Nile & the History of Irrigation in Egypt (by Eng. Moustafa El-Kady & others) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Civilizing the Past: Egyptian Irrigation in the Colonial Imagination
Journal of Egyptian History, 2020
Reviews of the historiography of irrigation regularly single out Karl August Wittfogel's "hydraulic hypothesis" as a uniquely deleterious contribution to the study of ancient water management. His errors notwithstanding, this article argues that the ideological misshaping of Western scholarship on irrigation instead emerged from Egypt's long colonial experience. First articulated in the Napoleonic Description de l'Égypte, the theory of a centralized, ancient Egyptian "hydraulic state" was crafted to justify French attempts to reshape Egypt's irrigated landscape. British hydraulic engineers later received and refined this narrative during the British colonial period. Their popularizing discourse retrojected the technocratic character of modern irrigation into antiquity, defining the Egyptian "irrigation system" as a static and unchanging fusion of hydraulic expertise and state power. Widely disseminated in specialist and popular fora, this tendentious argument had become received wisdom by the beginning of the twentieth century and subtly shaped early Egyptological descriptions of irrigation in antiquity. Abstract Reviews of the historiography of irrigation regularly single out Karl August Wittfogel's "hydraulic
Water and power: Reintegrating the state into the study of Egyptian irrigation
The study of irrigation in ancient Egypt has swung between two poles. Early environmental‐determinist scholarship stressed the imperative of state control while the most recent work denies the state any significant role and instead emphasizes the agency of local communities. This article briefly explores the historiography of Egyptian irrigation, critiquing both its colonialist roots and the extreme reaction against colonialist preconceptions that marks current scholarship. A case study of Roman state coordination is then presented as an argument for reintegrating the state into the history of Egyptian water management.
This article analyzes the structure of the irrigation system in the medieval Nile Delta. In the period in which agricultural lands were irrigated by the Nile flood, the so-called Basin Irrigation System is considered to have been the basis of society. However, the Basin Irrigation System of the medieval period has not been thoroughly studied by historians, and therefore remains unknown. This study focuses on the “sultan’s banks” (jisr sulṭānī), which were the most significant irrigation works at the time. The objective of this study is to unveil the locations of the sultan’s banks and the structure of the irrigation system by using Ottoman archival sources. The analysis shows the locations of the sultan’s banks in Gharbīya province, located in the central part of the Nile Delta, their irrigation areas, as well as the surrounding environment. It demonstrates the centralized structure of the irrigation system. Finally, the study concludes that the sultanic administration of irrigation based on the supervision of the sultan’s banks played a crucial role in the rule of rural areas.
The Egyptian Nile: Human Transformation of an Ancient River
River culture: life as a dance to the rhythm of the waters, 2023
The Nile, the longest river of the world, connects Northeast Africa from its headwaters near Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean Sea. This chapter focuses on the Nile in Egypt, where the river's annual inundation (until the building of the two modern dams at Aswan) was the source of the country's fecundity and guarantor of its civilization since the 6 th millennium BCE. While the historical population of Egypt remained at a maximum of c. four million people until the mid-19 th century when Vice-Roy Muhammad Ali modernized the country, in 2019 the number passed the threshold of 100 million people. Increased demographic pressure, the alteration of the country's ecology through the mega-impact of the construction of the Aswan High Dam, and industrialization have led to a massive transformation of the Nile River system. One of the consequences has been an almost complete extinction of the country's native fauna and flora. The overuse of the water (rice and cotton irrigation projects) and the absence of the river's historical natural sedimentation have had irreversible effects on Egypt's agriculture and heritage (salination; disappearance of archaeological sites) and caused land loss to rising sea levels in the delta. In view of the environmental degradation in the Nile valley, and the dangers to Egypt's water security posed by overpopulation and the construction of the Merowe dams in Sudan and the Renaissance dam in Ethiopia, sustainable water management is of critical importance.