Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [17]
In Egypt, geography is destiny. Egyptian religion is a meditation in narrative form on the significance of the unique geographical and climatic features of the country. The warm Nile flows northward out of Africa like a languorous cobra: Its tail starts in African lakes, carrying the rich volcanic soil northward to Egypt. Its body is contained between twin, almost impenetrable desert mountain ranges of the Upper Kingdom. Its hood is stretched out in broad fertile swamps of Lower Egypt’s delta, it jaws biting at the underbelly of the Mediterranean. No wonder the Egyptians depicted the cobra so often as the symbol of kingship.
The desert and the mountains make the country virtually invulnerable on the east and west, disciplining the Nile into a long, thin valley. Through the middle of this long, oval basin runs a pronounced but very narrow, green stripe of alluvial fertility, on either side of the river. The border of green represents the furthest reach of the Nile’s flood; in many places that border is so distinct that one can stand with one foot on the desert sand and one on cultivated land. Indeed, one ancient Egyptian word for Egypt is Khemet—the Black (i.e., fertile) Land.
In ancient Egypt, the most practical movement throughout the country was up the Nile or down the Nile, greatly aided by the prevailing wind originating from the north or northwest and blowing southward on many, fortunate days. For the ancient Egyptian, upstream therefore meant south, a direction navigated by sailing with the wind, or by tacking across it, which explains the invention of the lateen-rigged, triangular sail of the Egyptian faluka (pl. fala’ik). Travel north was simpler still, as it was downstream, running with the current. The Nile Valley as a climatic and geographical system is unique among the world’s great river basins, leaving a mark on the Egyptian sensibility in culture and religion. Egypt is virtually a self-enclosed system.
Given the poverty and overpopulation of modern Egypt, it is hard to remember that, in ancient times, Egypt was synonymous with both wealth and wisdom. Since the ancient world’s wealth depended on agriculture, Egypt was a paradise on earth. It could harvest three crops a year. The regular annual flooding of the Nile deposited a constantly renewing layer of fertile soil, carried down river from Africa, producing an unparalleled agricultural opportunity, which was exploited for millennia for grains, fruits, and vegetables. In the Delta, this dark stripe spread out into wide green marshes; along the banks to the south, the arable land was extended east and west by cleverly designed irrigation pumps and canals. The river itself was richly populated with tasty animal life-including game, fowl, and fish.
Rightly did Herodotus call Egypt “the gift of the Nile.” No one since has proclaimed a more apt or heroic epithet for this country. As there is virtually no rain in the country, the Nile river is the only practical source of water. Flooding of the Nile is not a catastrophe but a great divine blessing-the source of Egypt’s very existence. In a sense, the Nile has a cycle of birth and death on an annual basis. By summer, the river lies quietly and moves slowly, while the fields beside it gradually parch, turn to dust, erode, and blow away into the desert with the sandstorms. After which, the only available water for agriculture comes from a few wells, likely fed by the Nile too, as the winter rains of the Near East almost entirely bypass Egypt.
The cycle starts in August as the sun ends its eclipse of the Dog Star, Sirius, giving the month one of its oldest epithets, “the dog days of summer.” In Egypt Sirius was known as the goddess Sothis, who was the harbinger of the Nile’s flooding. At the start of autumn the