by Peter Zeihan
In comparison, Egypt’s borders are a class apart. To the west, it is six hundred miles from the western edge of the Nile delta to where rain falls regularly enough to support a non-nomadic population (contemporary Benghazi, Libya). Six hundred miles of dry, hot empty is a long thing to raid across. Land attack from the east was more likely, but that’s not to say it was probable. The Sinai Peninsula is just as inhospitable as the Bible suggests, and the three hundred miles between the delta and the Jordan River valley have proven to be a formidable barrier right up to (and even into) contemporary times. A southerly approach seems better, and indeed following the Nile is certainly a less painful affair than trudging through desert. But as one moves upriver south, the Nile valley narrows—to a steep canyon in places, complete with the occasional rapids (locally known as cataracts)—and it is a long, winding nine-hundred-mile route before you reach a geography and climate that can support a meaningful population (contemporary Khartoum, Sudan). Establishing multiple defensive positions along this route is quite easy.
In other words, you really have to want to get to Egypt.
Within Egypt, however, things are very different.
Within Egypt the Nile does two things. First and most obviously, it makes mass food production possible. Every patch of land within sight of the river is under cultivation, generating the most consistent food surpluses of any land throughout the history of not just the ancient world, but also the classical, medieval, and even early industrial worlds. This food surplus created the world’s densest population footprint for most of human history (the only exception being contemporary Bangladesh). Combine that with the country’s desert buffers, and any outside influence that was not an outright invasion would be so diluted in the sheer mass of the Egyptian population that the government would have little problem retaining control.
Second, by ancient standards the interior of Egypt was remarkably easy to get around in. From Aswan downriver, the valley is flat, in the dry season turning the river into a very slow-moving lake. The lack of elevation change results in a hazy, lazy downriver ride, while Egypt’s prevailing north-to-south winds allow for fairly reliable upriver sailing. The Nile could support riverine traffic in a way that the Tigris, Euphrates, and Indus—cursed with faster currents, less reliable seasonal flows and winds, and omnipresent sandbars—never could.
The key is the difference between the ease of internal versus external transport. Just as the difficulty of external transport inhibited invasion for centuries, allowing the Egyptians to wallow in splendid isolation, the ease of transport within so facilitated governance that Egypt was able to consolidate into a single kingdom more than five thousand years ago. For the first millennia and a half of Egyptian history, outsiders simply could not penetrate into the Egyptian core. Yet within the Nile valley, the Egyptian government had very little trouble moving manpower, resources, the tools of governance, and even giant blocks of stone around within its riverine-based system.
The many braids of the Nile combined with the flatness of the terrain to allow the narrow stretch of Egyptian civilization to be seen from the river. The pharaoh could—and often did—take a boat cruise down the river and visually inspect nearly all of his kingdom without setting foot on land. The current and accurate assessments enabled by such easy travel helped governmental policy to match and respond to reality—a concept that might not seem a major deal in a world of smart phones, but was revolutionary in the world before paper. Tax collection could reach every part of the valley, and such activity ensured that the government maintained a firm grip on every aspect of society. Food stores could be distributed quickly and easily to mitigate local famine; the population crashes and rebellions that plagued cultures well into the modern era were far less common in Egypt. Revolts could be quelled quickly because troops could be summoned with speed; fast military transport enabled the government to nip problems in the bud. In their sequestered existence, the Egyptians thrived.
Sequestered, however, is precisely the word. Just as the invaders couldn’t cross the desert gaps beyond the Nile valley, neither could the Egyptians. While everything about the river was core to the Egyptian identity, the Egyptians were never really able to expand beyond it. A grand canal dug from a western braid of the Nile allowed for the regulated flooding of the Faiyum Depression, bringing another five hundred square miles into Egypt’s green zone, but that is the only significant expansion of Egypt’s agricultural lands until the twentieth century, and even that expansion was only about twenty miles west of the riverbed itself.
Ventures farther abroad were almost unheard of. As the Nile flows through the desert, Egypt—ancient or otherwise—lacks trees. What few were available for boat construction were largely reserved for ego projects ranging from royal barges to monument construction. Reed boats were not just for biblical figures like Moses. Only once in the long reign of the Egyptian dynasties did Cairo make a serious effort to extend its power beyond the core Nile territories—in about 1500 BC Thutmose I conquered the Levant up to the Hatay—but even that effort was merely a fit of pique that didn’t outlive the conquering pharaoh. The sheer isolation limited Egyptian knowledge of the world. It was so thin its leaders were shocked when confronted with the fact that some rivers flowed south.1
Yet while Egypt was safe on its side of the deserts, pharaonic power—and Egyptian identity—stopped where the irrigated land met the harshness of the desert, a line of demarcation between verdant fertility and arid sand so exact that it could be drawn with a pen. This simple dichotomy—easy transport within, difficult transport beyond—enabled Egypt to be home to not only the first ever national identity, and one of the world’s largest well into the medieval period, but it also prevented it from playing a significant role on the regional stage.
This differential also shaped what type of people the Egyptians would become.
Every place that was within sight of the Nile was also a food-producing region, so there was never a pressing need to develop a nationwide food distribution system—that made the maritime transport system specifically, and transport in general, the province of the state. The military and the bureaucracy could move about (and did), but the common man could not (and did not), firmly entrenching the concept of central control. And as we well know from history, the term “common man” isn’t particularly accurate. Deserts, even desert floodplains, do not magically produce foodstuffs. Harnessing the river to store water for the dry season is a year-round, labor-intensive chore that requires a high degree of top-level planning and organization. Failure in central planning and organization would without fail translate into famine within months. People were rooted to the towns of their birth and tightly, ahem, managed. Nor did they have options. Every town was an agricultural town, and for Egyptians to leave the Nile valley was as difficult as it was for invaders to reach it. Theirs was a geography destined not just to generate slavery, but slavery of the masses.
It was destined to generate a different sort of slavery as well.
… Must Come Down
Necessity is indeed the mother of invention, and for the first age of pharaonic history (roughly 3150–1650 BC) there was neither necessity nor even the ability to compare notes with a neighboring civilization. Developments in agriculture, transport, and education ended with unification. Instead of generating higher and higher food surpluses, or attempting either to advance their civilization or to expand it past the confines of the Nile, the Egyptians dedicated all spare labor to monument construction. They got really good at building really big piles of rocks, but technological innovation came to a screeching halt.2
But only in Egypt.
Cultures elsewhere—even the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Indus—continued to exist in a crucible. For them existence was a struggle. A struggle against famine. Against nature. Against each other. New technologies developed to deal with problems that Egypt was blissfully unaffected by. Writing led to literacy. Copper led to bronze. Spears led to swords. Domestica
ted animals led to chariots. All of these technologies that most people associate with ancient Egypt were not actually developed there, because in Egypt there was no pressure for development past their original technologies of irrigated agriculture, basic engineering, small boats, and hieroglyphics. Even the word “pharaoh” was an import.
In time two of these “new” technologies—the domesticated camel and a sailing ship that could transport meaningful volumes of cargo—proved Egypt’s undoing. Outsiders could use these techs to breach Egypt’s desert buffers, and when they did they discovered the civilization that all had assumed was mighty and impregnable was in reality languid and backward. They also discovered that Egypt’s slave-heavy population lacked motivation to fight for their country. Anyone who possessed the technical skills necessary to defeat the desert was also advanced enough to conquer Egypt with almost contemptuous ease.
Instead of being the greatest of the civilizations, Egypt became an easily conquerable breadbasket for anyone seeking to rule the Mediterranean basin. Once the Nile was secured, the conquering power could redirect the population from pyramid building to food production. The excess food output could be diverted out of the Nile region to fuel the conquering power’s bid for Mediterranean control.3
The Egyptians first lost their independence in 1620 BC to the Hyksos (commonly known in the West as natives of Canaan), and then were independent only intermittently until the Roman conquest in the first century BC. From there the rule of Egypt is a who’s who of the ancient, medieval, and industrial eras: Greek city-states, the Persian Empire, the Great Arab Jihad, the Sublime Porte of the Ottomans, the armies of Napoleon, or the bureaucrats of the East India Company. The Egyptians never built another pyramid. And after the Roman conquest, they were not independent for a single day until the collapse of the European colonial era after World War II.
All of which came to pass because transport was easy for Egyptians within their own borders but almost impossible for them beyond.
CHAPTER 3
Technological Revolutions: Deepwater Navigation and Industrialization
There are many technologies that change the way people live, but only a rare few that change the way the world at large actually works. The reason is simple: Geography is static. Only a precious few technologies fundamentally alter how peoples interact with their geography. Either you have a river and can trade locally and cheaply and build your regional identity and capital base, or you don’t and you remain unaffiliated and poor. Either you live in the mountains and are isolated from others culturally and militarily and have an independent streak, or you’re part of the ebb and flow and rise and fall of empires. In the main, these are the ways that geography has shaped human experience.
But there are a few technological packages that have been so successful and far-reaching in their implementation that they have changed the rules of how peoples and nations interact. These few packages have come to define the age of the day.
As you may have guessed from the previous chapter, sedentary agriculture makes the short list of transformative technologies. Irrigation and crop differentiation took humans from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to modifying the land itself in order to produce greater concentrations of what humans wanted, on time schedules that were sufficiently reliable to allow for settlement. Once crop cycles were hammered out, populations could grow and provide spare labor to build roads, walls, buildings, and everything else that makes civilization worthy of the name. Beginning around 6000 BC, the secrets of agriculture radiated outward from places like Egypt and Mesopotamia, and their adoption created the groundswell of civilizations, interactions, and competitions of the ancient world.
Many of the technologies developed over the course of the next five millennia allowed humans to improve upon agriculture, but none resulted in the fundamental shift in circumstance that agriculture did. Copper and iron increased productivity as compared to wood and stone. Cannon and muskets increased range and lethality and required changes in battle tactics. The details—all of the details—changed, but the core that stability and power came from a robust, secure, and sustainable food supply remained. It wasn’t until the past half millennium that two packages of technologies, in sequence, radically altered the human condition. But before we launch into the first, it is critical to understand the shape of the world the day before the next transformative technology changed everything.
The Ottoman Empire: The Nearly Superpower
Keep in mind the balance of transport: Moving stuff is hard, and moving stuff by water is easier than moving stuff by land. Successful countries tend to be those that boast robust options for maritime transport, but that maritime transport has to be of a fairly specific type.
In the world before 1400, true ocean transport was a rare thing, being neither quick nor reliable nor safe. The problem was sight. Once line of sight to the land was lost, you had to more or less guess where you were and what heading might take you to where you needed to go and hope that you would make landfall before exhausting your supplies, or before the weather turned and the sea swallowed you up. The need to keep land in sight sharply limited long-range voyages, as coastal peoples often had opinions about who would be allowed to sail along their coasts.
In this era nearly all of the major, durable powers fell into one of two categories. The first were powers with navigable rivers that could easily extend their cultural reach up and down the river valley, enrich themselves with local trade, and use the resources of their larger footprint to protect themselves from—or force themselves upon—rivals. The second were powers that lived on seas sufficiently enclosed that they were difficult to get lost within. These seas didn’t work quite as well as rivers, but they certainly blunted the dangers of the open ocean and allowed for regional transport and trade. France, Poland, Russia, and a few of the Chinese empires fell into the first category, while the Swedes, Danes, Phoenicians, and Japanese fell into the second.
In this pre-oceanic-shipping era, one country nearly emerged as the European hegemon, largely because it qualified for both baskets and did so in a way bigger than other powers. The Ottoman Empire originated on the shores of the Sea of Marmara, a nearly enclosed sea small enough that it functioned as a river in terms of facilitating cultural unification, but large enough that it allowed for a reasonable volume of regional trade. And Marmara didn’t exist in isolation. To its northeast was the Black Sea, while to its southeast lay the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean—all three enclosed bodies of water that the Ottomans were able to use their naval acumen to dominate. Emptying into the western Black Sea was the Danube, by far Europe’s largest river, which allowed the Ottomans to expand as far north into Europe as Vienna. By the measures of the day, the Ottomans had within easy reach more useful land, river, and sea than any other power—and nearly more than all of their European rivals combined.
And then there was trade. From their home base at the supremely well-positioned Istanbul, the Ottomans dominated all land and sea trade between Europe and Asia and from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.
The largest and most lucrative of those trade routes was the famous Silk Road, the source of all spices that made it to Europe. Pepper, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, cumin, and saffron might seem like minor luxuries today, but their only sources were in South and Southeast Asia. Between the unreliable nature of ocean transport and the yet-to-be-mapped African continent, there was no reliable all-water route. The only way to access Asian spices was for the Silk Road to traverse China, Central Asia, Persia, and ultimately Ottoman-controlled lands. Between the hundreds of middlemen, the sheer distances involved, and the hefty tax the Islamic Ottomans placed on spice transfers to Christian Europe, upper-class Europeans often spent as much on spices as they did on food. In a manner somewhat similar to that of the contemporary Arab oil states, the spice trade perennially transferred massive volumes of wealth from Europe to the Turks.
Benefiting from the most strategic location on the planet, Europ
e’s longest river, three manageable seas, and the most profitable trade routes of the time, the Ottomans came but one battle away from dominating all of mainland Europe. In 1529, they laid siege to Vienna at the head of the Danube valley. Had they won they would have been able to pour an empire’s worth of resources through the gap between the Alps and Carpathians onto the North European Plain, a wide highway within which the Turks would have faced no barriers to conquest.
But they failed—because the world had changed.
Deepwater Navigation I: Expanding the Field
While the Turks were making their bid for hegemony in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a technological revolution was altering how people and countries interacted not just with each other, but with their geography. Lands that languished in the old world began prospering in the new. The converse proved true as well: The new technologies transformed the Sea of Marmara from the richest and most secure topography on the planet to a backwater, condemning the Ottoman Empire to a slow-motion collapse.
Collectively the new technologies ended ocean shipping’s likelihood of being a near-death (or worse) experience.