Flooding of the Nile

The annual cycles of the Nile were very important to the lives of ancient Egyptians. The Nile ‘mysteriously’ but predictably rose each summer to flood and fertilize the land, without rain and in the hottest time of the year. A good flood and Egypt’s wealth was assured; a poor flood or too great of a flood and Egypt would suffer.

The cyclic mystery created awe and stimulated worship, and the job of recording the history of Nile flooding, when the Nile was expected to flood, and the locations of farmers’ plots after the floodwaters receded stimulated creation of the first scientific instrument (the Nilometer), astronomy, and surveying.

The concerns of ancient Egyptians for a good flood were justified. The failure of the Nile floods and the generally low level of the river is thought to have been responsible for the collapse of the Old Kingdom about 4200 years ago. These concerns are captured in the Bible, where Joseph correctly interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams of 7 years of abundance and 7 years of poverty in Egypt to relate to good and then bad Nile floods.

Ledyard, in his Travels, speaks contemptuously of this celebrated wonder:-"This is the mighty, the sovereign of rivers-the vast Nile that has been metamorphosed into one of the wonders of the world! Let me be careful how I read, and, above all, how I read ancient history. You have heard, and read too, much of its inundations. If the thousands of large and small canals from it, and the thousands of men and machines employed to transfer, by artificial means, the water of the Nile to the meadows on its banks-if this be the inundation that is meant, it is true; any other is false; it is not an inundating river.”

More recently, drought during the 1980s led to widespread starvation in Ethiopia and Sudan but Egypt was protected from drought by water impounded in Lake Nasser.