False Economy - Alan Beattie [40]
By the time of Herodotus, Egypt had been united as one realm under the rule of the pharaohs for more than two and a half millennia. But the growing of barley and a primitive form of wheat had been established well before that, as had early versions of artificial irrigation to capture the potential of the river.
Wheat and barley are both highly dependent on water, and the elemental importance of the river soaked into the politics, culture, and religion of those who lived around it. The lives and identities of several deities took inspiration from the waterway: Hapi, a god in the shape of a frog, represented the delta or its annual floods. The Egyptians oriented their compass toward the south, the source of the Nile, and the Egyptian calendar was built around the seasons of the river, the new year starting with the midsummer flood.
The natural irrigation of the annual Nile inundations, between what is now July and October, would probably have allowed a single crop season over about two-thirds of the area covered by the flooding river. During the two millennia before the pharaonic era began (ca. 3000 b.c.), farmers extended the reach of the river. They built terraced fields along the valley, dredged the natural overflow channels that held floodwater in ponds after the level of the water had receded, dug ditches to breach the low points of natural levees, and lifted water directly from ponds or channels into fields by bucket.
One of the more important artifacts of pre-pharaonic Egypt is the romantically named "mace-head of the Scorpion King," a fragment of limestone scepter that shows a warrior monarch digging an irrigation ditch with a ceremonial hoe. (The scene is pleasingly reminiscent of a modern-day photo opportunity, with a politician turning the first spadeful of earth on the foundation of a new highway.) The swampy and forested delta itself, as opposed to the upper valley, was harder to cultivate. But it began to dominate economic life around 1400 b.c. onward.
The importance of the river and its flow was evident from the political and social turmoil that accompanied its fluctuations. Low floods meant trouble. Though the Nile was more reliable than many other rivers, it was still erratic. In the third millennium B.C., a series of low floods caused widespread rioting, looting of grain stores, cannibalism, and starvation. Hundreds of bodies were left rotting in the perfidious river.
During the reign of the pharaohs Ramses III and Ramses VIII in the twelfth century B.C., a water shortage drove up the price of wheat by twenty-four times. The fear of low waters that quite literally haunted Egypt's rulers made it into the Book of Genesis in the form of the pharaohs nightmare about seven fat and seven thin cattle, and seven good and seven stunted ears of grain, interpreted by Joseph to mean seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. Such erratic harvests and their devastating impact are lasting evidence of the inconsistency of the Nile floods.
Nevertheless, monuments to the success of the Egyptian civilization in overcoming them still stand in the desert. Ancient Egypt had a precociously centralized and well-ordered society, and as early as the third millennium b.c. had developed relatively sophisticated systems of irrigation and grain storage. The temples and pyramids that remain of ancient Egypt are testament to its skillful management of food supply, which enabled sufficient labor to be spared from farming the land to carve columns and haul blocks of stone.
Egypt, along with Sicily and the wheat-growing regions around the Black Sea, also developed into a principal grain exporter for the Mediterranean. The fifty days after the summer equinox were regarded throughout the Mediterranean as the prime days for trading. This was as much because it followed the Egyptian harvest—wheat was planted after the flood receded in the autumn and then reaped in the spring—as the mildness and suitability of