What Is The Gift Of The Nile
What Is The Gift Of The Nile - Like a giant snake, the Nile flows through some of the driest deserts on earth to form a narrow green valley. The ancient Greeks called this land Egypt. For more than five thousand years, famous and often mysterious civilizations flourished along the banks of the Nile.
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What Is The Gift Of The Nile
Around 450 BC, a Greek historian named Herodotus called Egypt the "Gift of the Nile" because Egyptian civilization depended on the resources of the great river. Every spring, the snow on the mountains of East Africa melts, a flood of water flows from the banks of the Nile and the river valley flows.
The flowing river collected pieces of soil and plants called silt. As the annual flood recedes, a liquid from the black soil emerges every year along the banks of the Nile. Silt was rich in nutrients and provided two to three grains to the people of Egypt every year.
The Nile made it possible for the ancient Egyptians to form the first nation in history. A nation may refer to a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnic background or history. The land outside the Nile River Valley is the Sahara Desert.
Ancient Egypt: The Gift Of The Nile
A desert is a land that receives less than ten inches of rain in a normal year. Since it was impossible to grow much food in the desert, few people lived far from the banks of the Nile. Huge rocks blocked the Nile River and created a natural border in the southern Egyptian city of Aswan.
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The Nile flows into the vast Mediterranean Sea, which forms Egypt's northern border. Egypt's isolation led to its unification. The people living along the Nile River spoke the same language and worshiped the same gods more than five thousand years ago. The Nile no longer overflows its banks because the modern Egyptians built a huge dam in Aswan.
Since 1970, the Aswan High Dam has held back the water that overflows the banks of the Nile every year. The dam also provides a reliable flow of water to Egyptian farmers during the dry season. Egyptians can now convert the predictable flow of the Nile into electricity.
The Aswan High Dam initially provided electricity to more than half of the villages on the Nile. Egypt's population has grown since then, but the Aswan High Dam still contributes fifteen percent of Egypt's electricity. Unlike oil, running water is renewable, which means the river will never run out.
The Nile's Physical/Chemical Properties[Edit | Edit Source]
Ancient and modern civilizations rely on the mighty river, proving that Egypt is truly the "Gift of the Nile." Download this lesson as a Microsoft Word file or as an Adobe Acrobat file. Listen as Mr. Dowling teaches this lesson. Check out the Powerpoint presentation of this lesson.
Listen to Dowling read this lesson. Word Count 447 Mr. Donn has an excellent website that includes a section on Ancient Egypt. The geography of ancient Egypt, as it is today, was dominated by a lack of rain and the Nile River. The Greek historian Herodotus called Egypt "the gift of the Nile", as the kingdom owed its survival to the Nile's annual flooding and the resulting deposit of fertile flowers.
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The Nile flows into the Mediterranean Sea, and there is a delta at its mouth. The Nile River was the only reason civilization in ancient Egypt took off at all. In the fourth century B.C. In his Histories, the Greek historian Herodotus declared that "Egypt is the gift of the Nile".
He meant that Egypt didn't really get any rain, and so all its water—for drinking, washing, irrigating the fields, and running the water wheels—came from this river alone. The Nile is the longest river in the world. Because the water of the Nile is deep in the middle east of Africa (at Lake Victoria), the river flows every year during the height of the Egyptian civilization.
The Nile's Physical/Chemical Properties[Edit | Edit Source]
The spring in the highlands of Ethiopia will melt the snow, which will then slowly flow down the river, and the Nile will rise gently. Unlike in Mesopotamia, where floods were irregular, unpredictable, and very destructive, the Nile washed its banks to produce a flood phase on a predictable schedule, usually within two or three days of the helial rising of the star Sirius in late July.
For a period of almost three thousand years, roughly separated, the ancient Egyptians could count on three months of high water, from August to early November. Submergence, as it is called, carried a rich bed of alluvial soil over the agricultural lands of Egypt. In this way, the agricultural fields of Egypt were renewed and revitalized every year, making Egypt the garden-land of the ancient world.
In this way the perennial Nile very quickly established the Egyptian way of life. Between August and November, when the fields were flooded, the Egyptians would work on building projects for the priests and Pharaoh. The pyramids at Giza and Sakkarha were most likely built during the Flood, as were the temples at Karnak and Luxor.
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From November to March, farmers will reconstruct and plant their fields using geometry and markers placed on high points above the flood lines. March-June was the harvest season, in which grain and grapes were made for bread, beer and wine, and Pharaoh's tax collectors were around.
Four Divisions[Edit | Edit Source]
At the beginning of July, people gathered their tools and prepared for the next flood. This style was so continuous that its interruption led to the downfall of several dynasties. The most famous example of the failure of the Nile flood probably occurred during the last years of the reign of Pepi II, who ruled from the age of 6 to 96.
reigned, and after his death, the Egyptian bureaucracy largely collapsed in power struggles with the country's nobility and priesthood. The death of Pepi II, and the resulting civil strife, is considered the end of the Old Kingdom period in Egyptian history. Four sections are useful for understanding the geography of Egypt.
The first division is between Upper and Lower Egypt, and the second is between the Red (Desert) and Black (Kermet) Earth. English speakers are often confused about the first division, because Upper Egypt is in the south, while Lower Egypt is in the north. Upper or southern Egypt is a narrow river valley, rarely more than twelve miles wide, and often only a mile or two wide.
High cliffs flank it on both sides. Lower or northern Egypt is the broad delta above modern Cairo. The land is clean and fertile, and the rich soil of the Inundation often blows here. It was richer than Upper Egypt but more modest. The second great division, between the Red and Black Lands, is a division between the black, fertile soil of the Nile Valley and the barren, sandy, dry desert wastes.
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