The Egyptian Nile: Human Transformation of an Ancient River

Abstract

The Nile, the longest river of the world, connects Northeast Africa from its headwaters near Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean Sea. This chapter focuses on the Nile in Egypt, where the river's annual inundation (until the building of the two modern dams at Aswan) was the source of the country's fecundity and guarantor of its civilization since the 6th millennium BCE. While the historical population of Egypt remained at a maximum of c. four million people until the mid-19th century when Vice-Roy Muhammad Ali modernized the country, in 2019 the number passed the threshold of 100 million people. Increased demographic pressure, the alteration of the country's ecology through the mega-impact of the construction of the Aswan High Dam, and industrialization have led to a massive transformation of the Nile River system. One of the consequences has been an almost complete extinction of the country's native fauna and flora. The overuse of the water (rice and cotton irrigation projects) and the absence of the river's historical natural sedimentation have had irreversible effects on Egypt's agriculture and heritage (salination; disappearance of archaeological sites) and caused land loss to rising sea levels in the delta. In view of the environmental degradation in the Nile valley, and the dangers to Egypt's water security posed by overpopulation and the construction of the Merowe dams in Sudan and the Renaissance dam in Ethiopia, sustainable water management is of critical importance.