Ancient Egypt - Introduction

by DeNile Team

The Nile

In his book Rivers of Empire, Donald Worster examines how the control of water meant everything. He examines how different tribes and societies have developed techniques to control the vital necessity of water.

Worster breaks up his analysis into the following categories, cultural, geographical, organizational, and technical. He takes a culture and explores how the water has influenced each category. For this assignment we will attempt to do the same.

For this web book, we decided to examine how the Nile river had influenced the ancient Egyptian life. Our focused time period was from ancient Egypt to pre-Aswan Dam. During this long time, life along the Nile did not change too much. Many of the day to day activities had not changed due to their isolation from the modern world. The annual flooding of the Nile river dictated their working schedules. We explored the following categories to see how the Nile influenced their life: Geographical, Cultural, Technical, Organizational.

It was not until William Willcocks, who helped develop the lower Aswan Dam, entered Egypt did their life-style change. As the control of the water changed, the culture had to enter a new paradigm.

This web book on Ancient Egypt is the product of the collaboration of many individuals. The Research Team wrote the individual essays (this Introduction by Jay Moore) and the Technical Team was responsible for converting everything to web format (Leroy Guatney did the general web book design and provided scanning and graphics services).

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