SCIENCE IN EGYPT - FOOD: EGYPTIAN AGRICULTURE

I had gone to the Mining region of the sovereign
I had gone down to the sea
In a boat 120 cubits long
40 cubits broad
In which there were 120 sailors from the choicest of Egypt …
Before it came they could foretell a gale,
A storm before it existed

(Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor (ca. 2,500 B.C.?)

These few lines are from a famous literary tale, probably composed during Egypt’s Old Kingdom (2686 B.C.–2181 B.C.). It is a story about a fantastic journey where the sole survivor of a shipwreck learns that he can restore order to a chaotic world through the power of language and obedience to the laws of nature.

We can see this is a society that has explored its geology, discovered its riches, and put them to use. Technology is advanced; it can build ships of great size. A cubit was the length of an average forearm, about 53 cm (21 inches), making a ship of 120 cubits no less than 63 meters (208 ft) long. Boats of such scale imply a long tradition of seafaring, thus knowledge of navigation, currents, coastal geography. We see that numbers and measurement, thus basic mathematics, were well known. Finally, sailors could understand weather signs and interpret evidence from the sky and the winds. All these scientific elements, then, in an allegorical poem about life, death, and rebirth.

This isn’t surprising. The history of science in Egypt spans no less than 3,000 years – from the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first king, Narmer (3100 B.C.), when an era of magnificent achievement began, to the tragic burning of the Great Library at Alexandria (48 B.C.). A similar length of time would stretch from the founding of the Roman Empire to the year 2900 C.E., a date so far in the future we can’t even imagine what modern science will look like. It is easy to see why other, later peoples, like the Greeks, felt such awe before its towering achievement.

Before we look deeper into this achievement, a caveat is in order. Ideas and beliefs that we would call religious permeated Egyptian thought. In such a context, no division between “science” and “religion” existed. We will pretend, however, that technical subjects can be discussed pretty much on their own for the sake of modern understanding. There is some justice to this; a significant part of Egyptian science was absorbed by other cultures, notably Greece.

Background

Surrounded and protected by deserts, the people of the Nile built a civilization from which an extraordinary number of monuments, statues, objects, and writings have been preserved – the Egyptians were great makers of things. All of this, including the pyramids, was based on technical knowledge. The greatness that was Egypt came directly from its science and technology.

Everything began with the Nile River. Roughly 5,500 years ago, the first complex societies formed in several of the world’s major river valleys – the Tigris and Euphrates, Indus, Yellow, and the Nile. Villages combined into towns through conquest, then into larger political units until many diverse communities lay under a single ruling hand, a monarch or clan chieftain who sat atop a supporting priest-hood and bureaucracy. But why river valleys? A major waterway, particularly in a dry climate, causes the land to burst into a winding spectacle of green wealth and flowering fertility. Plentiful freshwater and rich floodplain soils created a fabulous concentration of life and ecological diversity. For humans, this meant a wealth of food, materials (in river cliffs) for weapons and tools, herbs for medicines, skins and plants for clothing and medicine. A watercourse like the Nile also acted as a barrier to invading armies, while to the inhabitants it was a magnificent highway, stimulant to trade, the transport of resources, a source of cultural unity.

The Nile’s ecology changed a great deal during the final millennium before written history. Prior to 4000 B.C., the Sahara was cooler, wetter, covered by grassland savannah and roamed by lions, wolves, jackals, giraffes, gazelle, monkeys, and wild cattle. By 3000 B.C., the region was drying into final desert, driving many animals south but leaving a complex system of belief among Egyptians, who viewed animal forms as earthly manifestations of gods. Over the next twenty centuries, humans had their own impact: trees of the floodplain were cut down; many waterfowl were reduced in number; a few animals, perhaps lions, were hunted to local extinction. Daily use of the Nile for so long, by a population that probably reached several million at least, was bound to take its toll. And yet, given the great length of time, far less damage was done than has been the case for rivers in just the past 75 years. Relations between civilization and the Nile were largely sustainable for millennia, an almost unimaginable thing today.

The Nile runs its last 1,300 km (800 miles) through Egypt. Here it has no tributaries and gets little rain. Small wonder the people who came to live along its perennial waters saw them as a divine creation, a ribbon of life through deadening sand. The Egyptians could place their faith in an orderly nature, ruled by cycles, and their belief that life continues in a different form after death should be understood against this background. The river ends in a great delta, a term from the Greeks, who applied their triangular letter to the Nile above all.

Before modern dams, large parts of the delta and the entire width of the Nile valley were inundated from June to mid-September, receiving a new layer of sediment. Flooding also washed away mineral salts in the soil, preventing salinization, which would have been toxic to crops. The floods were fed by monsoon rains in the Ethiopian Highlands, where the largest tributary, the Blue Nile, carrying some 70% of the river’s total water, begins in Lake Tana. This is a volcanic region, with nutrient-rich (calcium-, phosphorous-, potassium-bearing) silts and muds that wash into the river. Not far downstream are wetlands and swamps whose organic debris was also carried into the rising waters of the Blue Nile. All of this material came to be spread over the floodplain north of where it meets the White Nile tributary in Sudan. So regular was the flooding event that the Egyptians based their calendar and their reckoning of seasons on it. Growing food in the Nile Valley was far easier than anywhere else in the region, an enormous boon to Egypt’s prosperity.

Such are clues about the Nile’s importance to science. What about a specific example? The plant Cyperus papyrus, a wetland reed up to five meters (16 ft) tall, grew abundantly along the river’s shallow banks. It has a long, green, durable stem and is capped by a spray of grass-like fronds. Observing its ability to bend in strong winds, the Egyptians found it could make things subject to repeated stress: rope, sandals, baskets, floor mats, mattresses, even boats. It also yielded food and medicine. But this still didn’t exhaust its capabilities. When sliced open, peeled into layers, dried and pressed into sheets, it provided something of incalculable value: the first paper, papyrus. Rolled up into scrolls, it formed the earliest books, first produced in the 4th millennium B.C. Amazingly, the technology to make papyrus was kept secret for more than 2,700 years. It finally had competition from parchment (dried and stretched skin from a calf, sheep, or goat), an innovation that began in Pergamum (Turkey).

Until then, Egypt held a monopoly, perhaps the longest in history. Paper was something nearly every culture in the Near East wanted (think of a company having control over word processing software for a thousand years). Egyptian merchants built a highly profitable export market. One of their largest buyers was the town Jebeil in modern-day Lebanon, which the Greeks called “Byblos” and used as the word for books (biblia). It is from this name, in fact, that the word “Bible” comes. Thus a technology of the pharaohs, using a plant from the Nile, proved essential to the Jews who set down a book that would change the world.


Food: Egyptian agriculture

Egypt was the most pleasant, cultivated society to live in during pre-Roman times. Its long periods of security and brief chapters of instability mark a contrast to other early river civilizations, like Mesopotamia or China, where wars were very frequent. What accounts for such a difference? Scholars often give a one-word answer: food. Good soil, abundant water, endless sun: these made the Nile Valley an ideal place for agriculture with minimal labor. Nature was clearly on Egypt’s side. But nature was not enough. The “gift of the Nile,” as the Greek historian Herodotus famously called Egypt, needed knowledge of this nature and how to use it – the power of ingenuity and application. Without these, the country would have remained a scattering of hunt-and-gather settlements.

From papyrus scrolls, tomb paintings, and other sources, we know the Egyptians understood much about the Nile’s plant life. At a very early stage, this helped them to develop an advanced agricultural system regulated by the annual flood event. When we say “advanced,” what do we mean? If the Egyptians knew how to plant and reap according to levels of the Nile, they also built a system of irrigation to aid this process. They developed their own mathematics to solve practical problems related to harvests, food distribution, and field boundaries. Egypt also adopted crops and technology from surrounding peoples, especially those of the Fertile Crescent. A great deal could be grown in the Nile Valley that was not native to it. And the Egyptians, knowing this, became over time skilled at expanding their system to include new plants for other purposes, such as ornament, aroma, and medicine. The extent to which they nurtured biodiversity is revealed by the fact that roughly 2,000 different flowering and aromatic species have been identified from tombs, mainly of the Old and Middle Kingdoms. Egypt was the first civilization to practice ornamental horticulture and landscape design.

As always, everything began with the Nile. Unlike most other major rivers, the Nile flooded gradually. It began to rise in southern Egypt in early July, reaching flood stage by mid-August. Measuring stations, called nilometers, using notched rocks, were built along the river’s course, allowing close comparison between flood levels of different years and good prediction of peak inundation (records of these levels were kept in temple archives). By late September, the entire valley was under water, usually to a depth of 0.3–1.5 meters (1–5 ft). Peak flood lasted two to three weeks. By mid-October, waters began to recede, and by December the river was within its banks again. Soils would dry quickly in the merciless sun, so to retain water for part of the growing season, which extended to mid-April or May, and to expand the total area for cultivation, the Egyptians devised an extensive irrigation system.

Using earthen levees, they made dike-enclosed reservoirs or basins, varying from about 400 to more than 1,000 hectares (1,000–2,470 acres), linked by sluice gates and canals. During flooding, basins were left open and so filled with water. When waters receded, the gates were closed, and the captured water would then keep the soil saturated. Gates and canals connecting different basins helped to distribute the water evenly. Fields thus remained wet for up to a month during the early, fragile period of crop growth.

The technology also existed to dig wells up to 100 m (330 ft), even through solid rock. These wells were used in some areas to supply water for crops and gardens during the dry season but more often to provide it to homes and gardens of the wealthy, to the royal palace, and also to tombs, via copper pipes. Natural pest control came from insect-eating birds, protected by royal decree. Levees did have to be repaired each year and canals dredged, but the overall amount of work for a good harvest was quite small.

The system was simple in concept and effective in practice. It was based on the hydrology of the river and used the most fundamental, non-invasive method of transferring water between locations: gravity. The system was ancient, even by Egyptian standards. Evidence of it appears on one of the oldest known scenes in Egyptian art, the so-called mace head of the Scorpion King, carved in low relief on limestone and dated to about 3100 B.C. It shows the king of Upper Egypt, likely the first pharaoh, holding a hoe for planting and under him a series of workers laboring on levees around basins with captured water. Egypt’s irrigation system, it seems, thus began in the Predynastic Period (>3100 B.C.).

Is it strange that pharaoh, a god in his own right, would be shown holding a common farm tool? But agriculture was the basis of Egyptian civilization. A gift from the gods, it embodied divine order, natural cycles, and the place of humans in the greater scheme of existence. Pharaoh stood at the top of the human ladder, as one who brought the gods’ blessings and protected the many who depended on this. The hoe in pharaoh’s hand is a sign of his role.

Most Egyptians were farmers. The government levied a tax totaling about 10–15% of the harvest, but it left agriculture in local hands, something that was both distinctive and beneficial. It meant political problems did not affect the ability of the country to produce food. That farmers had control over their fields may also help explain an even more unique aspect: Egypt did not have slaves for most of its history. The first mention of slavery, related to those captured in wartime, doesn’t occur until about 1500 B.C., at least 2,000 years after the system of agriculture was established.

What did Egyptians grow and eat? Barley and emmer were the main grains. Both went primarily to make bread, with loaves of many different sizes and flavors. Lightly baked versions were used for making beer, the most widely drunk beverage.1 Grapes were grown for eating and to make wine, but the latter was expensive. Beer production, like agriculture itself, was on a massive technological scale, with many refinements as to quality, taste, aroma, and texture. Yet these foods represent only a small part of Egypt’s total menu, which also included many vegetables, fruits, spices, meats, and fish. Indeed, the diversity of foods that the Egyptians had available as early as the Old and Middle Kingdoms (~3000 to 1800 B.C.) is nothing short of stunning. Vegetables, for example, included beans, cabbage, celery, chickpeas, peas, onions, and lentils, among others. For fruits, there were apples, dates, figs, jujubes, olives, plums, pomegranates, and melons. And for spices, there was the choice of garlic, aniseed, cinnamon, coriander, cumin, dill, fennel, marjoram, rosemary, and thyme, among others (pepper was unknown).

Sweetening made use of dates, figs, and honey. Cattle were raised in large herds, as were sheep, with goats and pigs also abundant. Though waterfowl, especially ducks, geese, pigeons, and quail, were widely consumed, Egyptians do not seem to have raised hens for eggs until the Ptolemaic Period (305–30 B.C.). Fish were caught in plenty by a wide range of techniques – nets, hooks, harpoons, spears, traps – according to images in scrolls and on buildings. In addition, there were plant-derived oils of varied properties and purposes, some for their scents, many for medicines, others for cosmetics, many more for religious uses, including embalming.

Most of this spectacular variety could only be enjoyed by wealthier members of society, who lacked for nothing. Bread, fruit, and beer were the main staples for ordinary people, though records show that men who worked in the quarries were also sometimes given vegetables and roast meat. In most years, Egypt’s people had more than enough to eat. The upper classes regularly held banquets at which many different foods were served. Dining was a source of refinement, an opportunity to show off one’s wealth, status, and sophistication. Music and dancing were routine, and guests were encouraged to eat and drink to excess. But such events were also expressions of Egyptian technology: musical instruments revealed craftsmanship and expert metallurgy and metalworking; chairs and tables could be folded and put away; jewelry worn by women and men included not only precious and semi-precious stones but also glass beads that had been made with a variety of vivid colors; manmade perfumes and scented oils filled the rooms with lovely smells.

That food was commonly plentiful does not mean a total lack of hard times. In years when the monsoons were weak, the Nile might fail to flood sufficiently or at all, and the majority of Egypt’s food could not be grown. Storage of grain was done on a large scale, yet years of famine did occur – the famous biblical story of Joseph and Pharaoh’s dream (Genesis 41) was an example known to antiquity. The so-called “dark age” that began after the sudden collapse of royal authority in the Old Kingdom, giving rise to the First Intermediate Period (2181–2040 B.C.), is documented by inscriptions that repeatedly refer to famine. Sediments from the Nile Delta show a thin zone of highly oxidized, red-brown silt, indicative of long-term exposure, dated at 2250–2050 B.C. Some Egyptologists now feel that each of the three intermediary periods, when social and political instability reigned, probably corresponds to a time of reduced flooding and fertility. Yet order returned – these periods were but dark punctuations between eras when food was seldom a source of worry.

Egypt thus presents the modern era with an important question. To what degree was this civilization, so dependent on, and integrated with, a single river and its plenty, the creator of a sustainable form of agriculture? Does it hold any lessons, positive or negative, for the present?

By Scott L. Montgomery & Alok Kumar in "A History of Science in World Cultures", Routledge, London, 2016, excerpts pp. 14-22. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.