That same season—which also saw the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire take a dahabiya up the Nile from Cairo to Wadi Halfa, a journey memorably documented in the letters of the Duke’s personal physician, A.F.R. Platt—was to be Sayce’s last in Egypt. The introduction of the wagon-lit service from Cairo to Luxor had made the winter resorts of Upper Egypt easily accessible by rail, and a lengthy Nile voyage to reach them redundant. Shortly thereafter, two world wars and the Great Depression curtailed the Western appetite for exotic holidays. And by the time tourism to Egypt once again became popular and affordable in the era of the jet-engine, what had once been called “the classic Nile” had become “the great water-way for a large number of travellers.”40 Smaller passenger boats all but disappeared, to be replaced by the multi-decked gin palaces that ply the Nile today (some of them still operating under the name Thomas Cook).
Yet, for the well-heeled visitor to Egypt in search of something quieter, slower, more romantic, there are still a few dahabiyas to be found on the Nile, modern replicas that faithfully recreate the atmosphere of nineteenth-century travel—albeit with an Internet connection and a plasma TV in the state room. From such a craft, seated under the shaded awning on the top deck, it is still possible, with no other boats in sight, to lose yourself in the river’s special aura, and to observe along its banks scenes unchanged since the days of the pharaohs. Travelling no faster than the current itself, you can witness every era of Egypt’s long history—pharaonic, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, colonial and contemporary—unfold before your eyes like the petals of a water lily. For the river is the green thread that runs all the way from the dawn of history to modern times. Sailing gently on its waters is the best way to appreciate Egypt and the truth of Herodotus’ timeless observation, that the country is indeed the gift of the Nile.
The Nile rose from between two sharp peaks … which lay between Elephantine and Syene. Half flowed toward Egypt and the other half toward Ethiopia.1
—HERODOTUS
In the whole corpus of ancient Egyptian literature, the word for “cloud” occurs just twice—once in the Book of the Dead, and once in the Pyramid Texts in an obscure verse describing celestial portents. Clouds, let alone rain-bearing ones, are a rarity in Egypt, and especially so in the far south of the country. On a recent visit to Aswan, a few spots of precipitation (which, in England, would not even be classed as a passing shower) were a cause for celebration among the locals—not least, one suspects, because it gave car-drivers a rare opportunity to try out their windscreen wipers.
But, while rain brings a welcome drop in temperature, a brief respite from the searing heat, the Egyptians have no real need of it. For, as the pharaoh Akhenaten put it in his hymn to the sun god in the fourteenth century BC, while foreign peoples rely on water falling from the heavens, Egypt is nourished by the waters of the inundation, welling up from below ground:
An inundation from the sky for foreigners …
For Egypt the inundation that comes from the underworld.2
For the ancients, this inundation had its source in underground caverns beneath an island in the Nile. For today’s Egyptians, reliable, perennial irrigation is made possible by a High Dam. In both cases, it is the city and region of Aswan that are the source of Egypt’s water. And hence the source of all its life.
As in all Egyptian towns, so in Aswan, every period of history has left its traces. The attentive visitor can observe a palimpsest, with remains from pharaonic, Ptolemaic, Roman, Christian, Islamic, colonial and post-colonial times to be found side by side or one upon another. And, like everywhere in Egypt, Aswan is both timeless and ever-changing. The geographical setting is as spectacular as ever—especially the view over the Nile from the cliffs of the west bank—but where once there was desert, now there are whole suburbs of houses, each with its own satellite dish, crowding the slopes of the eastern escarpment, and multi-storey apartment blocks lining the crest of the hill. The one constant is the river itself, winding its way through the heart of the city, still the life-bringer and the source of Egypt’s prosperity.
Aswan presents the story of Egypt in microcosm—constancy and change, decay and rebirth—and, as the ancient and modern source of the Nile’s life-giving waters, it is a fitting place to start any journey down Egypt’s great river.
ON A HOT, HUMID AUGUST DAY in 1858, after a year’s punishing trek across desert, marsh and mountain, an officer in the Indian Army, John Hanning Speke, climbed to the summit of Isamiro Hill in present-day Tanzania and took in the view. Here, laid out before him, in the heart of Africa, was a great lake whose still waters stretched to the horizon and beyond. Speke was the first white man to set eyes on this massive body of water. With characteristically imperialist chutzpah, he immediately named it Lake Victoria, in honour of his sovereign. Elated at his discovery, Speke wrote, “I no longer felt any doubt that the lake at my feet gave birth to that interesting river, the source of which has been the subject of much speculation.”3 For Speke was certain that he, and he alone, had discovered the source of the Nile.
Today, we may question Speke’s nineteenth-century confidence—Lake Victoria is itself fed by the Kagera River, which flows from the Burundi highlands, while a secondary tributary of the Nile, the Semliki River that feeds Lake Albert, rises in the fabled Mountains of the Moon. But at the time, the British officer appeared to have solved a mystery that had intrigued countless scholars and explorers for over two thousand years.
The Greek historian Herodotus—a man ahead of his time in so many ways—seems to have been the first to speculate in writing on the source of Egypt’s great river. In his extensive commentary on Egyptian geography and history, he conveyed the general ignorance and confusion which surrounded the question in ancient times. At one point, he admitted, “Of the sources of the Nile no one can give any account … it enters Egypt from beyond,” before hazarding a guess, in line with local folklore, that “the Nile rose from between two sharp peaks … which lay between Elephantine and Syene [Aswan]. Half flowed toward Egypt and the other half toward Ethiopia.”4
For the ancient Egyptians, the source of the Nile was indeed to be located in the vicinity of Aswan, where the river entered Egypt and where its annual floodwaters first made their presence noisily felt as they rushed between the boulders and granite outcrops of the First Cataract. More precisely, the ancients believed the Cataract to be the source, not of the river itself, but of its inundation, whose fecundity and bounty they personified as the god Hapy. Depicted as a prodigiously corpulent man with pendulous breasts (what we today would call “moobs”), Hapy cuts an unmistakeable figure. The island of Elephantine, at the foot of the rapids, was venerated as a dwelling-place of Hapy; and a cavern deep below the island was identified as the place where the waters welled up at the start of each flood season.
Travellers who are accustomed to the Nile as broad, tranquil and slow-flowing find the First Cataract a shock and a challenge. As the river breaks through a barrier of hard granite to the south of Aswan, its channel is forced into numerous branches, with torrents flowing swiftly around outcrops and piles of boulders worn smooth by millennia of abrasion. The resulting rapids and shoals, sunken rocks and abraded channel, which extend over a distance of about four miles, present a considerable hazard to shipping, as countless generations of travellers have discovered—sometimes to their cost.
Just six months after Speke had gazed upon Lake Victoria, another giant of Victorian England, the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–59), was experiencing the Nile for himself. Like many of his time and class, Brunel had travelled to Egypt because of ill health, to escape the foggy, raw and dull climate of an English winter for the sun and warmth of a Nile cruise. From Cairo, he sailed southwards in an iron boat called the Florence. But this was too heavy to negotiate the Cataract safely, so he purchased and converted an old wooden date-barge for the journey to Nubia. In a letter to his sister dated 12 February 1859, Brunel described his boat being hauled up rapids at Aswan. Fo
r a man used to overcoming immense practical challenges, it was a fascinating experience:
… they really do drag the boats up rushes of water which, until I had seen it, and had then calculated the power required, I should imprudently have said could not be effected.5
Brunel’s description of the operation as being accomplished with “an immense expenditure of noise and apparent confusion and want of plan, yet on the whole properly and successfully”6 is a fine summary of the Egyptian modus operandi, then and now.
A yet more vivid description of navigating the Cataract flowed from the pen of Amelia Edwards during her trip of 1873–4. This was the era of travel (for the monied classes) by stately dahabiya, and the local bigwig of Aswan knew a money-making opportunity when he saw one. The sheikh of the Cataract exercised a monopoly on shipping through the rapids, and charged travellers the princely sum of £12 for the return trip, up- and downstream, as a succession of dahabiyas made their way to Wadi Halfa and back again during the high season. The actual work of hauling ships up the rapids was left to local Arabs. It took two hundred men four days to haul a single dahabiya through the Cataract, “by sheer stress of rope and muscle.”7 This feat was repeated forty to fifty times each year between November and March. The result was an unforgettable experience for tourists, and a small fortune for the sheikh.
The return journey, running with the current downstream, took a mere half-hour. For Victorian trippers, as for countless travellers down the centuries, navigating northwards through the First Cataract announced their arrival in Egypt, and their entry into another world: “We left behind us a dreamy river, a silent shore, an ever-present desert. Returning, we plunged back at once into the midst of a fertile and populous region.”8
The main centre of population in the Cataract region has always been on the east bank of the Nile, where a broad plain runs back from the river’s edge at the northern end of the rapids. By contrast, the islands in the channel further south, though more easily defensible from marauding desert tribes, have been settled only rarely and sparsely. Since earliest times, these lonely and desolate places have been the haunt of wild animals and the abode of gods.
As a boat heading downstream towards Egypt rounds the first bend in the Nile at the southern end of the Cataract, the island of Biga looms into view. In the golden age of the pharaohs, during the New Kingdom, this was a distribution centre for Nubian imports; but its practical function soon gave way to a more sacred status when it was identified as the location of the grave of Osiris, god of the dead and of resurrection. What more fitting place for the epicentre of rebirth than the island marking the beginning of Egypt! Because of Osiris’ connection with the life-giving waters of the inundation, Biga also came—through the web of associations so characteristic of ancient Egyptian religion—to be regarded as the source of the Nile. The island’s rocky surface thus hid two miracles. Not for nothing was Biga called iat-wabet, “holy island.”
If Biga, way-station to Egypt, belonged to the national god Osiris, then the island of Sehel, at the mid-point of the Cataract, was sacred to the local goddess Anuket. Her name, “embracer,” has a deliberate double meaning: like the Cataract itself, Anuket could both protect and crush. In common with the rapids she embodied, she defended Egypt’s southern frontier but also demanded to be appeased. A shrine to Anuket in the centre of Sehel island and a huge number of dedicatory inscriptions bear witness to the Egyptians’ devotion. In ancient times, expedition leaders, before departing for Nubia, made a pilgrimage to Sehel to pray to Anuket for their safe return. Once arrived back in Egypt, they carved further inscriptions of thanks to the goddess. Sehel was the island of prayers, both offered and heard.
Anuket’s vice-like grip on shipping through the Cataract has remained hard to dislodge. In the nineteenth century BC, under King Khakaura Senusret III, scourge of Nubia, a canal was dug to bypass the Cataract and speed the way for the royal warships as they headed south to conquer and exploit the gold-rich land of Kush. Although the canal, named “Beautiful are the ways of Khakaura,” remained in use for some five hundred years, it regularly silted up under the weight of sediment brought down in the annual floodwaters. Eventually, when pharaohs no longer had the means or the will to dredge it, it disappeared for good and its exact location has never been established. Not until the twentieth century AD, and the construction of the Aswan Dam, was shipping able to navigate the rapids safely. And, even today, the locals who sail their feluccas and fishing-boats through the winding channels and submerged rocks have cause to respect the sacred powers of the Cataract.
The rocks of the Aswan region have proved a considerable blessing as well as a curse. One of the most extensive inscriptions on Sehel lists seven different kinds of rock and three times as many types of precious stone, metal and pigment, all of which could be obtained from quarries in the immediate vicinity. The mineral wealth of the First Cataract was legendary. Throughout pharaonic history, granite for pyramids and temples was quarried on both sides of the river, and on the smaller islands in the Nile. As recently as the early twentieth century, the local rock has been used for major building projects.
The sheer labour involved in extracting large blocks of granite from the bedrock, especially in an era before modern tools, is daunting. Nowhere are the determination and persistence of Egyptian quarrymen more impressively attested than in one of the granite quarries just south of the modern city of Aswan. Here lies one of the unfinished wonders of the world: an abandoned obelisk of truly gigantic proportions. Measuring nearly 140 feet in length and weighing nearly 1,200 tons, the obelisk is the largest known from ancient Egypt. Still lying in its trench, it reveals the secrets of stone-quarrying in the heyday of the pharaohs. Despite the abundance of granite close to Aswan, few quarries would have been suitable for the excavation of so massive a monument. Great experience would have been needed to identify a seam of rock strong and flawless enough. Once the experts had chosen the precise spot, the quarrymen could start their work. First, the dull, outer, weathered layers of rock had to be removed. This was accomplished, laboriously, by lighting fires on the surface and suddenly dousing them with water to shatter the rock, then pounding away with stone hammers until the richly coloured rock underneath was reached. Next, the masons hollowed out vertical test-pits around the perimeter of the quarry site to test for weaknesses or faults in the stone. Only after successful testing did the excavation begin in earnest. The ancient Egyptians’ copper tools were useless against the hardness of granite; only hammers made from dark grey-green igneous dolerite were strong enough. Using such primitive tools, the quarrymen carefully dug trenches to separate the shaft of the emerging obelisk from its parent rock. Pairs of workers, one man squatting facing the shaft of rock, his partner backed up against it, hammered away together, all around the quarry site—perhaps as many as a hundred men at a time. Lines drawn in red ochre on the trench walls showed them where to dig.
The final stage in the process, detaching the obelisk from the bedrock, was especially difficult. Undercutting was nigh-on impossible in such a confined space, and the natural bedding planes seldom ran as desired. Only by inserting stout wooden levers into the vertical shafts, and leaning on them with every ounce of muscle and sinew they could muster, could the quarrymen begin to prise the obelisk free. It seems an almost impossible task, but achieve it they did, and on numerous occasions. Some twenty-nine ancient Egyptian obelisks still survive today, in temples along the Nile Valley itself and in public places from New York to Istanbul.
At last, as the great shaft began to loosen, the front wall of the hole was quarried away to enable the obelisk to be slid out of its trench to a waiting barge for transport to its final destination. But, in the Aswan quarry, for the workers on Egypt’s greatest ever obelisk, that moment never came. For, at an unbelievably late stage in the process of extraction, the great granite shaft developed a fault. Realising it would never stand erect and intact, the masons had to turn their backs on months, perhaps years, of bac
k-breaking work, and abandon the obelisk in its stony grave. There it still lies, witness to the wealth and toil bound up in the Cataract’s rocky landscape.
IF THE ROCKS AND RAPIDS of the Cataract were the place where the Nile’s life-giving force began, then the surrounding region was considered the starting-point of Egypt. From earliest prehistoric times, the Cataract region was a cultural and ethnic frontier zone, a borderland where Egyptian and Nubian peoples and their distinctive ways of life mixed and mingled. Prehistoric Nubian pottery has been found several miles north of the Cataract, Egyptian pottery a considerable distance to the south. This intermingling of cultural traditions no doubt reflects a mixed community of Egyptians and Nubians, a feature that characterises Aswan to this day. While the foaming waters of the Cataract formed a natural, geographical and symbolic boundary, it was always a permeable frontier as far as people were concerned.
Where people come together, so do goods and produce for trade and exchange. At the northern end of the Cataract, where the Nile takes on its peaceable Egyptian character and where the portage road circumventing the rapids comes to an end, there is a broad plain on the river’s east bank where people and their goods have congregated since time immemorial. Here, around a thriving marketplace (ancient Egyptian sunu), a burgeoning settlement grew up, named after its most distinctive feature. Sunu, classical Syene, is better known today by the Arabic form of its name, Aswan. The first city of Egypt—the first major settlement north of the Nubian frontier—is still dominated by a bustling souk. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Egyptians rubbed shoulders with Turks, Abyssinians, Nubians, Sudanese tribespeople, and the Ababdeh and Bishariyah bedouin of the Eastern Desert. The goods on sale at Aswan included lion- and leopard-skins and elephant tusks from sub-Saharan Africa and basketry from Nubia of an ancient design. As Amelia Edwards remarked, “The basket-makers have neither changed their fashion nor the buyers their taste since the days of Ramesses the Great.”9 Today, the market stalls of Aswan are laden with fruit and vegetables, herbs and spices—especially the dried hibiscus flowers used to make the infusion known as karkadeh, a favourite drink in these parts.
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