Egyptian civilization

Egypt

A civilization multimillennial

Born from the Nile, Pharaonic Egypt produced a "first civilization" which continues to fascinate our contemporaries, because of its exceptional duration, the admirable monumental and artistic achievements that it left us and of the relationship to the sacred and to

the beyond that she was able to initiate. The history of this country, centered on the river valley and framed

of deserts, is however not limited to that of the dynasties recorded in the famous list of Manetho. Alexandria was the most brilliant center of Hellenistic civilization and its influence on the East lasted well beyond through the centuries of Roman peace and beginnings of the Eastern Empire, at the time when Egypt appeared as one of the most living from early Christianity. The Muslim conquest opened in the 7th century a new era during which Egypt, initially subject to the Caliphs of Damascus, then of Baghdad, was able to assert its autonomy, at the same time as a particular identity, under the Toulounids, then under the Fatimids, Shiite conquerors who came from the Maghreb before

Saladin and the Ayyubids do not bring it back into the Sunni fold. Started in the middle of 13th century, the Mamluk period, which saw Egypt once again play a powerful role regional by pushing its conquests as far as Syria, ends in the 16th century with the victories ottomans. In 1798, the arrival of Bonaparte and his army corresponds to the irruption, in a traditional Muslim society with a modernity that will promote the Arab awakening of the following century, when Mehmet Ali and his successors made the country the showcase of transformations inspired by the western modelThis same Egypt, passed under the British control recovers its full independence in the general context of the decolonization but the Nasserian dream of a pan-Arab union of which it was to be the center of natural gravity shatters on the defeats inflicted by Israel and on the diversity of a

Middle Eastern Arab world more complex than expected imprints of ideology. The time of Anouar el Sadat and Hosni Mubarak will be that of renunciation of the Nasserian dream and of a pro-Western normalization guaranteed by the authoritarianism of a regime faced with the strong comeback of religion. With the prospect of a doubling of its population within thirty years, Egypt, which has assets indisputable, will however have to take up the Islamist challenge and succeed in modernizing economic and social which promises to be at high risk.

Egypt, a gift from the Nile

The history of the civilization which appeared five thousand years ago on the banks of the Nile has been widely determined by the very specific geographical conditions that make the river valley a huge oasis, a natural refuge for populations forced to abandon the savanna regions of the "Green Sahara" gradually affected by desertification. Extent of the 24th at 31st degree of North latitude, Egypt is part of the vast arid zone which, over ten thousand kilometers, extends from Atlantic Sahara to the Thar Desert located in northwest India. For several millennia, these today desert regions were populated and abundant fauna lived there, the one whose bear witness to the rock carvings of Tassili, at a time when the current Nile Valley was a region of hostile swamps excluding any human presence. The situation has changed over the millennia of African post-rainy times that correspond to our postglacial times European; this is how ancient Egypt became the “gift of the Nile” of which Herodotus speaks and that its inhabitants could be defined by the famous historian of Halicarnassus as "those who live below the town of Elephantine and drink water from the river…” Characterized, on the contrary of all the rivers known to the Greek traveller, by floods which "enlarge him in summer and decrease in winter", the Nile brought both the water and the silt necessary for life and farming. At the heart of an arid region totally hostile to human presence, in a valley ten to thirty kilometers wide which stretches for nearly a mile from the first cataract, the union of water, arable land and human labor gave birth, as in Mesopotamia or on the banks of the Indus, to a great Neolithic civilization, agricultural then urban. The existence of a centralized political power, essential to organize the distribution water, and the use of writing brought this civilization into history from the dawn of the 3rd century. millennium BC

6,670 km long from its source in the regions of Lakes Victoria and Albert, the Nile is regularly and abundantly fed by the powerful precipitations that characterize the equatorial latitudes but a good part of its waters disappear due to evaporation during of the 2,500 km crossing he makes through the desert to reach the Mediterranean. What compensates for this enormous loss, it is the complement brought to it by its tributaries from the right descended from the Ethiopian plateau and richly supplied with water by the rains that water it when summer comes. This is how the Blue Nile and the Atbara guarantee each year, from

July, the return of the flood of the Nile. In regions where the average annual precipitation stands at 33 mm per year – with the exception of the Delta where the Mediterranean climate ensures higher rainfall. important – we understand that the ancient Egyptians made the Nile the god Hapi, guarantor of the eternal return of life. The 30,000 km2 cultivable created by the river – the area of ​​the Belgium for a country extended in latitude twice the length of France – have thus commanded the existence and development of Egyptian civilization.

The country presents itself in effect like an endless valley – a veritable river route along which the nomes, the local constituencies, played a decisive role insofar as any loosening of authority exercised by the central power could engender over such distances the seeds of anarchy – valley which ends in a vast delta whose 22,000 km2 cultivable represent two-thirds of the “useful agricultural area” of ancient Egypt and which Jean Yoyotte rightly presented as "an African Sologne gathered by the Nile under Mediterranean skies". This contrast establishes from the outset the distinction between Upper and Lower Egypt, so determining throughout the country's history. The desert is immediately present as soon as one moves away from the valley and its alluvial terraces, but to the west there are several important oases. That of Fayoum corresponds to the ancient Lake Moëris of Herodotus. Eighty kilometers southwest of Cairo, this depression of 1,770 km2 , the current Lake Karoun, extends on the site of an ancient delta of the primeval river; formerly connected to the Nile, it was occupied and developed from the earliest times. remote. Further west, one distinguishes, following one another south of the desert depression of Qattara