For the pharaohs, ruling Ancient Egypt meant mastering the Nile

One New Kingdom papyrus illustrates a curious case of power being projected along the river through sheer brinkmanship. It is a tale of two rulers and some hippos during one of the fragmented ‘Intermediate Periods’ (mid-second millennium BCE). One ruler was Apepi of the foreign Hyksos 15th Dynasty, at that time based in the delta city of Avaris. The other was Seqenenra Taa II, ruler of the simultaneous and rival 17th Dynasty, based down in Thebes. One day, Apepi sent a messenger south to Thebes to convey a complaint and an instruction to Seqenenra. 

Apepi claimed that he was being kept awake at night by ‘the hippopotami from the swamp … in the eastern waters of the city [of Thebes], because they do not allow that sleep come to me, day or night, because their noise is in his ear!’ Seqenenra was instructed to “expel the hippopotami.” The papyrus fragment breaks up at the moment that shows Seqenenra pondering this strange complaint from 300 miles away, and we don’t know what happened next. 

Scholarly interpretations abound as to what Apepi was trying to achieve. Was the implication that Seqenenra couldn’t even control the hippopotami — a basic skill for any self-respecting pharaoh? We do know that Seqenenra was later killed in battle, possibly by the Hyksos, but also that the Hyksos were ultimately defeated by Seqenenra’s descendants: the mighty 18th Dynasty of the New Kingdom. So this story may have had a happy ending for New Kingdom audiences. It suggests at the very least some ingenious methods for projecting power along the river. It also conveys, perhaps, the importance of controlling the natural world. A long-standing component of Egyptian kingship was the ritual hunt and killing of hippopotami, demonstrating a kind of power over chaos.

This ability to control nature proved a crucial feature of life on the ancient Nile. Harnessing the Nile flood and keeping the harvests rolling in was as important to controlling the river corridor as defence against usurpers or an ability to exude pharaonic authority. The very earliest visual image of artificial irrigation so far discovered comes from Egypt some 5,000 years ago, from the “predynastic” period just before Narmer. This carving on a stone mace head (a kind of ceremonial bludgeon) depicts the so-called “Scorpion King,” named after the scorpion symbol at his side. On his head sits the White Crown of Upper Egypt and, wielding a hoe, he appears to be engaged in the ritual opening of an irrigation canal. Demonstrating a measure of control over the Nile waters has been an important part of rule in Egypt ever since. 

All being well, the Nile flood made its appearance from June each year, when the swollen floodwaters started to rise downstream reaching the time of the “plenitude” in September, when it drowned the floodplains. Then as floodwaters slowly ebbed away, seeds for the harvest could be sown. In good years this supported two harvests a year; Egypt could then export wheat and barley, serving as the “breadbasket” of a wider world. But only about three-quarters of annual floods achieved this ideal. Too little or too much water meant either drought or the wrong kind of flood, which in turn led to famine and disease.

Rulers couldn’t control the volume of water arriving from thousands of miles upstream but instead relied on a mixture of propitiation of the gods, informed predictions, and blind hope. All along the riverside from Aswan to Memphis, there were “Nilometers” that measured rising water levels as the flood made its way northwards. These took many forms, from simple lines carved into the riverbank marking water levels, such as those at Elephantine near the southern border, to the elaborate structures incorporated into riverside temples of Kom Ombo and Luxor. The domain of temple priests, Nilometers were used to decide when to announce the plenitude and what tax levels to set for the harvest, so that the wealth of the flood could be distributed upwards. Sixteen cubits at the southern border was considered the ideal river depth for the plenitude (one cubit being around the length of a man’s forearm). In addition to water that irrigated the crops, water supply was raised from the Nile and its waterways by means of the shaduf, a levering device with a long pole, until after the pharaonic period when the Persian Wheel or saqia arrived, typically turned by a pair of oxen.

A successful harvest also relied on the ability to command a well-functioning system of corvée (forced) labor. This ensured that when peasants weren’t quarrying, building, or fighting Egypt’s enemies, they were growing food. Perhaps 200,000 peasants supported a population of 3 million people in the Nile Valley in the 2nd millennium BCE. These vast resources of corvée labor and raw materials also enabled powerful rulers to secure their place in the afterlife. It may have taken between 20 to 30 thousand men at a time to build the Great Pyramid of Giza (4th Dynasty), constructed from over 2 million limestone blocks. Laboring people were as expendable as other parts of the natural world. Many thousands died during building, quarrying and mining work for the pharaohs. One estimate suggests perhaps 10% of the workforce was routinely lost, rising to 50 per cent in more dangerous mining operations which employed convicts or enslaved workers, such as those from Kush.

The great human cost involved in construction works, river maintenance, and canal building is a pervasive feature of all powerful societies right up to the modern era. Sometimes this has relied on imperial power over others and systems of slavery, and sometimes on feudal hierarchies, but it is a feature of rivers from the Nile to the Yangtze and the Mississippi.

Gods have been especially helpful in this task of corralling the manual labor of the people and legitimizing it symbolically. Rulers on the Nile did not rely solely on their own human powers but worshipped and propitiated a natural world that was alive with gods. The greatest of all of these — the falcon-headed sun god Ra — controlled day and night, life and death. He sailed in his barque for all eternity across the sky during the 12 hours of daylight and through the underworld for the 12 hours of night, to return the next day. There were hundreds of animal gods: from the other falcon-headed sky god Horus to the moon god Thoth, represented by a baboon or by the Ibis, the sacred wading bird with its elongated and regal beak. Anubis, with the head of a jackal, stood at the passage to the underworld. The lowly dung beetle, or scarab, symbolised rebirth and the morning sun.

Little in nature went unused. Papyrus reeds from the Nile delta were the paper of the ancient world. The word paper (in English) comes from the Latin papyrus and perhaps before that from the Egyptian pa-en-per-aa (or “that which belonged to the king”). “Fossil water” from the great Nubian Sandstone Aquifer left over from rains that fell on the Sahara hundreds of thousands of years ago created oases in the western desert. These were used as outposts for Egypt’s defense against incursions from the west, as well as places of exile and sometimes of escape. The teeth and tusks of great beasts could be transformed into delicate ivory objects, like the Pintail Duck cosmetic box from the New Kingdom now in a Baltimore museum, or a hippopotamus ivory knife adorned with images of its living self as Taweret, goddess of childbirth, used to ward off evil in Middle Kingdom nurseries. The humble donkey and mule were beasts of burden though, like the peasantry, they did not make it into the realm of gods.

Dry riverbeds, or wadis, that once flowed into or out of the Nile provided land routes of trade, conquest and mining expeditions from the Nile River to the Red Sea. The waterless Wadi Hammamat between the Nile and the Red Sea was quarried for the siltstone formed from ancient river sediment that had hardened over millions of years to provide a limitless supply of stone coffins (sarcophagi). Natron bubbling out of pale saline lakes in the Wadi Natron (west of the Nile) was used in making the blue glaze faience for amulets such as Taweret’s and the scarab beetles such as those produced in a delta factory. 

Natron was also the key drying agent used to mummify both the dead and the food they would need in the afterlife. This posthumous meal alone was a huge guzzler of resources. In a single and quite ordinary New Kingdom tomb, the occupant was laid to rest with nineteen “victual mummies”: the bodies of ducks, geese, and turtle doves.

The Aswan region of stone quarries was the source of some of Egypt’s most famous monuments and the site of long-term power struggles with Kush. Here, below the southern border the “cataract Nile” flowed from a land abundant in gold, timber, ivory, and people to enslave. But only the most powerful rulers could navigate the rapids that led into Kush, because this meant conquering the rock-strewn bed itself. Canals (or trenches) began to be dug into this stony riverbed from at least the time of the Old Kingdom, as recorded in the 3rd millennium BCE when inscriptions were left at the scene proclaiming the magnificence of the pharaoh. These also told of subject Kushite chiefs who supplied the wood from acacia trees used to build vessels to ship blocks of Aswan stone northwards for the pharaoh’s pyramid. The boulders must have kept tumbling downstream because 500 years later, a Middle Kingdom Pharaoh (Senusret III/Khakaura) dug a new trench. The name of the canal — “Beautiful are the Ways of Khakaura living forever” — was preserved on a stone for posterity. 

Nearby rocks contained inscriptions to the gods of Elephantine: the Lord of the Cataract, Khnum, with the head of a ram and powers over the annual flood, his consort the goddess Anukis (or Anuket), and their daughter Satet. These goddesses were no feminists. They oversaw the destruction of men and women with the same stone-cold approval. As Khakaura said elsewhere of his exploits in Kush: “I have carried off their women and brought away their relatives, emptied their wells and driven off their cattle, cut down their grain and set fire to it.”

Later still, the New Kingdom Pharaoh Thutmose I had to start trench-digging again, as did his grandson Thutmose III, who sensibly left an instruction for the fishermen of Elephantine to keep the river clear. It was during this New Kingdom era that Egypt’s empire reached its greatest extent: from the Kushite city of Napata (Gebel Barkal) in the south, above the Fourth Cataract, to the far bank of the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq) at its north-eastern edge. Egypt’s famous female “King” Hatshepsut (r. 1473–1458 BCE), widow of Thutmose II, considered herself all-powerful across the globe. On obelisks she erected at the Theban temple of Amun-Ra — from whom ultimately her power flowed — she declared: “There is no rebellion against me in any land; … All foreign lands are my subjects. He made my boundary at the limits of heaven; Everything the Orb encircles works for me.”

Such a tight grip on the river kingdom and its neighbors was exceptional. And, needless to say, temporary. But part of the job of a pharaoh was to convey the message that the gods of the natural world were specifically and forever shining down upon them.