Throughout Egyptian history, the Nile has played a dominant role in the lives of the people. Its annual risings endowed the Egyptian year with a distinctive rhythm – inundation, planting, harvest, a fallow period or second cropping followed in the new inundation, repetitious and regular. The copious flow of the river’s waters deposited a new layer of topsoil yearly, enabling the land to produce the surpluses for which Egypt was already fabled before the arrival of the Greeks. From an aerial view, the Nile appears as shining stripes in the middle of a green fringe of the alluvial plains on either of the river’s banks, further distant from the river are the browns and yellows of the arid desert plateau and at many points behind them, mountainous regions. Year after year, the summer rains from the Ethiopian highlands and tropics rushed northward bringing the flood crest in the middle August and September.
The main pillar of Egypt’s economy has always been the arable farmland that depended upon the yearly inundation to lay down silt and fill catchment basins for water for irrigations. Pigeon droppings were collected for fertilizer from the dovecotes that peppered farming villagers. The strength of the inundation determined whether feast or famine would visit the land at the next harvest season, and an excessively high flooding that retarded the planting of new crops was as disastrous as one that failed to irrigate all the fields. Nilometers measured the levels of a flood from paranoiac times onward strategically placed at crucial points along the river.
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