The End of Egypt
How the first cataract of the Nile has shaped millennia of history
Happy New Year! This week’s post is the second in our series on how rivers shape history and how history shapes rivers. If you missed the first, you can click here:
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If you want to visit the Temple of Dendur, a structure commissioned by the Roman Emperor Augustus in 23 BCE, you won’t be able to see it in its original surroundings, which are shown in this 1867 photo:
Instead, you’ll have to go to the Met in New York City, where it’s been on display since the 1970s.
Likewise, the 2,200-year-old Temple of Debod no longer resides next to the Nile River, as it did in 1862:
Now you’ll have to go to Madrid to see it in person:
The same goes for the Roman-era Temple of Taffeh, which looked like this in a 19th-century photo:
But is now inside an archaeology museum in Leiden, the Netherlands:
You’d be forgiven for thinking that these temples are evidence of the imperialistic looting of Egypt’s cultural heritage. But you’d be wrong. As you can see on this map pinpointing the Temple of Dendur’s original location, the temple would be underwater if it had not been moved to New York.
All of these temples, along with a long list of other artifacts, were not looted by imperial powers but rescued from the rising waters of the Nile River with the permission of the Egyptian government. The story of how they ended up under threat is part of the story of a place in southern Egypt now called Aswan. And Aswan’s story chronicles Egypt’s changing identity and its relationship with the river that gives it life.
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Herodotus identified a place called Elephantine as the southern boundary of Egypt. Elephantine, an island inside the modern city of Aswan, was the place where Egypt ended and Nubia began. The reason for this was geographic: just upstream of Elephantine is the First Cataract of the Nile.
Here, the usually placid waters of the Nile got narrower and shallower; rapids make it more difficult to navigate, as this 19th-century photo shows:
The pharaohs’ stately barges couldn’t pass this point, and Egyptian influence diminished south of the rapids. But the area around the cataract was important to the Egyptians. Nearby quarries provided stone for some of Egypt’s greatest monuments. There was a cave on Elephantine Island from which the yearly Nile flood, which made Egyptian lands more fertile than any others, was supposed to originate. It was here that the southernmost Nilometers were built to measure the height of the floodwaters so that people downstream could know what to expect:
As the effective dividing line between the Egyptian and Nubian civilizations, this place was sometimes a staging area for armies and an object of conquest. During the Middle and New Kingdoms, the Egyptians conducted expeditions into Nubia and conquered much of it. In other times, when the Nubians were strong and the Egyptians relatively weak, Nubian armies pushed past the first cataract, deep into Egyptian territory. Nubian commanders even took control of the entirety of Egypt in the 700s BCE and ruled as pharaohs.
But these borderlands weren’t always hostile; the Egyptians called their ancient city there Swenett, which means something like “marketplace.” The two cultures worshipped similar gods and shared certain cultural characteristics. The “Elephantine Papyri” — a collection of documents written in Aramaic in the 5th century BCE by the Jewish community of the area — reveal a complex and cosmopolitan frontier society. This document, for example, records the sale of a home from a Persian soldier to a Jewish temple worker and his Egyptian wife.
The Nile floods had, since time immemorial, been the source of Egypt’s prosperity and fertility. Each year, the flood brought silt that rejuvenated the soil and water that irrigated the crops. Ancient Egyptians sang hymns to the flood:
O inundation of the Nile, offerings are made unto you, men are immolated to you, great festivals are instituted for you.
Birds are sacrificed to you, gazelles are taken for you in the mountain, pure flames are prepared for you.
Sacrifice is metle to every god as it is made to the Nile.
The Nile has made its retreats in Southern Egypt, its name is not known beyond the Tuau.
The god manifests not his forms, He baffles all conception.
Occasionally, some people got the idea that they could master the Nile by building a dam. Egypt’s medieval Arab rulers, for example, toyed with the idea. But it wasn’t until the British Empire came along, in its infinite desire to dominate as much of the earth as it could, and decided to change the Nile forever.
The logical place to build a dam to regulate the flood and store up the Nile’s waters had always been the cataract. So that’s where the British built their first dam around the turn of the 20th century. It was, at the time, the biggest masonry dam on the planet. Though the dam created a reservoir and produced electrical power, it wasn’t sufficient for British needs, and it was raised twice before the 1930s.
The dam created a large reservoir, flooding the areas upstream. And, since this was such an archaeologically rich area, this meant that ancient sites were disappearing into the waters. The temple of Philae, pictured here in 1902, was now inundated during the rainy season.
This dam didn’t completely control the Nile; it was low enough that during large floods, the waters could overtop it. Those who desired complete control over the river wanted something bigger. They got their wish when Gamal Abdel Nasser took control of Egypt, and looked for a project that would demonstrate the country’s progress and his own power.
Nasser approved a new Aswan High Dam upriver from the old dam. This structure was massive and really expensive — Nasser’s quest for funds intertwined with regional tensions to create the 1956 Suez Crisis. Eventually, the Soviet Union agreed to help fund the project, pushing Egypt toward its side of the Cold War. Construction took the entirety of the 1960s.
For thousands of years, the cataract — and, therefore, Aswan — had served as a symbol of how the rulers of Egypt, whoever they were, could not master the entire Nile. Now, Nasser would erase that distinction (although he barely lived to see its completion; he died two months after it was finished).
Once the dam was completed, the reservoir behind it began to fill. The lake was huge: 300 miles long, more than 2,000 square miles. This meant that a lot of people’s homes were going to end up underwater. Most of those who ended up displaced were from the Nubian minority. Tens of thousands of people from dozens of villages were forced to move away from the river, which had been at the center of their lives, into bleak homes in the desert. These people ended up poorer and less healthy after having moved. They called their new settlements Tahgeer, “the site of displacement.”
The rising waters also meant that a lot of ancient artifacts from both Nubia and Egypt were about to disappear. Egypt and Sudan asked UNESCO for help rescuing the archaeological treasures that Egypt had endangered. UNESCO responded with a landmark effort, the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia.
The campaign relocated two dozen ancient sites, in many cases disassembling temples block by block and shipping them to museums around the world. Other sites were moved. Philae was relocated to Agilkia Island:
The Abu Simbel complex, built in the 1200s BCE by Ramesses II, was too close to the river, as you can see in this 1820 illustration:
So it was disassembled and moved 65 meters higher:
At the time, Egyptians celebrated the completion of the Aswan High Dam. It felt like a victory of modern technology over the vagaries of nature. The dam provided year-round irrigation for many farmers and allowed Egyptians to avoid annual floods. It generated gigawatts of hydropower and helped Egyptians survive droughts.
But the reality was not entirely positive. Before the damming of the Nile, immense quantities of sediment would be carried down the river, fertilizing fields and building out the Nile Delta. Without that sediment, farmers have to use more artificial fertilizer, and delta communities are disappearing into the Mediterranean. Fish populations in the Mediterranean have suffered as the quality of the water flowing out of the Nile has changed. Perhaps worst of all, trapping the river’s flow in a big lake with a large surface area causes a lot of Egypt’s precious water to evaporate.
Some people suggest that Egypt would be better off destroying the dam, but the country is probably too dependent on the advantages it brings to seriously contemplate this.
The story of the area around the Nile’s first cataract is the story of the power of geography to determine history. The fact that the Nile devolved into rapids in this place made it a cultural boundary, a site of warfare and interchange. It’s also the story of humans’ attempts in the last few centuries to overcome geography with our own engineering projects — and the unintended consequences these always seem to bring.
Thanks for reading! For paid subscribers this week, a little more on the fate of the Temple of Philae:
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