger mission was to establish an Islamic empire, which required assembling a large army and engaging in a long-running jihad. Instead, the decision was likely made by his successor, Khalifa Abdullahi, who mistrusted the interest of the Mahdi’s kinsmen in settling in Khartoum;’ he also mistrusted Khartoum’s residents and the former employees of the Turco-Egyptian regime, both of whom he needed to keep under his control. Khalifa Abdullahi saw Omdurman as a new, better site, free of disease, open to expansion, and connected to the western hinterland, where his tribal allies resided. Khalifa Abdullahi’s proclamation declaring the new capital made clear that he saw the act as a religious duty, similar to the duty in early Islam to settle the land. It was addressed to “all the people now residing in Khartoum, awlad al-balad [i.e. townspeople] and awlad al-rif [i.e. Egyptians], employees and others.” It stated: My beloved ones, upholding the religion and being concerned with that which enhances it is demanded of every Muslim, and readying one’s self for the hereafter is incumbent upon everyone. It is a sign of God’s favor and concern for you that you are present during this blessed, happy time and included among His people, so praise God and thank Him for this. This being so, you ought to be in the greatest readiness for whatever you are commanded to do on behalf of the religion. If you understand what has been said, then know O beloved ones that out of consideration for the interests of the faith and your guidance and the betterment of your religion, we have thought fit that you should move from Khartoum and come to the City of the Mahdi (peace be upon him!), dwelling among us with your children and all that belongs to you. As of today, you must all begin this move. Let no one among you delay, even one employed by the arsenal or dockyard or treasury or whatever. Out of kindness toward you, we have set the date whereby you should complete [your move] for this coming Friday [i.e. four days hence, 31 July]. After Friday, a search will be conducted for you within Khartoum. Anyone found lagging behind will certainly be punished as a deterrent [to others], since he has refused to comply with the order . . . We have ordered Ibrahim al-Burdayn to be the overseer of all who are in Khartoum. Anyone found lagging behind after Friday will be reported to ‘Abd al-Halim Musa’id, and upon his notification that person will be forcibly uprooted. If anyone interferes with the execution of this order, he will be reported to us, that we might punish both the one who delays and the one who interferes. Peace! (From Daftar al-Sadir 2/42, as quoted by Kramer 2010: 25–6)

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River After his death, the Mahdi’s family continued to occupy an important position in Khartoum and was given responsibility of managing that city. Again, as with the Prophet Mohammed’s family, the Mahdi’s descendants were called the Ashraf, the “noble ones.” However, while several locals returned to live in Khartoum after the defeat of the Anglo-Egyptian army and the killing of Gordon, it was Omdurman that started to attract all kinds of people to serve the new regime, including Arabs, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Indians, Greeks, Turks, and Syrians. By 1888, although it remained poorly organized, Omdurman had grown to over 9 kilometers in length. Like other towns on the continent, however, it lacked any formal municipal organization, and its governance depended exclusively on actions of the ruler. Khalifa Abdullahi thus had to personally intervene in this urban chaos, for example with a proclamation to reorganize the suq and regulate market activities. The two main institutions that the Mahdi’s Islamic State had established (again following the traditions of the garrison towns of early Islam) were the Bayt al-Mal, or treasury, and the Mahakim, or Islamic courts. Both, however, had additional functions. The Bayt al-Mal was responsible not only for collecting revenues and paying expenses but also for administering landownership, foreign trade, agriculture, and the slave trade. Meanwhile, the qadis, or judges, of the Mahakim administered Sharia law according to an intricate judicial hierarchy. Architecturally, the city was divided into five major districts. The urban core included Khalifa Abdullahi’s compound, the mosque, and the tomb. The other districts were the nearby suq, the Bayt al-Mal (with its support facilities), the tribal residential quarters to the south and east (which housed the main tribes that supported Khalifa Abdullahi), and the residential quarters to the north and west (which often housed new immigrants) (Figure 13.6). Early on, Khalifa Abdullahi ordered the construction of a grand tomb for the Mahdi, and he inaugurated it with great fanfare, giving the city its first symbolic landmark. In another sign of symbolic significance, Khalifa Abdullahi added a second floor to his house, making it the only one in the city high enough to monitor the activities of the nearby mosque at the center of town. His house included two brass water taps and carpets in several rooms. Khalifa Abdullahi also embarked on what he viewed as his most important project, the building of a stone wall around the administrative quarter of the city, which included his house and the Mahdi’s tomb. The wall extended along the Nile, but the western side was never finished except for some mud-brick enclosures that housed the troops who managed Khalifa Abdullahi’s security. But the wall did isolate Khalifa Abdullahi from his people. Indeed, he seldom ventured beyond it, even though he continued to issue declarations inviting tribes from different parts of Sudan to move to Omdurman to join his Islamic State, as it was



Khartoum and Omdurman

Figure 13.6 Plan of Khartoum and Omdurman during the time of Gordon and the Mahdi

their duty to participate in the jihad. In doing so, Khalifa Abdullahi was again trying to follow in the footsteps of the Prophet, who had called on the faithful to engage in hijrah, or migration, to help build the virtuous Islamic city in Medina. However, many of those who moved to join Khalifa Abdullahi were from vulnerable groups who felt it necessary to seek the protection of the new state. The literate ones were assigned as teachers in the schools of Omdurman, while the women were often given as second wives to the men of the Ansar.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River The spiritual center of the new city was the tomb of the Mahdi, which by now was called the Qubba, in reference to its large whitewashed dome. Located next to the mosque, it was the most visible feature of the city. In the tradition of Ziyara, it also became an important pilgrimage site, as the Mahdi gained the status of a saint-like figure. It is difficult to estimate the exact population of Omdurman during the final years of Khalifa Abdullahi’s reign; reports of Europeans who lived there or passed through estimated it to be around 150,000, although some estimates were as high as 500,000. The lower estimate would still make the city one of the largest in all of East and Central Africa at that time. Khalifa Abdullahi was committed to continuing the jihad to spread Islam throughout the world, to the point that he even rejected an alliance from the king of Ethiopia to act against the Europeans who had infiltrated major parts of Africa. Instead, Khalifa Abdullahi decided to invade Christian Ethiopia, and in 1887, his army, led by the Ansar, captured its most important city, Gondar. Khalifa Abdullahi’s men also attempted to invade Equatoria to the south and Upper Egypt to the north, but they were repelled by Belgian and Anglo-Egyptian troops, respectively. His campaign of looting, massacres, and population transfers ultimately destroyed Sudan’s economy. And a series of Nile floods finally wiped out much of the country’s agriculture, and resulted in a massive famine that reduced the Islamic State’s population to about 4 million people, possibly a little more than half what it had once been. While it is easy to view Khalifa Abdullahi as a brutal dictator, as some early historians did, both his personality and his role were much more complex. As an illiterate man who had risen to great power, he is now viewed by historians partly as a victim of the circumstances of his time. He was initially a very accessible ruler to all his people; but the tribal nature of Sudanese society forced him to depend on his tribe and a set of advisors, many of whom worked for their own interests rather than those of the Islamic State. In 1896, an Anglo-Egyptian army entered Dongola under directions from Lord Cromer, the British high commissioner in Egypt. The leader of this army was Herbert Kitchener, who would later command British forces in World War I. Britain feared that instability in Sudan would make it vulnerable to takeover by one of the other colonial powers. In an interesting side story, a young officer by the name of Winston Churchill participated in the Sudan campaign, and the experience he gained there would sharpen his military tactics and help build his reputation for what would later be a major political career. In September of the same year, Kitchener reached the plain to the west of Omdurman and attacked Khalifa Abdullahi’s army of 50,000 poorly equipped soldiers. More than a fifth of Khalifa Abdullahi’s army died in the battle against the well equipped Anglo-Egyptian army, which lost fewer than 50 men.



Khartoum and Omdurman

Figure 13.7 The killing of Khalifa Abdullahi

­ ousands of soldiers from both armies were also wounded, but many Th of those from Khalifa Abdullahi’s army were left to die. In the space of a few hours, Khalifa Abdullahi’s world and his empire came to an end. None of the 10 forts he had built around his territory could save him. Yet, instead of falling back on Omdurman to defend it, he decided to ask his family and his wives to leave the city and join him in Kordofan, to which he escaped. The Anglo-Egyptian army followed in pursuit and ultimately captured and killed him two years later (Figure 13.7). In the interim, Kitchener oversaw the partial rebuilding of Khartoum after the devastation it had suffered when it was attacked by the Mahdi’s army in 1885. Kitchener laid out the city center in the crossed pattern of a Union Jack. And its main buildings, including the Palace, Governor’s House, Gordon Memorial College, Grand Hotel, bank, and administrative offices, adopted different styles borrowed from other colonies. Perhaps the most intact and picturesque example of that period was the Grand Hotel, which survived intact until the end of the twentieth century. The long, low structure, with broad terraces, ran along the Nile where the Blue and White branches joined. Another event of symbolic importance followed the Anglo-Egyptian victory over the Mahdi state. The egg-shaped dome of the Mahdi’s tomb in Omdurman had collapsed when it had been shelled by the British, and the rubble had fallen on top of his grave (Figure 13.8). Soon after, all of

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Figure 13.8 The Mahdi’s tomb after shelling by the British

Figure 13.9 The current tomb of the Mahdi after restoration

its furnishings and decorations were looted, possibly by some of the same people who had venerated it. Kitchener, who recognized the symbolic significance of the structure as a potential rallying point for future revolt, decided to raze it to the ground. Although it was not a structure of any architectural significance, it was nevertheless an important monument for the many Sudanese tribes who believed in the Mahdi, and whose men had died in the jihad. To fully avenge Gordon and in memory of his slaughter, Kitchener further ordered that the Mahdi’s skull be sent to England, and his body disposed of in the Nile. In his memoirs, the young Winston Churchill denounced the idea as wicked, and he was not the only one. Indeed, Queen Victoria chastised Kitchener for the idea, and the skull was never sent to London—although the body was discarded in the Nile. When he heard of the queen’s displeasure, Kitchener wrote to Cromer: “I am very sorry that Her Majesty should consider that the Mahdi’s remains were unjustifiably treated . . . I will have the skull buried at the queen’s desire” (Green 2007: 221). But Kitchener was obsessed with Gordon’s memory and the bitter feelings his killing had left in the minds of the people of the empire. With an army mainly made of Egyptian soldiers and English officers, he ordered a celebratory victory parade and memorial service to be staged in honor of the fallen general, outside the former palace where he had been murdered. Documentation of that parade was equally important



Khartoum and Omdurman

to reassure Britons back home that Gordon had been fully avenged and that the power of the empire had been fully restored. On the same day, and almost on the same spot where Gordon had died, Kitchener had two flagpoles erected; he then raised the Union Jack and the flag of the khedive of Egypt, supposedly affirming the Anglo-Egyptian alliance. In 1899, the Anglo-Egyptian agreement restored Egyptian control over Sudan. The agreement stipulated that the khedive should appoint a governor general at the recommendation of Britain. And for the next half century, all of Sudan was effectively placed under the rule of Her Majesty’s government. Although the skull of the Mahdi was ultimately buried at a cemetery in Wadi Halfa, north of Khartoum, it was later moved back to the site of a reconstructed tomb of the Mahdi, at its original Omdurman location (Figure 13.9). Today, seen at a distance from the Nile, it stands with its egg-like dome as one of the major landmarks on the western side of the twin cities of Khartoum–Omdurman—just as the Corinthian Hotel, or Qaddafi’s Egg, stands on its eastern side. Both structures today bear witness to a complex urban history.

Bibliography Arkell, A. J. 1949. Early Khartoum: An Account of the Excavation of an Early Occupation Site. London: published for the Sudan government by Oxford University Press. Collins, Robert O. 1971. “The Way South.” In Land Beyond the Rivers: The Southern Sudan, 1898–1918. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Featherstone, Donald F. 2005. Omdurman 1898: Kitchener’s Victory in the Sudan. Westport, CT: Praeger. Green, Dominic. 2007. Three Empires on the Nile: The Victorian Jihad, 1869–1899. New York: Free Press. Hill, R. L. 1959. Egypt in the Sudan, 1820–1881. London: Oxford University Press. Holt, P. M., and M. W. Daly. 2000. A History of the Sudan: From the Coming of Islam to the Present Day. Harlow: Pearson. Johnston, H. 1903. The Nile Quest: A Record of the Exploration of the Nile and Its Basin. New York: F. A. Stokes. Kramer, Robert S. 2010. Holy City on the Nile: Omdurman during the Mahdiyya, 1885–1898. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener. Ludwig, Emil. 1937. The Nile. New York: Viking Press. Murray, H. 1817. Historical Account of Discoveries and Travels in Africa, by the Late John Leyden, M.D. Edinburgh: Archibald Constable & Co. Theobald, A. B. 1951. The Mahdiya. London: Longman. Walkley, C. E. J. 1935. “The Story of the Khartoum.” Sudan Notes and Records, 18 (2).

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Ch a pter 14

A Pyramid for the Living: The Nile at Aswan This is the High Dam that is the product of the will of our people. It is the dam that witnessed our struggles and deserves it, not because of its importance to our livelihood but because it is a symbol of our determination to build our independent Arab nation. — Gamal Abdel Nasser, January 9, 1960

T

o the west of the High Dam south of Aswan stands an uncannily tall structure which resembles a lotus flower blossoming toward the sky. Five sand-colored petals, 72 meters high, face one another, connected by a ring at their tops (Figure 14.1). The walls of the petals are decorated with traditional geometric motifs and engraved with texts in Arabic and Russian. An elevator inside the structure leads to an observation platform on the ring at the top, which offers a commanding view of the neighboring area. From here, a visitor can make out an immense reservoir shining under a scorching sun to one side and a gigantic dam with numerous power stations and electric lines to the other. This stone lotus flower, whose faded color matches the relaxed atmosphere of the desert city, is in fact a monument erected to commemorate Soviet–Egyptian friendship following the completion in 1971 of the High Dam, the largest rock-fill dam in the world. As a structure, therefore, it also symbolizes one of the most important moments in the environmental, cultural, and political history of the Nile. The High Dam (Sadd el-Ali in Arabic) sits around 700 kilometers south of Cairo and approximately 10 kilometers upriver from the city of Aswan. One of the world’s largest dams, it is 3,600 meters long, 111 meters high, and more than 1,000 meters wide at its base. Behind it, a reservoir—differently named Lake Nasser in Egypt and Lake Nubia in the Sudan—spreads over an area of more than 5,000 square kilometers. The title “High” does not provide an accurate representation of the dam’s true distinction, however. Rather than height, the nomenclature signifies its status as a political and technological symbol of the time in which it was conceived and built (Figure 14.2), and a way to differentiate it from another dam built at Aswan seven decades earlier (Figure 14.3). About 6 kilometers downstream from the High Dam, this other structure is the

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Figure 14.1 Monument to Russian–Egyptian friendship near the Aswan High Dam

massive masonry buttress known as the Aswan Dam. Before the High Dam was built, the old dam—now referred to as the Low Dam—had itself held the distinction of being the largest masonry dam in the world. Numerous differences exist between the two dams— one of which is that the Low Dam is a gravity dam and the High Dam is a rock-fill embankment dam. But they occupy a similar symbolic position in the region’s environmental history at both the national and the global levels. The temporal and material dimensions of the two engineering projects



A Pyramid for the Living

Figure 14.2 Nasser at the Aswan High Dam site during the diversion of the course of the Nile in May 1964

mark them both as battles against nature. But at the same time they were modern interventions that ultimately altered the distribution and management of the mighty river’s water and redefined the relationship between humans and nature in the entire Nile valley. Just north of the two dams and on the east bank of the Nile lies the city of Aswan. Its climate is extremely dry, making it one of the least humid cities in the world. At Aswan, the Nile encounters hard igneous rock on

Figure 14.3 The Old Aswan Low Dam

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Figure 14.4 The island of Elephantine

its journey northward before flowing over softer sandstone and limestone further downstream. The river’s passage from one substrate to another thus created rapids (or cataracts) at this point, producing a spectacular display of water and noise. For this reason, the ancient Egyptians initially thought the source of the Nile was located in the vicinity of Aswan. It was below the cataract that its flood produced its annual life-giving fecundity and bounty. If Egypt was given life by the Nile, the cataract at Aswan was where Egypt began. In ancient Egypt, the settlement at the site of present-day Aswan was less important than that on the island of Elephantine nearby (Figure 14.4). Elephantine was called abu or yebu, which meant “elephant” in ancient Egyptian. The name may have originated from the elephant-like granite boulders which surround the island, but another explanation may relate to one of the primary items—ivory (elephas in Greek)—that was traded there. Due to its strategic location in the region of the First Cataract, Ele­ phantine gained further prominence, both politically and economically, by the late Old Kingdom. And additional public buildings and houses were built there through the Middle Kingdom. Some of their remains can still be found on the island. However, one of the largest surviving structures is the temple of Khnum, which was built during the New Kingdom. One of the earliest Nilometers may also be found on Elephantine.



A Pyramid for the Living

As the hard stone of which it is made also creates the First Cataract of the Nile, and formed a natural southern border for ancient Egypt, Elephantine had a long career as a frontier town where different peoples mingled. Playing a prominent role in trade with Nubia and Central Africa, a small marketplace developed there with the name Swenett in ancient Egyptian. The name may have had its origin either with a namesake Egyptian goddess or with the Egyptian word sono (“trade” or “market”). The city on the island was called Syene during the Ptolemaic period, a name that was subsequently transformed to Aswan with the Arab conquest of Egypt. Today, however, the once prosperous domain of Elephantine is considered a part of Aswan, which is a still an expanding city—and it was largely through the building of the old dam that Aswan’s economic fortunes were reversed. That event came at a time when the Anglo-Egyptian government was seeking to harness the river’s flow to boost economic growth, a period that would be remembered as “an era of engineering” (Mitchell 2002: 21). After Egypt went bankrupt in 1875, the European countries representing its debtor banks imposed strict regulations on its government by forming the Commission of the Public Debt (the Caisse de la Dette Publique). Britain was among the countries which held a controlling share in Egypt’s debt. And when a rebellion against the khedive of Egypt broke out in 1882, Britain, which was also the largest shareholder in the Suez Canal, intervened militarily to save him. The Anglo-Egyptian govern­ment established after Britain’s military occupation considered its first and foremost economic goal to be to strengthen Egypt’s export-oriented cotton industry. To achieve this, it was deemed necessary to gain better control over the water of the Nile. An Egyptian Irrigation Department was therefore established to initiate several projects and repair the Nile delta barrage. This effort greatly boosted revenue from Egypt’s cotton industry and eventually allowed British engineers to lay claim to other Egyptian hydrological achievements. The Irrigation Department largely employed British engineers, many of whom had previously worked on projects in India. This new generation of formally trained technocrats shared the opinion that the reliability of the Nile’s water supply could be greatly improved—and, by extension, additional revenue generated—through construction of a large-scale project: a dam and reservoir system. In order to harness the full productive potential of the Nile, which had long been a concern for the ruling class, the engineers argued, perennial irrigation was the best method, and constructing a dam was the most cost-effective and safest way to achieve this goal. The delta, where the country’s largest expanse of flood-irrigated lands was located, was not the best location for the project: the region already had a large population and lacked space to accommodate a new reservoir. Upper Egypt, by contrast, provided a more suitable location,

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River because it was fertile, sparsely inhabited (with few cities), and “politically underrepresented” (Cookson-Hills 2013b: 66). It was thus appropriate geologically, geographically, and politically, because a massive engineering project there would cause less disruption. The construction of the first dam at Aswan began with the Duke of Connaught laying the foundation stone on February 12, 1899. Labor at the construction site was divided along national lines: British engineers designed the dam, primarily on a plan devised by Sir William Willcocks; Italians were hired as skilled stonemasons; and Egyptians were employed as laborers, conducting back-breaking excavation under the blazing sun. As a gravity dam, which required a strong foundation at its base, the old dam was a project that was challenging in both financial and technical terms. As the engineers soon discovered, the bedrock at Aswan was not as strong as they had expected. In order to create a solid foundation, the builders had to dig deep trenches in several of the river’s channels. And whenever soft rock was discovered, including diorite and syenite, it had to be replaced with masonry, which required the costly import of materials and equipment from Britain. Nevertheless, the old dam was completed at the end of June 1902, and was hailed as an engineering masterpiece, reflecting British pride and imperial power. In the service of the Anglo-Egyptian government, the dam made it possible to store a year-round supply of water, allowed an increase in the acreage of arable land downstream, and facilitated navigation through the cataract. However, it was not without unexpected consequences. Notwithstanding its economic benefits, introduction of a dam-based agricultural system had a number of unpleasant environmental and social repercussions. Villages upstream were submerged, for which the government had to expend a great deal of money in compensation. And the soil in the Nile valley below the dam became prone to desertification without regular inundation by silt-filled floodwaters. Without replenishing silt, farmers had to turn to chemical fertilizers, which added uncalculated expense to agricultural practices in the Nile valley and delta. From its conception, the old dam was a colonial project intended to display the prowess of British Empire. Yet despite its success at controlling the water of the Nile and mastering nature, it soon proved inadequate in terms of storage capacity. Nor was it big enough to fully control the river’s floods. Two additional engineering initiatives were thus needed in the early twentieth century to increase its height; but their effect likewise fell short of expectations. It was in the wake of these difficulties that the idea of building a bigger dam was born. This would eventually take the shape of the High Dam, built decades later under the direction of a new Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. With a different yet parallel set of environmental impacts, it



A Pyramid for the Living

was the product of thousands of workers, technicians, and engineers, from both Russia and Egypt, whose labors were entangled with the ideological conflicts of international politics and the Cold War. Born in Bani Mor, a small village in Upper Egypt, to a family of Arab tribal origin, Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70) moved to Alexandria at an early age and then to Cairo upon the death of his mother. Nasser came of age in an era when calls for national independence were peaking, and he chose to pursue a military career in the early 1940s, believing only the army could bring lasting change to Egypt. After a military coup by a group that called itself the “Free Officers” in July 1952, Nasser, a central figure in the movement, consolidated his position by removing his political rivals from office. And after he became the official president of Egypt in 1956, his role in Egyptian and world history grew quickly. A well read intellectual with despotic propensities, Nasser knew how to connect to common Egyptians, particularly peasants and factory workers. Unlike other foreign-educated leaders, Nasser was a charismatic orator who kept his speeches compellingly simple, winning over the hearts and minds of the masses. Nasser’s involvement in the Non-Aligned Movement enabled him to play an important role on the global political stage, as that movement attempted to create common ground for non-Western nations to stand apart from both emerging superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union. The organization was created in April 1955 when President Sukarno of Indonesia, the leader of another newly independent state, organized a conference of similar nations in Bandung. Seeing an opportunity in this movement to achieve greater sovereignty, Nasser sought to create important alliances for Egypt with such large nonaligned nations as China and India. Nasser’s will to exert the political influence of Egypt was further manifest through efforts to accelerate industrial develop­ ment. Egypt’s industrial base at the time was in dire need of capital and resources, especially because its infrastructure had remained largely underdeveloped under British rule. Given that Egypt had no large, centralized supply of electric power, the ultimate wellspring of industrial development, the vast hydroelectric ­potential of the Nile immediately stood out. For Nasser’s new govern­ ment, the development of a High Dam at Aswan could address a number of political-economic needs: not only might it be used to boost agricultural production and benefit industrialization, but it could provide a reliable supply of electricity to Egypt’s many villages. Yet the decision to construct it was also an attempt to solidify Nasser’s power by “building, in effect, a Great Pyramid” (Collins 2002: 177). The decision to construct the High Dam was thus made as early as September 1952—after which Dr. Hassan Zaki, who would become director of the High Dam Authority, went to Bonn, Germany, to commission a feasibility study.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River It was to the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—or the World Bank, as is commonly known today—that Nasser first turned in November 1954 to secure funding for the project. But Egypt, which had lost a war with Israel in 1948, was simultaneously attempting to diversify its sources of weaponry through imports from Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. This angered Britain and the United States, which started to feel suspicious of Nasser. Financial support for the dam had originally been promised by the World Bank, the United States, and the United Kingdom. However, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden and U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, concerned with the increasing Soviet influence in the region, soon began to press Nasser by placing stringent conditions on the agreement for international funding. And Nasser’s opposition to the Baghdad Pact, an alliance of Western nations against the Soviet Union, also played a part in leading the United States to withdraw its financial support for the project in July 1956. Frustrated by the United States’ retraction of promised funds and Britain’s decision to follow suit, Nasser took the bold step on July 26, 1956, of announcing the nationalization of the Suez Canal, then primarily owned by British and French interests. The decision came only a week after Dulles’s decision to withdraw funding for the dam project. Without international support, Nasser envisioned that toll revenues from the canal, which had been built on Egyptian soil nine decades earlier, would provide an alternate source of funding to build the High Dam at Aswan. The British, however, under the premiership of Eden, soon forged an alliance with France and Israel to regain control of the canal and remove Nasser from power. In an action later known as the Tripartite Aggression, or the Suez Crisis, British and French military units occupied the canal zone, while Israel occupied the Sinai. But an international outpouring of criticism against the occupation ensued and brought the short-lived action to an end. The consequences, however, were enormous, particularly in the way they strengthened Nasser’s power. His government subsequently confiscated all property from British and French citizens in Egypt, and most were forced to leave the country immediately. Nasser famously declared that Eden would be the “last prime minister of Great Britain”—that thereafter the country would be referred to merely as “Britain.” This bold move should have secured the plan for the High Dam, but revenues from the canal did not prove sufficient, and Egypt lacked the expertise to build the project on its own. With few options, Nasser turned to the Soviet Union for financial and technical support, and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev offered a substantial loan in October 1958. In contrast to the initial plans for the High Dam, however, which had involved many parties in terms of finance, design, and construction, the Soviet Union, eager to expand its influence in Egypt, demanded that the project become a solely Soviet-supported effort.



A Pyramid for the Living

Following this turn of events, the Hydrological Research Institute in Moscow (Gidroproekt, or “Hydroproject”), an agency of the Soviet Ministry of Electric Power Station Construction, took on the mission of building the dam based on the existing German design. Soviet experts arrived in Egypt during the spring of 1959, and in September 1959 the Egyptian Minister of Public Works Musa Arafa visited the Soviet Union along with Egyptian hydraulic specialists, including Hassan Zaki. There, the Egyptian delegation was taken on a tour of hydroelectric construction sites, among which was the spectacular Kuibyshev Dam on the Dnepr River at Kremenchung. The visit was orchestrated to impress the delegation with the supposedly superior Soviet production culture, manager–worker relations, work discipline, and technological advancement. While giving the Egyptians a tour of the Kuibyshev Dam, the Soviet experts did not fail to make references to the Hoover Dam in the United States and proclaim that the Soviet dam was superior. The Egyptian delegation was told that the Kuibyshev Dam was the most powerful electricity-generating facility in the world. Its capacity to boost regional economic development, leading to the construction of new factories, technical institutes, and residential settlements, made a further impression on the visiting Egyptians. The chief engineer of Hydroproject, Nikolai Malyshev, who had played a major role in building the Kuibyshev Dam, and Ivan Vassilievich Komzin, the production manager at the Kuibyshev Dam, took charge of managing construction at Aswan. Construction work officially began on January 9, 1960, as Nasser, in the presence of Khrushchev, hailed the project as one that would produce the world’s largest dam. While the Soviets sought to use the High Dam as a way to show off their technological superiority, the project appeared, to Egyptians, as a metaphor for nation-building. And to impress ordinary Egyptians with its significance, the commencement of construction was turned into a theatrical spectacle. As Nasser pushed a button and declared that the project had begun, “a flash and a roar followed, as ten tons of dynamite exploded from the Nile’s granite bank” (Bishop 1997: 166). The High Dam was by nature an international project that was qualitatively different from the domestic construction of dams in the Soviet Union. The relationship between workers and managers in Egypt, as well as climatic and material conditions at Aswan, in particular, were very different. Indeed, factories had to develop “tropical” or “Aswan” variants of Soviet production models. From its inception, the High Dam was a massive-scale engineering project which involved great numbers of people, without regard to gender. Thus, about 40 female engineers and technicians were members of the dam’s design team in Moscow at its early stages. However, only male specialists were sent to Aswan during

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later stages. Among the Soviet engineers at Aswan was Alexander Alexandrov, who was put in charge of construction in 1962. Before coming to Aswan, Alexandrov had been chief engineer on the mega-hydroelectric project known as the Volga Hydroelectric Station at Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad). The Soviets came to Aswan either as bachelors or with their families. And by the time construction began in earnest in the early 1960s, the city of Aswan had grown into a booming town with a population of 200,000. This included a Russian enclave called Sahara City, built exclusively to house Soviet engineers and technicians working at the High Dam (Figure 14.5). About 5,000 Soviet nationals lived there in air-conditioned, three-story, stucco apartment buildings Figure 14.5 Sahara City, a residential enclave whose walls were decorated with huge built for Soviet engineers and their families portraits of Lenin. In Sahara City, one journalist observed at the time, the Soviets worked “their strange alchemies on shish kebab to make it stroganoff” (Life 1964). Sahara City, however, was a self-contained community. In addition to dining halls catering to bachelors, there was a hospital for Soviet nationals, though expectant mothers had to go back to Moscow, since it contained no maternity ward. Contrary to the term “friendship” attached to its creation, Russians and Egyptians actually did not mix too well during work on the dam. The former usually spent their leisure time within Sahara City, and Egyptians rarely visited the Soviet enclave; even the swimming pool near the Nile, which was meant to be open to the Egyptian public, came to accept Russians only. Nonetheless, the Soviet influence reached far beyond the confines of Sahara City and Aswan, transforming Cairo’s famous foreign quarter, Zamalek, into a “Russian ghetto” (Life 1968). Things were little different at the construction site, where the labor was divided along national lines. The Soviets provided technological and financial aid and oversight, while the Egyptians were responsible for providing contractors and laborers, and for taking care of all local arrangements for living quarters, schools, hospitals, and fiscal and financial affairs. In 1962, after the Soviet specialists requested more skilled labor at the construction site, an onsite training center was established to educate and train workers. Many residents of Upper Egypt, and particularly Aswan



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(which had until then been a small, sleepy town), became involved in small businesses to support the new population of workers. It would not be an exaggeration to say that it was the High Dam that created the modern city of Aswan. In 1963 and 1964 the Egyptian government further instituted a referral system, in order to have a secure labor force, through which students of technical schools spent their last year at the construction site or found employment there upon graduation. Some students were offered scholarships to study in the Soviet Union, based on their performance at the construction site. In all these respects, the construction of the dam was equated with the building of a powerful and sovereign nation, which had significance at both a personal and a collective level. The fate of the dam was thus tied not merely to the nation’s future, but also to the workers’ own. In addition to receiving a good income—twice the pay of an average worker and three times the pay of a farmer—workers were offered accommodation and subsidized health services. After studying long-term cycles in the level of the Nile flood, the ideal opportunity for diverting the river to perform in-stream construction was determined to be in the spring of 1964. This meant that all the preparatory work necessary to excavate rock and soil and build concrete and steel structures for a diversion channel needed to be done before then. However, long transport distances between the continents, extreme summer temperatures, and the hardness of the local granite made it difficult to use standard Soviet equipment, which was designed for cold climates. Furthermore, the lack of a common language and experience between the Egyptian and Soviet experts caused delays. Faced with a pressing need to meet the deadline in 1964, and in the face of great reluctance from Soviet engineers, the Egyptian government asked Arab Contractors, a major Egyptian construction company, to assist with the project. The company, a semi-public corporation that had built mega-projects in Saudi Arabia and Libya, managed to bring in European equipment that worked well in hot regions. As a result, the diversion of the Nile took place successfully on May 14, 1964, marking one of the most significant landmarks in the building of the dam, and in the environmental history of the river itself. As a novel form of technological modernization, when it was officially opened in 1971, the High Dam finally provided human control of the great, intractable river. Because they are so labor-intensive, however, such massive infrastructure projects become imbued with a plethora of public sentiments. The High Dam thus came to be seen as a major achievement of Nasser’s regime, an important source of pride for the workers who participated in it, and a significant mark of prestige of the Egyptian people. It was also the greatest nation-building project of the young and recently declared United Arab Republic, a union between Egypt and Syria that lasted three years under Nasser. Silenced from the official, glorious narrative

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River of the dam, however, were the deaths and hardships at the construction site—from electrocutions to explosions to fatal falls. Such human costs are rarely included in official narratives of the dam. However, as Nasser famously put it, the High Dam was primarily “a pyramid for the living.” Ironically, Nasser did not get to witness the dam’s inauguration. He died in September 1970, a year shy of its completion. Nonetheless, his name will always be remembered with the High Dam, thanks to its namesake reservoir—Lake Nasser (Figure 14.6). Not only did the dam

Figure 14.6 Locations of the old Aswan dam and the Aswan High Dam



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contribute to the industrialization of Egypt and provide electricity for its villages, but it placed the annual Nile flood, which had long been of grave concern for rulers of Egypt, under human control. Yet, as with the construction of pyramids and temples in ancient Egypt, the High Dam required monumental human effort and a vast expenditure of nonhuman resources. The High Dam was crafted out of the Cold War politics of the mid-twentieth century. After the death of Nasser, his successor, Anwar Sadat, tilted more toward the United States while preparing for war against Israel to regain the Sinai Peninsula, which had been occupied since 1967. Sadat eventually decided to reformulate Egypt’s foreign policy toward the Soviet Union and expelled 17,000 Soviet residents from the country in 1972. Shortly thereafter, diplomatic relations between Egypt and the Soviet Union were abrogated. But it was not until 1981 that the last Russian technicians left Aswan. After the Russians departed, Egyptian families moved into the three-story houses in the settlement once called Sahara City. Its conflicted history and legacy notwithstanding, the High Dam reflected a national imperative to secure electricity for industry and water for agriculture. But at the same time, it had grave social and environmental repercussions. The dam made a great contribution to the increase in agricultural productivity, yet it increased rates of water evaporation and salinity, degraded the fertility of the Nile delta, and initially brought a sharp decline in the fishing industry. The dam’s large reservoir also threatened to submerge a host of ancient Egyptian monuments. Eventually, many, like the temple of Abu Simbel, were dismantled piece by piece and relocated with UNESCO’s assistance to nearby elevated sites in an effort as grand and important as the building of the High Dam itself. Lake Nasser brought a degree of climatic change to the region as well, causing rain to be more frequent, while creating an incubator for waterborne diseases. Furthermore, Lake Nasser submerged a large portion of lower Nubia. Wadi Halfa in the Sudan was among the towns flooded by Lake Nasser after the construction of the High Dam. Eventually, hundreds of thousands of Nubians were displaced from their homes and forced to resettle in faraway regions. Aswan is now one of the major cities of Egypt, welcoming a large number of tourists, who come to enjoy the natural beauty and monumental grandeur of the First Cataract region. What used to be a predominantly desert town is now filled with suburban houses, multi-story apartment buildings, and five-star hotels. With its own international airport, universities, and industrial complexes, it is today a prosperous city of about 290,000 people. Since the construction of the High Dam enabled perennial irrigation and increased arable farmland, Aswan and its vicinity also became a fertile new site for agricultural production, particularly for

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River sugarcane, lentils, corn, and wheat. The dam also made the city into an industrial center for agricultural products. Indeed, it was the High Dam that resulted in the massive urbanization of the Aswan region. The River Nile has six cataracts that impede the flow of its water from Khartoum to Aswan. They are shallow stretches of boulders that break up the river’s flow and that create small waterfalls or stretches of white-water rapids. Five of the cataracts are located in Sudan, but the northern-most one, referred to as the First Cataract since it is the first that one encounters as one goes up the Nile, is in Egypt at Aswan. After the building of the old dam, the portion of the cataract to its north became so tame that the river’s flow now cascades only gently around its boulders as it enters Egypt. Because of Aswan’s perfect weather and blue sky, the flow of the Nile over and around these deep black rocks creates one of the most scenic spots anywhere on the river. It was on the eastern bank of the Nile facing the remains of the cataract here that the Cataract Hotel was built and opened to great fanfare in 1899. The hotel was initially designed as a sanatorium for wealthy Westerners suffering from tuberculosis or attempting to recover from other ailments caused by the cold, damp, and unhealthy air of industrial cities in Europe and America. And it housed many royals, dignitaries, politicians, and writers at the beginning of the century. Among them were the czar of Russia, Sir Winston Churchill, and the novelist Agatha Christie, who, inspired by the hotel’s atmosphere, wrote the novel Death on the Nile as her husband worked on an archaeological dig nearby. The hotel still stands on the east bank of the Nile, giving the city a sense of old-world charm that distinguishes it from the bustle of urban life in Cairo (Figure 14.7). Among the unique landscapes that Aswan offers is the age-old heritage of Nubia. The Nubian population is now

Figure 14.7 The Cataract Hotel on the Nile



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growing, thanks in part to the tourism industry at Aswan. While it was undoubtedly the construction of the High Dam that eternally changed the fate of the city by displacing hundreds of thousands of Nubians, it is paradoxically modern-day Aswan that many Nubians today call home. Bibliography AlSayyad, Nezar. 2011. Cairo: Histories of a City. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Bagnall, Roger S., and Dominic Rathbone. 2004. Egypt from Alexander to the Early Christians: An Archaeological and Historical guide. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum. Bishop, Elizabeth Anona. 1997. “Talking Shop: Egyptian Engineers and Soviet Specialists at the Aswan High Dam.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago. Bishop, Elizabeth Anona. 2013. “Control Room: Visible and Concealed Spaces of the Aswan High Dam.” In Panayiota Pyla, ed., Landscapes of Development: Modernization and the Physical Environment in the Eastern Mediterranean. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design. Brewer, Douglas J., and Emily Teeter. 2007. Egypt and the Egyptians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins, Robert O. 2002. The Nile. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cookson-Hills, Claire. 2013a. “Engineering the Nile: Irrigation and the British Empire in Egypt, 1882–1914.” Ph.D. dissertation, Queen’s University. Cookson-Hills, Claire. 2013b. “The Aswan Dam and Egyptian Water Control Policy, 1882–1902.” Radical History Review, 116, pp. 59–85. Fahim, Hussein M. 1981. Dams, People, and Development: The Aswan High Dam Case. New York: Pergamon Press. Lamb, David. 1988. The Arabs: Journeys beyond the Mirage. New York: Vintage Books. Meital, Yoram. 2000. “The Aswan High Dam and Revolutionary Symbolism in Egypt.” In Hagai Erlikh and Israel Gershoni, eds., The Nile: Histories, Cultures, Myths, Boulder,CO: Lynne Rienner, pp. 219–26. Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mossallam, Alia. 2014. “‘We Are the Ones Who Made This Dam “High”!’ A Builder’s History of the Aswan High Dam.” Water History, 6 (4), pp. 297–314. Parkin, David. 2004 [1969]. Neighbours and Nationals in an African City Ward. London: Routledge. Scudder, Thayer. 2016. Aswan High Dam Resettlement of Egyptian Nubians. Singapore: Springer. Snape, Steven R. 2014. The Complete Cities of Ancient Egypt. London: Thames & Hudson. Taha, Fadwa. 2010. “The History of the Nile Waters in the Sudan.” In Terje Tvedt, ed., The River Nile in the Post-Colonial Age: Conflict and Cooperation among the Nile Basin Countries. London: I. B. Tauris, pp. 179–216.

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Epilogue

On the Possible Death of the Nile and the Life of its Cities The enslaving of the old Nile by barrages and stream pumps and later by bigger dams and electric generators cannot be reversed. The idea of an annual inundation of the Nile is not even a memory now. Nor is man-driven equipment that raised the water to the thirsty land for millennia. Yet the banks of the river will continue to enchant us. — Pierre Loti (1910 [1909])

T

he opening of the Suez Canal in 1867 was a major event not only in the history of Egypt but also in global history and the history of the environment. Khedive Ismail, the ruler of Egypt at the time, was obsessed with making Egypt a part of the Europe he admired; and, for the opening ceremony, he commissioned the famous Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi to produce a major opera. Although Verdi was initially reluctant to take on the task, citing lack of familiarity with the context, he ultimately agreed to compose a new work based on a sketch by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette. The sketch was a portrayal of a fictional war in ancient times between Ethiopia, the country that controls the source of the Blue Nile, and Egypt, the one most dependent on its waters. Neither Verdi nor Mariette—nor even Camille du Locle, who wrote the opera’s libretto—could have imagined how prophetic their work would become. A century and a half later, Egypt and Ethiopia are engulfed in a major political struggle, with the former threatening military action to protect its share of Nile water, and the latter threatening to assert full sovereignty over the flow of the Blue Nile. In Verdi’s opera Aida, the epony­ mous Ethiopian princess is captured and given as a slave to the daughter of the king of Egypt. But Aida falls in love with an Egyptian soldier who also happens to be the object of affection of her Egyptian mistress. After several unresolved battles and considerable palace intrigue, the Ethiopian dies in the arms of her Egyptian soldier lover, who chooses her instead of the Egyptian princess, despite all the princess’s power and wealth. Anyone familiar with the current standoff between Egypt and Ethiopia cannot fail to see the metaphorical relevance of this story to the conflict. Had it not been for the Nile, Egypt could not have existed. It was the river that provided fertile soil for a land that otherwise would have been

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River a barren desert. The construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), however, is now posing an existential threat to Egypt, as it appears inevitable that this large hydroelectric project will cut into Egypt’s water supply and diminish its ability to irrigate existing areas of farmland. It is also likely to bring many ongoing desert reclamation projects in the country to a halt and inflict hardship upon a population that is likely to exceed a 100 million by 2020. More often than not, rivers flow across national boundaries. This has sometimes been the cause of disputes between upriver countries seeking to construct dams and countries located downstream. But today it is the very idea of the Nile as an Egyptian river that needs to be interrogated. Originally, it was the alliance between African tribes and the Arabs, who came to Africa in medieval times, that brought comprehensive change to social and political relationships throughout the river basin. Islam assimilated various pharaonic and Christian practices and introduced new ones, such as a trade in African slaves along the Nile. But it was the European colonial powers that first set out to codify control of the river itself. And, in particular, it was British colonial administrators in the nineteenth century who consolidated the idea of the Nile as an Egyptian river. The Nile does indeed cast a long shadow over Egypt, because of the country’s nearly complete dependence on the river. The majority of Egypt’s current population is concentrated in the Nile valley, and the river provides more than 90 percent of its water. Today, Egypt receives more than 55 billion of the 88 billion cubic meters of water that annually flow down the Nile. At stake in the Renaissance Dam dispute is the 60 percent of this supply that originates in the Blue Nile drainage in Ethiopia. Interestingly, at 660 cubic meters a person, Egypt’s per-capita water usage is low in comparison with other large countries of the world. But its vulnerability to water shortage derives not only from the lack of rain within its boundaries but from its burgeoning population, a trend that is not likely to abate in the near future. Civilization survived for thousands of years in Egypt not only because of the Nile but also because food production there did not depend on a centralized state. Thus, changes in government and the collapse of regimes rarely interfered with agricultural production. In the face of the Nile’s unpredictability—where excessive floods could damage crops, while low ones could lead to famine—the ancient rulers of Egypt, backed by powerful religious notions, nurtured a system of contingent social order. The pharaoh was seen as the agent who intervened with the gods to ensure stability and prosperity. In fact, it was the slowing of sea-level rise after 3000 bc that made possible the introduction of farming into the northern Nile delta and the expansion of settlements there. But compared with other major river civilizations, like the Sumerians and the Harappans, which developed along the banks of the Euphrates and the

Epilogue Indus rivers, Egyptian civilization, because of its dispersed, village-based character, did not suffer the frequent, destructive rise and fall of states and city states. Following Britain’s occupation of Egypt in 1882, however, an expansion of control over the river was driven by an imperial policy that took into account the entire geographical and hydrological capacity of the Nile basin. In 1904, the British invented the idea of the Nile as a single productive ecosystem that could be managed to benefit their economic interests. They thus limited development and modernization upstream while investing in downstream control works, irrigated lands, and cotton production in northern Sudan and Egypt. In this effort they negotiated the geography of the African highlands with the Italians and the Belgians, the colonial powers in Ethiopia and Congo. In 1929, the Nile Waters Agreement, which supposedly gave Egypt its “historic rights” over the river, was concluded between the British High Commission in Cairo and the Egyptian government. It allocated 48 billion cubic meters of water to Egypt and only 4 billion to Sudan, while leaving 32 billion unallocated. Other upstream countries were not included in the agreement. The British, who had colonized all the important areas of the Nile basin except Ethiopia and Congo, built the Sennar Dam on the Blue Nile in Sudan in the mid-1920s, which turned that country into a hydraulic state and allowed for some control over the Nile water there. To assure a predictable water supply for downstream economic production, during the first half of the twentieth century London also proposed a dam at Lake Tana in Ethiopia. Fearing that it would partition his country, the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, initially opposed the idea, before demanding British support for his claim to Eritrea against Italy in return for permission to build the dam. By then, however, the British had decided to build the Owen Falls Dam on the White Nile in Uganda instead. After World War II, the Sudanese government revived its own plans for dams on the Blue Nile, and began to build the Roseires Dam. In the meantime, Egypt was developing its own plan to build the High Dam at Aswan (above where the British had helped build the old Aswan dam in 1902)—a project that would create a huge reservoir extending into Sudan, where it would submerge many old Nubian villages. Thus, the period 1954–8 witnessed political conflict between Egypt and Sudan over the control of Nile water. When Sudan expressed objections to the High Dam and demanded a renegotiation of the 1929 agreement, Egypt withdrew its support for the Roseires Dam. In 1958 a new military government was established in Sudan that was more open to negotiations with Cairo. And the following year an agreement was reached to develop a new treaty between the newly independent Republic of Sudan and Egypt (then part of the United Arab Republic as a result of a short-lived political union with Syria). The bilateral agreement

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River increased the share of Nile water for both countries (Egypt to 55.5 billion and Sudan 18.5 billion cubic meters), leading to a renewal of support by each country for the other’s High Dam and Roseires Dam. Once again, however, outside interests were excluded from the agreement, which granted Egypt 87 percent of the Nile’s flow without seeking the input of any other upstream state. The agreement provoked particular anger in Ethiopia, and led it to start aggressively declaring its right to Nile water within its borders. While all of this was going on, an interesting natural situation developed. Unexpected and dramatic amounts of rain fell on the Lake Plateau between 1961 and 1964. Lake Victoria rose 2½ meters, increasing its volume by 170 billion cubic meters, and Lakes Kyoga, Albert, Edward, and George amassed an additional 84 billion cubic meters. In other words, within four years the Lake Plateau accumulated three times the historic annual average flow of the Nile at Aswan. As was later shown, El Niño, a recurrent accumulation of abnormally warm water in the central Pacific, was probably the reason for the four-year deluge over the Lake Plateau. Elsewhere around the world, El Niño triggered severe droughts as well as floods, and other climactic anomalies, especially in the tropics. And in the White Nile basin, the rains caused especially severe flooding of villages around the lakes. It was also around that time—in 1962 and 1963, respectively—that the British colonies of Uganda and Kenya became independent. And in the face of the extensive flooding, the newly independent East African states came up with a solution: pass the excess water from Lake Victoria through the sluices of the Owen Falls Dam, which had been completed in 1954. Yet while the dam gave power to these upstream nations to regulate the waters of the equatorial lakes, the decision to release the water brought great suffering downstream. This was particularly acute among the Dinka and Nuer, two ethnic groups living below the lakes in southern Sudan, as water levels remained unusually high in the Sudd swamps for two decades. Such complications were typical of the more decentralized decisionmaking process that emerged following the end of colonial rule. Indeed, many of the new Nile developments of the time came to reflect national pride and aspirations for sovereignty. In Egypt, in particular, the High Dam, completed 1971, was hailed as a symbol of the country’s independence. Yet the changing landscape of international law and growing demands by upstream states ultimately made it impossible for Egypt to maintain its “rights” to a river it had long considered its own. And its prior willingness to use military force to secure water was largely abandoned in the new international political environment following the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. Egypt had no choice but to change its official policy to accommodate the needs of other countries. And, as in the case of Sudan, other problems surfaced as well.

Epilogue In Sudan, to resolve ethnic conflict between an Arabized north and a Christianized south, a southern autonomous region was first established in 1972. In the years that followed, however, the Sudanese central government sought to retain control over defense, foreign affairs, customs, and the waters from the Lake Plateau and the Upper Nile basin. At the time, the Sudanese and Egyptian governments shared the view that the waters that created the Sudd swamps in the south of Sudan could better serve the expanding populations of the two countries farther north. But this would require diverting the flow of the river around this low-lying area. And without taking account of the potential effect of the giant project on the local populations, the government proposed the excavation of what would become known as the Jonglei Canal. The push to build the canal was the outcome of a design by the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works, intended to conserve and transmit water from the Lake Plateau and the entire Upper Nile basin to the great reservoir of Lake Nasser behind Aswan. From the Egyptian perspective, the canal would support new reclamation projects by shortening the river’s journey south from Juba by 320 kilometers. And if it was made wide enough to be navigable by Sudanese steamers, it might also facilitate commercial traffic. The project was thus designed to run south in a straight line for 280 kilometers, from the mouth of the Sobat River to Jonglei on the Bahr al-Jabal. Such a ditch would supposedly deliver 4.7 billion cubic meters of water annually into the White Nile at its confluence with the Sobat, near the town of Malakal. And from Malakal, it is 2,700 kilometers —through savanna, Sahel, and desert—downstream to Lake Nasser. Fearing its impact on their livelihoods as fishermen and farmers, the residents of southern Sudan protested that no study had ever been conducted to identify the canal’s impact on them. Furthermore, rumors circulated that 6,000 Egyptian peasants would be settled in the canal zone, replacing the original residents of the area. In October 1974, tension over the proposed project exploded into a riot in Juba against the Sudanese administration, in which three people were killed by security forces. And in the wake of such evident discontent, the Sudanese government agreed to transform the plan by promising social and economic development for the region. Discontent returned, however, when the central government did not keep these promises. Eventually, Lieutenant Colonel John Garang, a native of the area, was appointed by the Sudanese president to resolve a dispute within the army at Bor in 1983. Garang, however, had previously written in his Ph.D. dissertation from Iowa State University that the Jonglei Canal could never provide a solution for the people of the Upper Nile, and had advocated a more sweeping economic and social revolution. And when he was dispatched to the south he abandoned his government

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River position and helped found the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and its military arm, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). As disillusionment with the construction of the Jonglei Canal peaked, Garang became determined to put an end to it, and in February 1984 the SPLA halted its excavation at mile 166. It was here that the massive bucket-wheel excavator being used to dig it finally stopped. All work on the canal was subsequently terminated by the escalating civil war between the north and south. It now appears the project has been abandoned by the new state of South Sudan, which achieved independence in 2011. Since the second half of the twentieth century, a massive increase in population in the region has complicated issues surrounding the allocation of Nile water. Egypt has often expressed willingness to use military force to defend its control of the river. And tensions rose between Egypt and Sudan in the mid-1990s, when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was almost killed in Addis Ababa by Sudanese Islamic militants. As demands for food have soared in tandem with its growing population, Egypt has continued to expand its acreage of irrigated lands. This included the opening in 1997 of the Al Salam (Peace) Canal to transport Nile waters under the Suez Canal to create new areas of farmland in the Sinai Desert. It is in this context that Ethiopia has emerged as a powerful new actor since the 1980s. It argued that projects on the Ethiopian plateau within its borders could be used to more effectively store water from the Blue Nile, which accounts for more than 80 percent of the main Nile’s flow. And at the end its civil war with Eritrea, it began to seek a way to establish food security by moving ahead with plans of its own to divert Nile waters for irrigation. To do so, it entered into a bilateral agreement with Sudan in 1991 that weakened Egypt’s political influence in the region. Since the 1980s, former Nile treaties have been increasingly challenged over their validity and relevance from the perspective of international law. Thus many Nile basin states that achieved their independence in the 1960s no longer recognize Nile water agreements concluded during the colonial period. Uganda, in particular, has been involved in numerous bilateral and multilateral diplomatic initiatives to resolve the long-standing dispute over usage of the Nile. Other upstream countries have likewise demanded revisions to the treaties signed under colonial regimes, arguing that they are no longer applicable. To address such longstanding concerns, the Nile Basin Initiative was established in 1999 as a platform on which to discuss the river’s use. However, citing their “historic rights” to the river, Egypt and Sudan boycotted the cooperative movement. In the absence of these two countries, the other basin nations nevertheless moved to support Ethiopia’s plan for the Renaissance Dam through a Cooperative Framework Agreement in 2010. And in May 2010, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda

Epilogue all signed this new agreement governing the use and management of the Nile. The pact was considered a corrective to previously wrongful treaties, one that would establish a more equitable sharing of Nile waters to assist the development of all riparian states. In particular, once ratified by all parties, it would provide a legal framework for the establishment of a new Nile Basin Commission. Unhappy with the new agreement, however, Egypt has threatened to block construction of any new Nile dams. Yet, according to their own 1959 agreement, Egypt and Sudan have already agreed to reduce their use of Nile water if upstream countries need it for their own socioeconomic development. Therefore the two countries may have no choice but to share the Nile’s water with their upstream neighbors. In the end, Ethiopia went ahead with its plan to build the Renaissance Dam, without Egyptian consent. Yet, despite the Ethiopian government’s claim that it will not cause significant harm to downstream countries, it remains unclear what impacts it will have. When completed, the dam will create a large reservoir, one likely to hold 74 billion cubic meters of water. And as it fills, it will be crucial to manage the flow of water downstream. If the reservoir is filled slowly, it will have far less impact on Egypt and Sudan than if it is filled quickly. Thus, even if the river eventually returns to “normal” flows once the reservoir is filled, it could cause great damage downstream while this is taking place. Furthermore, Sudan and Egypt cannot entirely exclude the possibility that Ethiopia will build more dams in the future. In one study, Egypt has estimated that it will lose a staggering 50 percent of its farmland if the reservoir is filled in three years. A somewhat slower fill, over six years, would cost Egypt 17 percent of its cultivated land. But other studies say the impact will not be that grave. Adjusting the rate of fill to ensure that Egypt’s own massive reservoir on the Nile, Lake Nasser, will contain enough water to meet Egypt’s needs could resolve the conflict. But Ethiopia may insist on filling the reservoir more quickly, to receive the benefits of the dam without waiting that long. Construction of the Renaissance Dam is now almost complete, but Ethiopia has given little information as to when it will start to fill the reser­voir behind it, or at what rate. But there is very little Egypt can do. The Ethiopian government has claimed it needs the dam to electrify hundreds of villages not connected to the grid. And for a country whose infrastructure is among the least developed in the world, the $5 billion dam may represent a last recourse for a vast majority of the population, about 95 million people, who still have little access to electricity. This was exactly the logic used by Gamel Abdel Nasser 60 years ago to build the High Dam near Aswan, despite the damage that its construction would cause to the Nubian people of the region and in Sudan. How can Egypt threaten military action or deny another country what it allowed for itself?

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Figure E.1. Locations of dams, barrages, and canals along the Nile

Epilogue Since coming to office in 2014, the Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has attempted seek new alternatives and come up with diplomatic solutions. Thus, in 2015 Egypt signed the Declaration of Principles, in which it made no claim to its past share of Nile water for the first time in its modern history. This new approach, however, has been criticized by Sudanese and Egyptian nationalists, because it implies that Egypt will no longer be the dominant power along the Nile—and has, in effect, been replaced by Ethiopia. The Nile has changed much throughout thousands of years, in terms of its flow, its width, and its location. Indeed, 17 major channel changes can be identified over the course of the last two millennia. Some of the shifts have been eastward, with a fewer to the west, and some have been of a magnitude exceeding 3 kilometers. But it is important to remember that, from prehistoric times to the nineteenth century, the Nile underwent such massive changes mainly due to uncontrolled natural factors. Today, the Nile is largely controlled by the countries that have engineered its course, including Egypt, Sudan, Uganda, and now Ethiopia (Figure E.1). But nature may still have its way, as human-induced climate change is again altering prospects for the Nile. As the course of the Nile has changed many times, it has brought life to some cities while killing others. In the coming millennium, the trend is likely to continue, although the course of the Nile is likely to remain relatively stable, as a result of human intervention. A considerable number of barrages, dams, reservoirs, and surplus outlets along the Nile now ensure that its formerly unpredictable character will cause less damage to the urban areas along its banks. The concern today is, rather, that the entire river may one day dry up as a result of climate change. Indeed, rain patterns in both the Ethiopian and Central African highlands appear to be undergoing major changes, but it is too early to tell if this will kill the Nile. Speculation about the possible death of the Nile is both premature and highly exaggerated. The Nile will not die in our lifetimes, nor in the lifetimes of many generations after us. And when it does ultimately cease flowing, as is very likely, there may be no human being left on earth to witness it. What will die, however, may be cities and villages along its banks—not only because of forces of nature like climate change but also because of the activities of human beings, both reasoned and foolish. Again, there is nothing new here. This has been the way of the Nile since its birth, and it is likely to continue until the end of time.

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Bibliography Associated Press. 2017. “Existing Only from the Nile, Egypt Fears Disaster from a Dam.” ABC News, October 2. Collins, Robert O. 1990. The Waters of the Nile: Hydropolitics and the Jonglei Canal, 1900–1988. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Collins, Robert O. 2002. The Nile. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. El Zain, Mohamad. 2006. “Reshaping the Political: Nile Waters of the Sudan.” In Terje Tvedt et al., eds., A History of Water: The Political Economy of Water. London: I. B. Tauris, pp. 118–23. Gebeto, Petros J. 2010. No More Thirst: The Citizens of the Nile. Nairobi: P. J. Gebeto. Gershoni, I., Meir Hatina, and Hagai Erlikh. 2008. Narrating the Nile: Politics, Cultures, Identities. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Hassan, Fekri A. 1981. “Historical Nile Floods and Their Implications for Climatic Change.” Science, 212, pp. 142–5. Kérisel, Jean. 2001. The Nile and Its Masters: Past, Present, Future, Source of Hope and Anger. Rotterdam: A. A. Balkema. Loti, Pierre. 1910 [1909]. The Downfall of the Nile [La Mort de Philae]. W. P. Baines, trans. New York: Duffield. Okoth, Godfrey P. 2011. “National and Regional Foreign Policy Underpinnings: Uganda and the Nile River Basin Controversy.” In Korwa G. Adar and Nicasius A. Check, eds., Cooperative Diplomacy, Regional Stability and National Interests: The Nile River and the Riparian States. Pretoria: Africa Institute of South Africa, pp. 215–34. Schumm, Stanley Alfred. 2005. River Variability and Complexity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schwartzstein, Peter. 2017. “Death of the Nile.” BBC News, October 10. Tvedt, Terje. 2010. The River Nile in the Post-Colonial Age: Conflict and Cooperation among the Nile Basin Countries. London: I. B. Tauris.

Index Note: references to images are indicated by italics; references to notes are indicated by the letter n Abbasids, 16, 143–6 Abdullahi, Khalifa, 219, 220, 221, 222–3, 224–5 Aboukir, Battle of, 204 Abu al-Haggag, 75 Abu Simbel temple, 6, 74, 92, 93–5, 96, 105 and relocation, 241 Abydos, 52 Abyssinia see Ethiopia Actium, Battle of, 119 administration, 32, 56–7 Adwa, Battle of, 192 Agilika, 91, 92, 105 Agous of Damot, 18 agriculture, 8, 13, 18–19, 35, 45 and ancient Egypt, 33, 41–2, 43–4, 57 and Aswan, 241–2 and Fayoum, 132, 134, 135–6, 137 and Memphis, 51 and Meroe, 101–2 Ahmose I, 64, 68, 79 Aida (Verdi), 245 Akanyaru River, 33 Akhenaten, 6, 64, 72–3, 80–2, 83, 84–8, 89–90 Aksumite Empire, 182–4 al-Adel, 166 al-Adid, 153 al-Adil II, 170 al-Ashraf, 166 al-Askar, 143, 144, 145, 146 al-Aziz, 149, 165 al-Baghdadi, Abd al-Latif, 47 al-Bowab, Zubaida, 205 al-Din, Nur, 153 al-Farama, 163–5 al-Ghuri, Sultan, 157–8, 159 al-Hakim, 149–51 al-Halabi, Suleyman, 204

al-Haymi, Hasan Ibn Ahmad, 189 al-Idrisi, Muhammad, 47, 214 Nuzhat al-mushtaq fi ikhtiraq al-afaq [Book of Roger], 16–17 al-Jabarti, 202, 205 al-Jamali, Badr, 151–2 al-Kamel, 166, 167–8, 169, 170 al-Khattab, ‘Umar ibn, 120 al-Khawarizmi, Muhammad ibn Musa, 16 al-Ma’amun, 197 al-Mahdi, Sa’id Ibn Husain, 146 al-Maqrizi, 146, 148, 168, 173, 174 al-Masudi, Abu al-Hasan Ali Ibn al-Husayn The Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems, 16 al-Mu’azzam, 166 al-Mu’izz, 146, 148, 149 al-Qahira see Cairo al-Qata’i, 144–5 Al Salam (Peace) Canal, 250 al-Salanki, Ali Bey, 206 al-Salih, 154 al-Salih Nejjem al-Din Ayyub, 170, 171–3 al-Zawila tribe, 151 al-Zubair, 216, 218 Alexander the Great, 14, 42, 59, 129–30, 165 and Alexandria, 107–8, 110, 112, 114 and burial, 116, 131 Alexandria, 6, 14, 59, 73, 107–13, 121–3 and Battle of, 205 and Cyrus, 139–40 and Ptolemies, 115–18, 134 and Roman Empire, 119–20 and Rosetta, 198–200, 209 and trade, 120–1 Alexandrov, Alexander, 238

256

Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Ali, Mehmed, 18–19, 61, 121–2, 137, 158, 206, 209, 214–15 Aloa, 214 Amalric, 153 Amarna see Akhenaten Amazon River, 4, 29 Amenemhat I, 97, 128 Amenemhat III, 128 Amenhotep I, 68 Amenhotep III, 66, 68, 69, 72, 80 Amenirdis I, 98 Amon, 52 Amun, 98, 100, 102, 164 Amun-Re, 64, 66, 71 ancient Egypt, 13–16, 32–3, 56–8 and Ethiopia, 180 and Fayoum, 127–8 and floods, 40–2, 43–4 and Hyksos, 77–8 see also Akhenaten; Avaris; Memphis; Nubia; pyramids; Thebes ancient Greece, 14, 33, 42, 65–6, 180; see also Alexandria; Ptolemies Anhksenamun, 88 Ansar, 218–19, 220, 224 Antony, Mark, 118–20, 165 Anville, Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’, 18 Apis, 14, 49, 50, 59 Arafa, Musa, 237 archaeology, 31–2, 57, 47–8, 89, 96–7, 98; see also Rosetta Stone architecture, 53, 200, 201 and Alexandria, 110, 111–12 and Cairo, 151–2, 155–6 and Ethiopia, 184, 185, 189–91 see also palaces; pyramids Aristotle, 14, 130 De Inundatione Nili, 123n1 Arsinoe, 133 Artois, Robert d’, 171, 174 Assyrians, 100 Astapus see Blue Nile Aswan, 6, 14, 231–2, 241–3 and High Dam, 3, 44–5, 91–2, 229–31, 234–41 and Low Dam, 229–31, 234 Atbara River, 33, 39 Aten, 64, 73, 80, 85 Atlanersa, 100 Atum, 51, 52

Aurangzeb, 188 Avaris, 6, 77, 78–9, 80, 90 Axum, 16 Ay, 88, 89 Ayyubids, 153–4, 165–6, 169, 170, 173, 174–7 Babel, 130–1 Babylon, 97, 114, 139, 140–1, 142, 160n1 Badoglio, Pietro, 192 Bahr al-Arab, 5, 36 Bahr al-Ghazal, 5, 36 Bahr al-Jabal, 5, 36 Bahr al-Zaraf, 5, 36 Bahr Dar, 6 Bahr Yusuf, 126–8, 132 Baker, Elizabeth, 21–2 Baker, Samuel, 21–2, 24, 35, 216 Baldwin I of Jerusalem, 165 Bantus, 35 Barjawan, 149 Barquq, Sultan, 156–7 battles Aboukir, 204 Actium, 119 Adwa, 192 Alexandria, 205 Kadesh, 73 Nile, 107 Pyramids, 107, 203 Baybars, General, 154 Baybars al-Bunduqdari, 174 Belzoni, Giovanni Battista, 61–2, 74 Berthier, Louis-Alexandre, 204 Berthollet, Claude Louis, 204 Bible, the, 2–3, 78, 125–5 black pharaohs, 93, 95, 96, 98 Blue Nile, 4, 5, 6, 15, 33, 183 and color, 39–40 and course, 37–9 and Ethiopia, 192–3 and source, 17, 18, 26 and Tissiat Falls, 179, 181 and White Nile, 211, 212, 213 Bombay, Sidi Mubarak, 20 Bouchard, Pierre-François, 195 Brienne, Jean de, 165–6, 170 British Empire, 6, 61–2, 63, 191, 205–6 and the Nile, 234, 246, 247 Bruce, James, 17–18, 25, 26, 179, 181 and Gondar, 191 and Lake Tana, 187

Index Brueys d’Aigalliers, François-Paul, 202 Bunyoro, 21, 22 Burckhardt, Johann Ludwig, 95–6, 214 Burton, Richard Francis, 19–20, 21, 25, 181 Burundi, 4, 5, 11, 25–6 Byzantines, 139 Caesar, Julius, 14, 118 Cailliaud, Frédéric, 95, 96 Cairo, 5, 6, 146–58, 159, 160 and Napoleon, 203, 204 Cambyses II, King, 165 Cameron, John, 18 Canaan, 78, 79 cannibalism, 43 Cape of Good Hope, 17, 121 Carnarvon, George Herbert, Lord, 63, 74 Carter, Howard, 63 Cataracts, 92, 96, 104, 232–3, 242 Chaillé-Long, Charles, 24, 36 Champollion, Jean-François, 62, 63, 207 China, 217, 235 Christianity, 16, 17, 74, 104, 214 and Ethiopia, 182–5, 188 see also Bible, the; Copts; Crusades Christie, Agatha Death on the Nile, 242 Churchill, Winston, 213, 224, 226, 242 Cleomenes of Naucratis, 110, 113, 115 Cleopatra, 118, 119–20, 197 climate change, 44, 45, 122–3 colonialism, 19, 25, 191–2, 209; see also British Empire Colossi of Memnon, 72 Columbia River, 29 Commission of the Public Debt, 233 communication, 42 Condominium Agreement (1899), 93, 105 Congo River, 29 Connaught, Arthur, Duke of, 234 Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness, 25 Conté, Nicolas-Jacques, 207 Cooperative Framework Agreement (2010), 250–1 Copts, 140, 142, 145, 150, 197 craftsmen, 56, 70 crocodiles, 134–5

Cromer, Lord, 224, 226 Crusades, 6, 153, 154, 164, 165–8 and Ethiopia, 180 and Louis IX, 169–72, 177–8 and Mansoura, 168–9, 172–7 and Rosetta, 197–8 Curse of the Pharaohs, 74 Cyrus, 139–40 Damietta, 6, 163–4, 165–8, 169, 171–2, 173 Danfiq, 43 Danqaz, 188 Danube River, 29 De Bono, Emilio, 192 Decree of Canopus, 164 Deir el-Bahri, 71–2 Deir el-Ballas, 68 Deir el-Medina, 69–71 Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), 4, 5 Demotic language, 164, 195, 197, 199, 207 Denon, Dominique Vivant, 62, 63 Description de l’Egypte, 63, 121 Dingil, Sarsa, 186–7 Dinocrates of Rhodes, 110 Diodorus Siculus, 14, 121, 135 Dirgham, 153 Djoser, 53, 58 drought, 13, 126, 151 Drovetti, Bernardino, 63 Dugua, Charles, 202 Dulles, John Foster, 236 dynasties First, 51 Third, 53 Fourth, 53–4 Fifth, 48 Sixth, 48, 59 Fifteenth, 77 Eighteenth, 64, 72–3, 79–80 Nineteenth, 55, 73 Twenty-Fifth, 93 Twenty-Sixth, 100–1 East India Company, 19 Eden, Anthony, 236 Egypt, 3, 4–5, 6, 24 and Abbasids, 143–6 and Arab invasion, 139–43 and France, 200–6

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River and the Nile, 245–51, 253 and prehistory, 31–2 and Sudan, 214–15, 216 see also Alexandria; ancient Egypt; Aswan; Cairo; Damietta; Fayoum; Mansoura; Rosetta Egyptology, 61–3 Eighteenth Dynasty, 64, 72–3, 79–80 el-Musta’ala Bellah, 16 El Niño, 248 el-Sisi, Abdel Fattah, 253 Elephantine Island, 14, 33, 232–3 Equatoria, 24, 216, 217, 224 Eritrea, 4, 183, 192, 193, 247, 250 Ethiopia, 4, 5, 15–16, 17–18, 39, 179–82 and Aksumites, 182–4 and Blue Nile, 192–3 and Egypt, 245–6 and GERD, 251 and ice age, 31 and Italy, 191–2 and Lalibela, 184–5 and the Nile, 250 and Sudan, 224 see also Gondar; Lake Tana Eumenes, 114 Ezana, Emperor, 182

funerary temples, 64–5, 68; see also pyramids Fustat, 141–3, 145, 146, 150, 153–4

Fakhr al-Din, 173–4 famine, 43 Farouk, King, 122 Fasiladas, Emperor, 188, 189–91 Fatimids, 16, 145–6; see also Cairo Fayoum, 6, 14, 125–9, 130, 131–7 Festival of the Sanctuary, 67 Fifteenth Dynasty, 77 Fifth Dynasty, 48 First Dynasty, 51 First Intermediate Period, 63–4 floods, 3, 5, 13, 15–16, 94 and ancient Egypt, 32, 33, 40–2, 43–4 and ancient Greeks, 123n1 Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (Rome), 2 food, 57–8 Fourth Dynasty, 53–4 France, 62, 63, 204–6, 209, 236; see also Napoleon Bonaparte Franks, 153; see also Crusades Fraser, Alexander Mackenzie, 206 Frumentius, 16

Hapi, 3, 41 haras (residential quarters), 152 Hasan, Sultan, 155–6 Hatshepsut, Queen, 71–2, 80, 180 Heb-Sed festival, 59 Heit el-Ghurab, 56 Heliopolis, 51, 52 Hely-Hutchinson, John, 205, 206 Henry III of England, King, 170–1 Herikor, 98 Hermopolis, 98–9 Herodotus, 4, 41, 44, 52, 121 and Ethiopia, 180 and Fayoum, 128–9 Histories, 14 and Memphis, 51 Hetep-Senwosret, 56 hieroglyphics, 164, 195, 207–8 High Dam (Aswan), 3, 44–5, 91–2, 229–31, 234–41 Hittites, 73, 88 Holocene Wet Phase, 31, 40–1 Holy Land see Crusades

Ganges River, 8 Garang, John, 249–50 Garran, Ahmed, 17 Gebel Barkal, 98, 99, 100 Gessi, Romolo, 24 Gish Abay River, 26 Giza, 14, 42, 49, 53–5 Gondar, 6, 17, 188–91 Gondokoro, 21, 22, 24 Gordon, General Charles Gordon, 24, 25, 211, 213, 217–19 and Kitchener, 226–7 and Omdurman, 220–1 Gorgora, 187–8 government see administration; politics Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), 122, 193, 246, 251 granite, 58 Grant, James Augustus, 20–1 Great Britain, 18, 206–7, 233, 236 and Sudan, 218–19, 224–5, 226–7 see also British Empire Great Rift Valley, 35

Index Homer, 65–6, 180 Horemheb, 89 Horus, 51, 54 houses, 55–6, 85–7 Huni, King, 128 Hut-Ka-Ptah temple, 52–3 hydrology, 30, 41–2; see also High Dam Hyksos, 44, 68, 77–80, 97 Ibn al-‘As, ‘Amr, 59, 120, 139–40, 141, 165 Ibn Battuta, 121 Ibn Hawqal, Abu al-Qasim Muhammad, 145 Kitab surat al-ard [The Face of the Earth], 16 Ibn Luqman, 175 Ibn Tulun, Ahmad, 144–5 ice age, 31 Ikhshidis, 146 Imfraz, 185–7, 191 Imhotep, 53 India, 17, 121, 188, 235 Indus River, 29 Intef II, 64 iron ore, 101 irrigation, 32, 33, 41–2, 135, 233–4; see also High Dam Islam, 16, 104, 139–40, 142–3, 205 and Abbasids, 143–5 and Fayoum, 137 and Sudan, 191, 214, 218, 220, 222–3 see also mosques; Quran Ismail Ayoub Pasha, 218 Ismail Pasha, Khedive, 24, 216, 217, 218, 245 Israel, 236, 241 Israelites, 78 Italy, 191–2 Iyasu I, Emperor, 191 Jawhar al-Siqeli, 146–8, 149 Jerusalem, 121, 165, 170, 184 Jews, 112–13 Jinja, 35–6, 37 Joinville, Jean de, 168, 171, 172, 173 Jonglei Canal, 249–50 Joseph, 126 Kabarega Falls, 22 Kadesh, Battle of, 73 Kagera River, 33

Kamose, 78–9 Kamrasi, King, 22 Karnak, 43, 44, 64–6 Karuma Falls, 21, 22 Kashta, 93, 98 Kasumo River, 26 Kazeh, 19–20 Keith, George, 204 Kemp, Barry, 32 Kenya, 4, 31, 248 Khaemwaset, 49–51, 59 Khafra, 54–5 Khartoum, 5, 6, 38, 39, 211, 212, 213–16 and map, 223 Khonsu (Montu), 66 Khrushchev, Nikita, 236 Khufu, 53–4 Khurshid Pasha, 215 Khusraw, Nasir-i, 152 Kibotos Canal, 109–10, 111 Kikizi range, 5, 11, 17 kings see pharaohs Kitchener, Herbert, 25, 224, 225, 226–7 Kiya, 82 Kléber, Jean-Baptiste, 202, 204 Kom el-Hetan, 72 Kom el-Qal’a, 55 Komzin, Ivan Vassilievich, 237 Kushite kingdom, 6, 93, 95–6, 98–105 Labyrinth, 128–9, 130 Lake Albert, 16, 21, 22, 24, 35, 36 Lake Bangweulu, 23 Lake Edward, 16, 24, 35 Lake Idku, 198–9 Lake Kivu, 35 Lake Kyoga, 24, 36 Lake Mareotis, 108–9, 111 Lake Meroe, 133–4 Lake Moeris, 127–8 Lake Nasser, 44, 229, 240, 241 Lake Nyasa, 20 Lake Plateau, 5, 248 Lake Tana, 5, 15, 17, 18, 26, 37 and Blue Nile, 181 and Imfraz, 185–8 Lake Tanganyika, 20, 23, 24, 35 Lake Victoria, 20, 21, 24, 35–6, 37 Lalibela, 184–5, 186 Lannes, Jean, 204 Las Vegas (USA), 75

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Lepidus, Marcus, 119 Libya, 44 limestone, 58 Livingstone, David, 22–4, 25 Lobo, Jeronimo, 17, 181 Locle, Camille du, 245 Louis IX of France, King, 165, 169–72, 173, 174–8, 197 Luvironzia River, 33, 35 Luxor, 43, 74–5; see also Thebes McLeay, Cameron, 26 Magdala, 18, 191 Mahdi, 25, 191, 218–20, 211, 213, 221 and tomb, 222, 224, 225–6, 227 Mahmoudiyah Canal, 122, 158, 200, 209 Malkata, 68 Malyshev, Nikolai, 237 Mamluks, 47, 154–8, 161n7, 215 and Crusades, 170, 177 Manetho, 78, 79, 129 Mansoura, 6, 165, 166, 167–9, 172–7 Marcel, Jean-Joseph, 207 Marguerite de Provence, Queen, 171, 177 Mariette, Auguste, 49, 245 Marmont, Auguste de, 204 mastabas (tombs), 103 Mediterranean Sea, 5, 14, 163 and Alexandria, 108–9, 111 and Rosetta, 195–6, 199–200 Melly, George, 216 Memphis, 6, 14, 33, 42, 44, 47–8, 50–1 and houses, 55–6 and inhabitants, 57 and Nubians, 98, 99 and Ptah, 52–3 and pyramids, 58–9 Menas, Emperor, 185–6 Menelik II, Emperor, 192 Menes, 42, 51, 135, 196–7 Menkaure, 54–5 Menou, Jacques-François, 195, 202, 204–5, 206 Mentuhotep II, 64 Meritaten, 82, 88 Merneptah, 55 Meroe, 6, 92, 93, 95, 96, 101–5 Mfumbiro (Virunga) Mountains, 35 Middle Kingdom, 64 Mississippi River, 4, 29

Mit Rahina, 48 Mitanni, 88 Mohamad Ahmad see Mahdi Mohamed Osman Pasha, 215 Monge, Gaspard, 204 Monument to Russian–Egyptian friendship, 229, 230 Moses, 164 mosques, 75, 142–3, 144–5, 168 and Cairo, 149–50, 155–6, 158 Mountains of the Moon (Ruwenzori), 5, 15, 16, 19, 35 Mubarak, Hosni, 250 mud brick, 47, 53, 55, 56, 58 mummies, 49, 136 Murad Bey, 203, 204 Murat, Joachim, 204 Mussolini, Benito, 192 Mustansir, 151 Mut, 66 Mutesa of Buganda, King, 21 myths, 13–14 Namlot, 98, 99 Napata, 6, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98, 99–101 Napier, Robert, 18, 191 Napoleon Bonaparte, 54, 107, 121, 158, 195, 200–4 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 44, 231, 234, 235–6, 237, 240 natural habitats, 5, 41 Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II, 64 necropoli see Giza; Saqqara; Valley of the Kings Nefertari, 73, 93 Nefertiti, 81–2, 87, 88, 89 Nelson, Adm Horatio, 107, 203 Nero, Emperor, 14 New Kingdom, 6, 32, 64, 79–80 Nile, Battle of the, 107 Nile Basin Initiative, 250–1 Nile River, 2–5, 8–10, 68, 252, 253 and Alexandria, 107–10, 111, 118, 122–3 and ancient Egypt, 32–3 and Arabs, 141–2 and Aswan, 231–2 and Cataracts, 92, 96, 104, 242 and cities, 5–6, 7 and course, 29, 33, 35–9, 43 and Crusades, 166–8, 169, 173, 174 and Egypt, 245–9

Index and Ethiopia, 179–80 and Fayoum, 125, 126–7, 132 and irrigation, 233–4 and map, 34 and pharaohs, 51–2 and prehistory, 30–1 and source, 11, 12, 13–14, 16–19, 22–6, 27 and transport, 58 and visitors, 14–15, 48–9 see also Blue Nile; floods; High Dam; White Nile “Nile, The” (statue), 1–2 Nile Waters Agreement (1929), 247 Nilometers, 33, 40 Nineteenth Dynasty, 55, 73 Nitocris, 100 nomes (administrative districts), 56–7, 136–7 Norden, F. L., 62 Nubia, 6, 14, 92–105, 242–3 Nyavarongo River, 33 Nyungwe Forest, 26 obelisks, 62, 66–7, 120, 184 Octavius, Gaius, 119 Old Kingdom, 53, 55, 56–7 Omar, Caliph, 139, 141–2 Omdurman, 6, 211, 213–14, 220–4, 225–6 On see Heliopolis Osiris, 51, 52 Ottoman Empire, 107, 121–2, 158, 206 and Napoleon, 203, 204 and Rosetta, 198, 199 Owen Falls Dam, 247, 248 Pa-nehesi, 86–7, 97–8 Paez, Pedro, 17, 37, 181, 187 palaces, 55, 67–8, 69 and Akhenaten, 85–7 and Alexandria, 115–16 and Cairo, 149, 152 and Ethiopia, 186–7 and Meroe, 102–3 papyri, 115, 132 Paterick, John, 215–16 peasants, 51–2, 134 Pelagius, 167, 169 Pepi II Neferkare, 58–9 Perdikas, 130–1

pharaohs, 14, 33, 51–2, 74, 125–6; see also black pharaohs Pharos, 107, 111 and lighthouse, 116–17, 118, 121 Philadelphia, 132, 133, 134, 135 Philae, 91, 92 Pi-Ramesses (“The House of Ramesses”), 59, 80 pilgrims, 121 Piye, 98–9, 100 Pliny the Elder, 14 Pococke, Richard, 62 Poitiers, Alphonse de, 171, 172 politics, 33, 42, 59 Pompey, 165 Poncet, Jacques-Charles, 17, 187, 191 Port Said, 209 Portuguese, 17, 18, 121, 180–1 prehistory, 30–2, 127–8 Prenile River, 31 Prester John, 180 Prophecy of Neferty, 43 Psamtek I, 100–1 Ptah, 50, 52–3, 140 Ptolemaeus, Claudius Geographia, 14–15 Ptolemies, 6, 14, 111–13, 114–18, 180 and Fayoum, 131–7 Ptolemy I (Sotor), 113, 114–15, 116, 117, 130–2 Ptolemy II (Philadelphus), 115, 116, 117 and Fayoum, 125, 132–4, 135, 136 Ptolemy III (Euergetes), 116, 118 Ptolemy IV (Philopater), 116 Ptolemy V (Epiphanes), 207 Ptolemy XIII (Auletes), 118 Ptolemy XIV, 118 pyramids, 14, 26, 42, 49, 53–5 and construction, 56 and Fayoum, 128–9, 130 and Memphis, 58–9 and Meroe, 96, 102, 103 and Napata, 99 Pyramids, Battle of the, 107, 203 Qait Bey, 198 Qalawun, Sultan, 155 Qift, 43 Quran, 3, 126 Qus, 43 rainfall, 40, 41

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Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River Ramesses II, 50, 53, 59, 73, 97 and Abu Simbel, 93 and bust, 61–2, 63, 74 and Ethiopia, 180 and Thebes, 67 Ramesses III, 50, 67–8, 73 Ramesses XI, 73, 97–8 Ras Tafari, 192 Rawdah, 141, 154, 156 religion, 64–5, 77, 89; see also Christianity; Islam; Jews; temples Rhakotis see Alexandria Rhine River, 8 Richard I of England, King, 154 Rift Valley, 35 Roman Empire, 1–2, 6, 14, 42, 140 and Alexandria, 118–20 and Fayoum, 137 and Thebes, 73 Roseires Dam, 247 Rosetta, 107, 121, 195–200, 201, 202–3 Rosetta Stone, 6, 63, 195, 205–8, 209–10 Royal Geographical Society, 19, 20, 22, 25 Rukarara River, 26 Russia see Soviet Union Ruvuvu River, 33 Ruvyironza River, 26 Ruwenzori see Mountains of the Moon Rwanda, 4, 5, 26 Sadat, Anwar, 241 Sahara Desert, 31, 41 Saladin (Salah al-Din ibn Ayyub), 153–4, 165 Salt, Henry, 61, 63 Samarra, 144–5, 160n2 sandstone, 58, 65 sandstorms, 43 Saqqara, 49, 53, 59 Schedia Canal, 109 Schmidt, Johann, 22 science, 32 sea level, 45 Sehpenwepet I, 98 Selassie, Haile, Emperor, 192, 247 Selim I, Sultan, 158 Selim III, Sultan, 203 Seljuks, 153

Semliki River, 35 Sennar Dam, 247 Senusret I, 65, 96–7 Senusret III, 97 Senwosret II, 56 Serapeum, 49, 59 Serapis, 113 Seth, 78 Seti I, 73, 74 settlement, 33; see also houses Shajar al-Durr, 154, 173–4, 176–7 Shawar, 153 Shelley, Percy, 62 Shiites, 145–6 Sicard, Claude, 62 Sixth Dynasty, 48, 59 slavery, 24, 180 and Sudan, 214, 215, 216, 218 Smendes, King, 164 Smenkhkare, 88 Smith, Sidney, 204 Sobat River, 37 Sobkhotep, King, 44 Sostratos of Knidos, 117 South Sudan, 4, 6 Soviet Union, 229, 235, 236–9, 241 Speke, John Hanning, 19–21, 22, 25 sphinxes, 54, 66 Stanley, Henry Morton, 23, 24, 25 Stocks, John E., 19 stone, 53, 55, 58 Strabo, 59, 109, 121, 129, 132 Geographika, 14 Sudan, 4, 6, 19 and Britain, 224–5, 226–7 and Condominium Agreement, 93, 105 and Ethiopia, 191, 193 and Gordon, 217–19 and Jonglei Canal, 249–50 and Mahdi, 219–20 and the Nile, 247–50, 251, 253 see also Khartoum; Meroe; Napata; Omdurman Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), 250 Sudd swamps, 4, 5, 14, 24, 30–1, 36–7 Suez Canal, 48, 209, 216, 218, 236, 245 Suhrab, 16 Sukarno, 235

Index Suppiluliumas, 88 Susenyos, Emperor, 187, 188 Syria, 80, 145, 151, 153, 239 Talkha see Mansoura Tanis, 163–4, 165 Tanutamun, 100, 101 Tanzania, 4, 19–20 Tawfik, Khedive, 218, 219 taxation, 42, 57, 117 Tefnakht, 98, 99 Tell al-Daba’a, 77 temples, 32, 42, 47–8, 56 and Akhenaten, 84–5 and Avaris, 78, 79 and High Dam, 91–2 and Memphis, 49–50, 52–3 and Nubians, 102–3 and Sphinx, 54 and Thebes, 64–7, 71–2, 73 see also Abu Simbel temple Tewodros II, Emperor, 18, 191 Thebes, 6, 52, 59, 61, 62–75 and Hatshepsut, 80 and Hyksos, 78–9 and Nubians, 98, 100 and Tutankhamun, 88 see also Luxor Theodosius I, Emperor, 207–8 Thévenot, Jean de, 198 Third Dynasty, 53 Thutmose III, 69, 80, 81, 180 Tissiat Falls, 179, 181 Tiye, Queen, 81, 87 tourism, 48–9, 74–5, 92, 121 Toynbee, Arnold, 41 trade, 42, 58 and Alexandria, 111, 113, 120–1 and Cairo, 152–3 and Ethiopia, 185–6 and Nubians, 96, 104 and Ptolemies, 134 and Rosetta, 197, 198 and Sudan, 216 Trajan, Emperor, 140, 142 Tunisia, 146, 148

Turan Shah, 173–4, 175–6, 177 Tutankhamun (Tutankhaten), 63, 73, 74, 82, 88 Tuthmosis I, 97 Tuti Island, 211, 214 Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, 93 Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, 100–1 Uganda, 4, 6, 24, 31, 248, 250 Ujiji, 20, 23 Umayyads, 142–3 UNESCO, 92, 94 United Arab Republic, 239 United States of America, 192–3, 235, 236 Upper Mesopotamia, 16 urbanism, 57–8 Valley of the Kings, 14, 62–3, 68, 73, 87 Valley of the Queens, 73 Verdi, Giuseppe Aida, 245 Victoria, Queen, 219, 226 Volga River, 8 Wafa al-Nil (“Gratitude to the Nile”), 3 Waldecker, Burkhart, 12, 25–6 water, 29–30, 41, 125, 127 water mills, 32 White Nile, 4, 5, 6, 33 and Blue Nile, 211, 212, 213 and color, 39–40 and course, 37, 38, 39 and source, 18–22, 26 Wilkinson, John Gardner Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, 63 Willcocks, Sir William, 234 Wilson, John, 32 Yangtze River, 8, 29 Young, Thomas, 207 Zaki, Hassan, 235, 237 Zenon, 132

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