Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (13 page)

There is no question in my mind that the Pyramids and the Sphinx are an idealised artificial rendition of the desert home of the first Egyptians. They are rather like the lifelike pirate ship in Las Vegas, there to remind you of something alien and different but still somehow compelling and essential. It is as if the first Egyptians were saying, Now we have quit the desert we must not forget where we came from.

Herodotus states that the first Pharaoh, known as Menes in later accounts though no contemporary record of this name exists, built the city of Memphis, the first capital of ancient Egypt, after he had united the kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt. He chose Memphis (only a few kilometres south of modern Cairo), situated just below the delta where the Nile split into two main channels, because this was the start of Upper Egypt (Lower Egypt being the fertile regions of the delta to the north).

The fertile regions of the delta. Or were they, at that time? Menes, Herodotus tells us, drained the marshy regions of the Nile to create the terrain for Memphis. He did so by building the first dam on the
River Nile. It was the marshy regions that had kept early Egyptians in the desert in the first place. The desert at this time, as we have seen, was perfectly capable of supporting life and not the barren waste it gradually became. So it is quite likely that Menes and his people chose Memphis because, though marshy, it was a lot less boggy than the delta of 5,000 years ago. It was the closest inhabitable spot to the Mediterranean sea.

And even then it wasn’t that habitable. Menes still needed to build a dam, or dams, to divert the river. The standard reason given is that he wanted to build on the western side of the Nile, but in those days the Nile’s path ran right under the Libyan Hills. Handy for delivering stone but inconvenient as a place to build lower down. So Menes supposedly diverted the Nile higher up at Kosheish a dozen miles upstream – that is, south – of Memphis. This dam was made of cut stone, we are told, and was fify feet high and 1,500 feet wide.

The only way such a small dam could have worked against the immense power of the Nile would have been if the river had already split into several streams, and Menes’ dam was simply a way of diverting one stream into another. In all likelihood the Nile at that stage was already splitting into branches; Menes merely postponed such development until the delta. On the reclaimed land he built Memphis.

Where is Memphis now? Under the new path of the Nile? Destroyed to build later versions of Cairo? Subsumed under the silt of ages? Perhaps a little of all of these three. As the Old Kingdom capital perhaps it wasn’t anything like as huge as that of the New Kingdom – Thebes, now present-day Luxor (whose name comes from the Arabic for ‘the palaces’ – Al-Uxor).

We know that up until the high dam in Aswan was constructed – when the silt was much reduced in quantity (the first Aswan dam in 1902 let through the flood specifically to avoid the problem of silt retention) – the Nile valley increased five inches every hundred years. So a little over four feet every thousand years – so twenty feet have been added since Memphis was built 5,000 years ago. Whatever remains of the city will have to be dug out of ground that will become instantly waterlogged, requiring, as much archaeology in the delta also does, constant and costly pumping operations.

How would Menes have diverted the Nile with no heavy diggers and pumps? Willcocks gives us a clue when he speaks of the corvée, the indentured nineteenth-century labour force of fellahin, peasants
of the delta, forced by the ruler of Egypt to dig canals and build levees against the flood. He observed thousands of men working with their bare hands and transporting mud on their backs. If they had tools they worked more efficiently, to be sure, but the lack of tools did not deter them from extremes of effort, often under the lash of harsh overseers. Willcocks also speaks of hundreds of men filling a channel through the use of the
shadouf
, the traditional method of shifting water into a higher ditch. The
shadouf
is really a bucket on a long lever; weighted at one end, it is swung into the lower stream and dumps water into the higher. Willcocks writes, ‘They lifted water with over a hundred shadoofs working side by side. Each shadoof had four men, who worked incessantly night and day in rotation so that the shadoof never stopped for a minute. In addition to this each shadoof had four boys who worked by rotation . . . helping the weight as the bucket ascended . . . The life and animation of the scene I have never seen surpassed; while the resulting stream of water could not have been lifted by the largest portable engine.’ There are parts of Egypt where things have not changed since pharaonic times. We can assume that the ability to work in unison in vast numbers, seen as late as the nineteenth century, was very similar to that which enabled men like Menes, thousands of years ago, to change a river’s course and, of course, build the Pyramids.

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The Nile pump

When the marsh dries, the smell gets worse
. Sudanese proverb

That Menes went to so much trouble was no more mysterious than the Pyramids themselves. But it becomes more understandable when we consider that the ancient Egyptians had already learnt to control the Nile through the use of Lake Moeris, what is now known as Lake Qarun in the Fayoum oasis.

Lake Qarun, when you turn off the highway from Fayoum, looks like the sea. There are big waves lapping the shore and fishermen standing up to their waists throwing nets.

But the lake is dying, or at least getting saltier by the year. This can be directly related to the damming of the Nile at Aswan. In 1902 when the first dam was built using William Willcocks’ plans the Nile was
tamed. With the high dam in 1970 the Nile was neutered. The salinity began its increase around the beginning of the twentieth century due to the reduction in the yearly flush of the inundation. With a flood of reduced impact the canals that ran from the Nile to Lake Qarun were no longer filled at the same rate. The lake began to grow more saline. By the time of the second dam no water was getting into the lake. Its fate was sealed when the fertilisers used around the lake began to re-enter the water as run-off – the need for fertiliser being a direct result of the end of basin irrigation, which relied on Nile silt, and the beginning of dammed perennial irrigation when fertiliser was added to the constant water source.

That Lake Qarun, or Moeris, waxed and waned in size I discovered for myself when I visited Qasr el-Sagha with my good friend the explorer Tahir Shah. Qasr el-Sagha is an Old Kingdom temple (though often confusingly listed as New Kingdom) which stands a good mile or more from the modern edge of Lake Qarun. It is surrounded by gritty, almost sandless desert. Behind it rise layers of escarpment that contain the caves of later Christian hermits and monks. Why build here unless the lake lapped this far inland?

We know that the shore had receded massively by later Ptolemaic times because of the abandoned city of Dimeh which lies much closer to the lake’s edge, a few miles from Qasr el-Sagha. Dimeh is filled with broken Roman pottery, and the walls are mud brick. Three thousand years earlier the builders of Qasr el-Sagha used massive masonry blocks cut unevenly yet fitting together perfectly – the same construction technique can be seen in the walls of Cuzco in Peru and in the Sphinx temple in Giza.

My own interest in Qasr el-Sagha was not only because of its situation at the edge of the original Nile reservoir. It also derived from its connection to both Schweinfurth and Willcocks – men whose combined knowledge of the Nile is probably unsurpassed. They were friends and, when in Cairo, used to walk out together around Wadi Digla, a place now favoured by mountain-bikers and hikers. Schweinfurth had been second fiddle on the expedition made by Gerhard Rohlfs in 1873 across the Sahara. I had replicated this journey in 2010, finding that Schweinfurth had exaggerated the difficulties of the terrain. Strangely this made me feel more not less sympathy for him; when an expedition has been paid for by the public one feels duty bound to make it sound heroic. What was indeed heroic was his later journey into the heart of Africa to
the fabled land of Bongo, where he meticulously recorded the habits of the cannibal Azande people. But more of this later.

Schweinfurth had been the original discoverer of the mysterious Qasr el-Sagha, which consists of a large inner room with what look like seven bays for statues. There are also several mysterious rooms which can be entered only through a hole near the floor the size of a large cat-flap. But what Schweinfurth and all subsequent archaeologists have missed, though I am sure Willcocks didn’t, was that Qasr el-Sagha is an oracle temple – similar to that found in Siwa where Alexander the Great went to discover the cause of the Nile’s flood (and to find out whether he would rule the world, if the geographer Strabo’s account is to be believed). At Siwa, where Schweinfurth ended up after his desert journey, is the oracle of Ammon. It sits on top of a fifty-foot-high rock plug and is a rudely made series of rooms, interesting mainly because of their connection to antiquity, but also because they reveal the simple cunning in the practice of oracular arts. High up in the walls there are holes, there by design. Alongside the wall runs a narrow room or corridor from which one could overhear what was said within the room. Or perhaps one could intone a prophecy from within the corridor and the words would emerge as if magically spoken. If the walls were hung with tapestries or wooden panels, as they would have been, the communicating holes would be hidden, operating like a ship’s secret telegraph system.

The same set-up is visible at Qasr el-Sagha, and was pointed out to me by Justin Majzub: a secret corridor running within the outer wall with a small hole at one end in the entrance wall of the temple. The entrance to the secret corridor is easy to miss – it’s a slim door in the outer wall – and was no doubt concealed in earlier times, as the listening or speaking hole in the grander main entrance would have been.

What is remarkable is not that Schweinfurth missed the similarity but that not a single archaeological description of Qasr el-Sagha refers to its obvious oracle function. One can safely assume that its position was connected somehow to the function of Lake Qarun/Moeris as the regulating reservoir of the Nile. One may speculate that the oracle might furnish advance information on the extent of the flood and how large a supply might be caught within the ambit of the lake. Such information would be of crucial use. Perhaps the rate at which the lake filled would have some bearing on the size of the flood; perhaps other key
indicators were used rather as today commodity speculators use complicated cross-indicators of weather and natural disasters to compute the future price of a trade.

The entrance to Lake Moeris was a diversionary canal known for centuries as Joseph’s Canal. Willcocks, the ever present water engineer of the Nile, suggested that a close reading of Genesis indicates that Joseph controlled Lake Moeris at a crucial stage in biblical history.

That the original dams remain is not in question – vast dam-like edifices of cut stone lie by the Pyramid of Hawara (where the Egyptologist Flinders Petrie also unearthed a papyrus roll that comprised books one and two of Homer’s
Iliad
). Joseph’s Canal still passes within thirty yards of the Pyramid, and due to increased winter river levels floods the Pyramid entrance.

But control of Lake Moeris pre-dates Joseph by hundreds of years. When the system eventually decayed, perhaps during one of the many periods of unrest between dynasties, the Fayoum oasis blossomed in the old lake bed. The lake shrank to its old size; we know this because of prehistoric stone tools found all around its current edge. Yet further up, much further, near Qasr el-Sagha we find the remains of Nile shellfish – a sure sign that the lake’s size has not been constant. On the far side the land is mainly low except where it rises on the bluff at the artist colony of Tunis. This low land – all prime agricultural acreage – would have been under water for half the year as the lake operated as a giant regulator for the ebb and flow of the Nile.

With such control of the Nile the delta could have been better irrigated throughout the year. The Nile – according to records stretching back over a thousand years – never has two low floods one after another. If one year is low the next will always be normal or high. The idea that low floods in succession cause famines cannot be supported; just as in Ethiopia and the Sudan in the present era, famine is the result of a natural disaster magnified greatly by political inaction or unrest. So, it seems, with the lake operating as a reservoir protecting against the possibility of a low flood, Egypt was the first country in the world to wrest control of its own food supply from the lap of the gods.

At night the sun sets across the sea-like extent of Lake Qarun and you see the tail lights of fishermen returning home, two-up on cheap Chinese-made motorbikes. They have been beating the water all day just as their ancestors did for 5,000 or more years. Now that there is no
more flood to recharge the lake with fresh water, it is gradually turning to salt. There is even some talk of stocking it with sea bass and bream. But not much serious talk. In a few years the lake will be too saline for any kind of edible fish. In fact it will resemble the vast lakes around Siwa. The two ancient oracles are now silent and facing the lapping sound of dead waters.

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Sex lives and crumbling papyrus

If one speaks about everything the heart remains empty
.
Ethiopian proverb

In this biography of the Red Nile we must not shrink from revealing all. The silent desert culture that gave way to the prolific riverine one is, thanks to the drawings of the Turin Erotic Papyrus (dubbed the ‘world’s earliest men’s mag’ with pictures of different sexual positions), and from the evidence of ancient lyric poetry, one where a great deal can be known about the intimate life of ordinary people.

In the myth Isis was grovelling around in the marsh searching for her husband’s penis. In reality, it seems that, in sexual matters, the ancient Egyptian woman dominated the male, was rather exacting and certainly not weak willed.