Without the Nile, Egypt may never have become one of the most extraordinary civilizations in history. The White Nile together with the Blue Nile which joins it in the south has a total length of about 1,913miles. The Blue Nile rises in the highlands of Ethiopia. Egypt is very hot and very dry. There is no enough rain in Egypt to help crops to grow, so the River Nile is very important to the Egyptians. Every year it rains hard in the distant mountains to the south. In the summer, water comes rushing down the Nile into Egypt. The river bursts its banks and floods the farm land on either side. The Egyptian people have always used irrigation. In this way they can make the best use of the flood waters. The Ancient Egyptians dug ditches which ran through their fields. They built reservoirs to store the water. Men and woman called conscripts were made to help with this work. By 3100 B.C the Nile Valley and Delta had coalesced into a single entity that was the world's first large nation state. As well as providing the region's material potential, the Nile and other geographical features influenced political developments and were significant in the development of Egyptian thought. The land continued to develop and its population increased until Roman times. Important factors in this process were unity, political stability, and the expansion of the area of cultivated land. The harnessing of the Nile was crucial to growth. It is uncertain how early and by how much the inundation was regulated. The Nile's annual inundation was relatively reliable, and the floodplain and Delta were very fertile, making Egyptian agriculture the most secure and productive in the Near East. When conditions were stable, food could be stored against scarcity. The situation, however, was not always favorable. High floods could be very destructive; sometimes growth was held back through crop failure due to poor floods; sometimes there was population loss through disease and other hazards. Contrary to modern practice, only one main crop was grown per year. Crops could be planted after the inundation, which covered the Valley and Delta in August and September; they needed minimal watering and ripened from March to May. Management of the inundation in order to improve its coverage of the land and to regulate the period of flooding increased yields, while drainage and the accumulation of silt extended the fields. Vegetables grown in small plots needed irrigating all year from water carried by hand in pots and from 1500 BC by artificial water-lifting devices. Some plants, such as date palms, whose crops ripened in the late summer, drew their water from the subsoil and needed no other watering.
References: the story of the Nile by John Baines
Ancient Egypt by Martin Forrest
