Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [30]
Cutting through the harsh landscape of the desert flowed the Nile, the world’s longest river, with its beginnings in the mountains near the equator in central Africa. Gathering the rainfall and snowmelt of the Ethiopian highlands and all of northeastern Africa, and wandering for more than 4,100 miles, the Nile was Egypt’s life force. Starting at the end of June, when the rainy season began in central Africa, the Nile flooded its banks each year, leaving a strip of fertile, dark silt that averaged about 6 miles wide on each side of the river. The annual rising of its waters set the Egyptian calendar of sowing and reaping with its three seasons of four months each: inundation, growth, harvest. The flooding of the Nile from the end of June till late October brought down the rich silt, in which crops were planted and grew from late October to late February, to be harvested from late February till the end of June. The ancient Egyptians called their country Kemet, meaning “Black Land”*—after this rich, dark, life-giving soil.
Barley, which was baked into bread and brewed into beer, and Emmer wheat—an Asian grain well suited to feed cattle—were the staples, along with lentils, beans, onions, garlic, and other crops that grew in abundance in this moist, fertile soil. At times, there were bad years when drought limited the rains, or flooding rains destroyed the crops. But usually, Egypt’s farmers could anticipate and rely upon a surplus that allowed for trading. Trading led to commerce, commerce led to a merchant class, which eventually allowed for the development of the ranks of artisans and craftsmen who didn’t need to depend on farming to live. All of this came from the Nile. As historian Daniel Boorstin puts it in The Discoverers, “The Nile made possible the crops, the commerce, and the architecture of Egypt. Highway of commerce, the Nile was also a freightway for materials of colossal temples and pyramids. A granite obelisk of three thousand tons could be quarried at Aswan and floated two hundred miles down the river to Thebes…. The rhythm of the Nile was the rhythm of Egyptian life.”
Since the welfare and existence of the whole country depended on this one central phenomenon—the annual flooding of the Nile—the river became the centerpiece of Egypt’s religious ideas. The flooding, or inundation, was personified in the form of different deities. The annual rising of the Nile—which was part of the maat—could be fixed to the regular appearance of the “dog star” Sirius, which gave the whole affair a sense of celestial as well as earthly order.
Egypt’s history begins with prehistoric villages that grew up along the banks of the Nile more than five thousand years ago. Before that time, Stone Age Egypt was probably settled by people who came from Libya to the west, Palestine and Syria to the east, and Nubia to the south. Adding to this “multicultural” melting pot were traders from what is now Iraq (ancient Mesopotamia) who may have also settled in the area, attracted by the fertility of the land beside the Nile. Grave sites from these early periods show that the dead were carefully buried, often in a fetal position suggesting notions of an expected rebirth, in burial pits that contained possessions needed for an afterlife—a clue to how ancient religious beliefs were formed very early