Quotes
The East African Rif
A further factor in the Nile’s importance was that it reliably flooded every year. During the late summer it broke its banks, depositing a rich layer of silt, fertilizing the soil and washing out salts. The Ancient Egyptians called the annual flooding of the Nile Akhet, and believed it was caused by the tears of the goddess Isis weeping for her dead husband Osiris. The true cause of the inundation, though, was monsoon rainfall hundreds of miles upriver in Ethiopia, which caused a surge in the volume of water that eventually led to flooding of the Nile in Egypt. The floodwaters sat in natural basins that formed an immense reservoir of water for farming during the six to eight weeks when the river was in flood. These natural basins were added to by a complex system of dykes and irrigation canals that allowed the water to be stored and distributed more effectively.
The Nile no longer annually floods in Egypt. Since the mid-nineteenth century, a series of increasingly ambitious projects have transformed the flow of the river, beginning with dams and sluices that were built to create irrigation canals that allowed a year-round supply of water. These culminated in the Aswan High Dam, which was initiated by Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70), who became President of Egypt in 1956. He hoped that the dam would stimulate and modernize the Egyptian economy. When the American and British governments withdrew their funding for the dam (partly as a result of Nasser’s policy of trying to maintain neutrality during the Cold War), he decided to help pay for it by nationalizing the Suez Canal, which had been owned by a corporation that had been in the hands of the French and British governments. Despite the resulting Suez Crisis, Nasser, and Egypt, retained control of the canal and used the tolls to build the dam between 1960 and 1970. Nasser, who remained president during this period, died of a heart attack just two months after the dam was completed.
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