Egypt Is The Gift Of The Nile
Egypt Is The Gift Of The Nile - Like a giant snake, the Nile River makes a narrow green valley through some of the driest deserts on earth. The ancient Greeks called this land Egypt. For more than five thousand years, a famous and often mysterious civilization flourished on the banks of the Nile. Around 450 BC, a Greek historian named Herodotus referred to Egypt as the "Blue Gift" because Egyptian civilization depended on river sources.
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Egypt Is The Gift Of The Nile
Every spring, snow melts on the mountains of East Africa, which cascades down the river banks and into the river valleys. The flowing river lifted the soil and plant life As the annual flood receded, a black surface formed every year along the banks of the Nile.
The mud was rich in nutrients and provided the Egyptians with two or three crops each year. The ancient Egyptians made it possible to form the first nation in history. A nation can refer to a community of people who share the same language, culture, ethnic or historical background.
The Sahara Desert on the banks of the Nile The desert is a land that receives less than ten inches of rain in an ordinary year. Since it is nearly impossible to grow much food in the desert, very few people live above the rivers.
Ancient Egypt: The Gift Of The Nile
Aswan in Egypt south of the Nile River flows into the vast Mediterranean Sea, forming the borders of Egypt to the north. The isolation of Egypt led to its unification. The peoples living along the Nile spoke the same language and worshiped many of the same gods five thousand years ago.
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Since the Egyptians had built a great dam at Aswan, its rivers would no longer overflow. Since 1970, the Aswan High Dam has prevented flooding along the Nile River every year. Dams provide a reliable flow of water for Egyptian farmers during dry seasons. Egyptians can now convert the predictable flow of the Nile into electricity.
The Aswan High Dam originally supplied electricity to more than half of the villages on the banks of the Nile. Egypt's population has grown since then, but the Aswan High Dam accounts for about fifteen percent of Egypt's electricity. Like oil, flowing water is renewable, meaning that rivers will never run out. Ancient and modern civilizations have relied on great rivers to prove that Egypt is indeed the "Blue Prize".
Download this text as a Microsoft Word file or Adobe Acrobat file. Listen as Mr. Dowling reads this text. View the PowerPoint presentation of this lesson. Word Count 447 Mr. Don has a great website which includes a section on Ancient Egypt. When the Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the land of the ancient Egyptians was "given to them by the rivers," he was referring to the Nile, whose waters were crucial to the rise of the world's first great civilization.
The Nile Was A Source Of Rich Farmland
Flowing north for 4,160 miles from east-central Africa to the Mediterranean Sea, the river provided ancient Egypt with fertile soil and water for irrigation, as well as a means of transporting materials for construction projects. Its vital waters allowed cities to grow in the desert. To benefit from the Nile, people living along its banks had to learn how to cope with the river's annual floods.
They also developed new skills and technologies, from agriculture to ship building and the Nile River ships were instrumental in building the pyramids, colossal wonders that are among the most recognizable monuments of their civilization. Beyond practical matters, the great river had a profound influence on the ancient Egyptians' view of themselves and the world, and shaped their religion and culture.
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Lisa Saladino Hanne, assistant curator of Egypt at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, writes on the museum's website that the Nile was an important passage that literally brought life to the desert. "There would be no Egypt without the Nile," the Egyptologist wrote in his 2012 book, The Nile.
The modern name of the Nile comes from Nelios, the Greek word for river valley. But the ancient Egyptians called it Ar or Ar, meaning "black", referring to the rich, dark deposits deposited by the waters of the Nile in Egypt as it flowed north from the Horn of Africa.
The River Served As A Vital Transportation Route
and washes away the river every year at the end of the summer year. Increases in water and nutrients turned the Nile Valley into productive agricultural land and allowed Egyptian civilization to thrive in the desert. Ancient Egypt by Barry J. The Nile was so important to the ancient Egyptians that their calendar year began with the first month of the flood.
Egyptian religion even honored Hapi, the god of floods and fertility, who was represented as a man with blue or green skin. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, ancient Egyptian farmers were among the first to cultivate food crops such as wheat and barley, as well as industrial crops such as flax for clothing.
To get the most out of the Nile's water, farmers in ancient Egypt developed a system called basin irrigation. They built a network of land banks to create depressions and canals to carry floodwaters to the settlement, where it would sit for a month until the soil was saturated and ready for cultivation.
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Arthur Goldschmidt, Jr. Penn State University Emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern history and author of A Brief History of Egypt. "Creating dykes, canals, and basins to transport and store some of the Nile's water required ingenuity and probably required a lot of trial and error for the ancient Egyptians."
The River Served As A Vital Transportation Route
To predict whether they would face a dangerous flood or low tide, the ancient Egyptians built nilometers—stone pillars that indicated the water level. As well as encouraging agriculture, the Nile River provided the ancient Egyptians with an important means of transportation. As a result, they became skilled boat and shipbuilders who built large wooden crafts, including sails and ships, capable of traveling long distances, and small boats made of reeds of mounted papyrus.
on a wooden frame. Art from the Old Kingdom, dating from 2686 to 2181 BC, depicts boats carrying livestock, vegetables, fish, bread, and wood. Boats were so important to the Egyptians that they buried their dead kings and dignitaries in boats that were sometimes so well-built that they could have been used for the actual journey down the Nile.
According to Haney, the Nile influenced the way the Egyptians thought about the land they lived on. They divided their world into kemets, the "black land" of the Nile Valley, where there was enough water and food to sustain cities. In contrast, hot and dry desert areas are sandy deserts, "red earth".
They associated oases in the Nile Valley and desert areas with life and abundance, while deserts were associated with death and chaos. Blue played an important role in the creation of monumental tombs such as the Great Pyramid of Giza. An ancient papyrus diary of an official involved in the construction of the Great Pyramid describes how workers hauled blocks of limestone along the Nile and then guided the blocks through a system of canals to the
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