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Ask Amenophis:
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Both the Nile and the Amazon can claim to be the world's largest river. The Nile is the longest river in length and the Amazon contains the most water.
The Nile and the Amazon are alike in many ways. Both provide enough water year-round for a lush growth of vegetation. Yet the societies that grew up around them could not be more different.
The people around the Amazon live in small tribes and hunt and fish for their food. The people around the Nile may have started out the same way, but then went on to build one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known. Why did they develop so differently?
This has rarely been discussed by scientists, but MummyFriends thinks it is because of the one big difference between the two rivers: inundation.
In ancient times, the Nile flooded every year, overflowing its banks and bringing fresh new soil that remained on the fields when the waters subsided.
This made the fields very fertile, but still no more fertile than the lands near the Amazon. The other thing it did was destroy everything near the water's edge. All the farms and buildings near the water were swept away when the Nile flooded.
The destructive potential of the flood was so great that small bands of hunters could not control it. People were forced to join together in larger groups to manage the waters of the Nile.
At a very early date, Egyptians banded together to control the Nile waters as a community. After the flood waters subsided, new farm buildings had to be set up and the boundaries of all the farms had to be marked again so farmers would know where their land ended and their neighbor's began.
The Egyptians also worked together to dig large irrigation canals. These would help the Nile water go where the farmers needed it when it flooded, and would keep the drier parts of the fields wet when the waters fell.
These Egyptian work communities were called "nomes" and the leader of each was called the "nomarch". Nomarchs had great power in the very early days, before the system of Pharaohs became established, and also whenever there was instability in Egypt and central government became weak.
The hieroglyphic picture for the word "nome" is a picture of an irrigation canal. |
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