Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in Modern Middle Eastern Studies
Faculty of Oriental Studies
Trinity 2006
Table of Contents
Table of Contents.......................................................................2
Acknowledgements.....................................................................3
Introduction...............................................................................4
Chapter I: The Origins of the Myth of the Hydraulic Society..............21
Chapter II: Reading and Inscription...............................................45
Chapter III: An Aristocracy of Water.............................................74
Conclusion and Epilogue: Desire and History .................................103
Appendix ................................................................................108
Works Cited .............................................................................111
Introduction
“For the first time, nature becomes purely an object or humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power or itself , and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws app ears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production.”
-Karl Marx
Egypt and the Nile
Every organism ceases to exist without water; as for nations, even in the antiquewritings of Homer, the river and land of Egypt were notionally one and the same being. Linguistically they were distinguished by gender alone: used in the masculine, aigyp tos signified the waters whose annual flooding ensured the fertility of an earth, denoted by aigyptos in the feminine. Deified by Pharaohs, revered by the Jewish and Christian writers who claimed Paradise as its source, so awesome was the Nile that Arabic texts held that when al-nil al-mabruk went up, all other rivers on earth would fall. If there is any element that could act as a unifying factor throughout the written history of Egypt, a history that testifies to the rise of pyramids, to the fall of world conquerors, to fabulous wealth and to disasters of biblical proportions, it is that those inundations have been something of a sine qua non; Egypt without the Nile would be inconceivable. One could, like the poets, extol the generous virtues of a body of water, but in equalif not greater measures the Nile was an entity to be feared. It could bring a deluge so vicious that it left only famine and death for untold numbers in its wake. As a matter of survival, the ability to intervene in some way, to deflect or even harness such a force of and J.K. Kramers, “Al-Nil” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam. tribulation would seem an imperative. By the age of early Islam, Ibn ‘abd al-Hakam reported that the Caliph ‘Umar had finally been able to abolish the yearly sacrifice of the Nile Bride. Instead of casting a young virgin into the waters to obtain a good flood, he threw in a letter of request calling on the river to rise if God so willed.
Until recently, human survival in Egypt depended on a singular idiosyncrasy in the river’s temperament. At the height of summer when lesser streams slow to a trickle, the Nile begins its tempestuous surge. Equatorial monsoons batter the mountainous highlandsaround Lake Tana before draining into the Blue Nile and ‘Atbara tributaries. Having joined the White Nile in the Sudan, by the time the force of this confluent trinity arrives
at Aswan in September, the Nile enters Egypt at up to fifteen times its former size. Before the age of the dam whose monumentality signified a kind of hydraulic conquest, the annual torrent would overwhelm the riverbanks and transform the Nile Valley and Delta into a vast lake. As the Nile expended its hydraulic charge and slowly receded, it bequeathed to Egypt the pulverized vestiges of Ethiopian volcanoes, endowing an otherwise barren desert with an astonishing fecundity.
Egypt is perhaps the most famous irrigated agricultural society in world history. The people of Egypt survived and prospered from this bounty by diverting the Nile’s mighty floods with earthen barriers. The continuous downward incline of the land from Aswan to the Mediterranean allowed the water to be captured and then routed to several basins along the slope. Upon the silt deposited by the floods, Egyptians could easily sow
their eeds and await the harvest without much further effort.
