A History of the World by Andrew Marr

the ancient Egyptians, there was no art for art’s sake. Art was an expression of religionand of earthly power. Its job was to describe the hidden world of powerful gods; to record man’s relationship with them; and to intimidate travellers or rebels through the power of its kings. This required an art of repetition and sometimes gigantism, not of humanism or realism.
    The culprit is also the hero of the Egyptian story, the Nile. The world’s longest river, it is unusual in flowing from south to north. Since its prevailing winds blow from north to south, people with simple sailboats found it an excellent two-way conveyor belt. Better still, it not only provided its people with ample fish and wildfowl, but (before Nasser’s Aswan Dam in modern times) it flooded regularly every year, bringing fresh water and silt to produce remarkably rich soil. The floods were not entirely regular. If they came late, or too early, or if they were too strong or too weak, they could disrupt the planting and cause hunger.
    Ancient Egyptian history is marked by periodic disruptions, revolts and fallings-back; and these seem to have to do with times when the flooding Nile misbehaved. Yet compared with the civilizations on the Tigris, Euphrates, Yellow River and the Indus, in today’s Pakistan, the Egyptians were blessed. Not only did they enjoy a four-thousand-mile streak of remarkable fecundity, culminating in a great flood-plain delta on the shores of the Mediterranean. But they were also well protected by deserts and mountains to east and west and by a relatively unpopulated African hinterland in the south. Egypt was invaded, by Libyans and Persians and the mysterious ‘sea peoples’; but this happened relatively rarely. The flatter plains of Mesopotamia, or the land highway of Palestine, were much easier prey for armies of chariots and horsemen.
    Egypt was a hard place to attack and almost impossible to hold for long; and so, in the ancient world, it always recovered.
    The Nile had a political effect too. Though we speak of ‘Egypt’ there were really two Egypts. The two-way transit system knitted together people along a huge expanse, bringing black African Nubians and Mediterranean dwellers together in a single state. We cannot get a full sense of how ancient Egyptians saw their geography without understanding that for most of the time Upper Egypt, the more African south, dominated Lower Egypt, the more Mediterranean north. Egyptians today are still quick to note the difference, marked in the shape and colour of bodies. Egypt was a late starter compared with the Mesopotamians, partly because the land around it stayed sorich in plants and wildlife for so long that peoples were not forced to settle. Then the desert encroached further and the first unifying kings arrived from the south, bearing wonderful names such as Narmer, or ‘Baleful Catfish’. 24
    As with the story of Da Yu and the Xia, only centralized royal power could have made a single nation of such a strung-out series of settlements. To use the river’s bounty effectively, people here too needed a complex network of canals and irrigation systems, which had to be carefully cleaned, dug out and restored every year. So the habit of communal working, people’s readiness to dig and build together away from their fields, was set early on.
    This would later become very useful when it came to the Pharaonic temples. The Egyptians believed the Nile flowed from the underworld. They spent a lot of time – quite reasonably – worrying about the annual flood. Nile gods featured early in their belief system, so when their kings associated themselves with the flow of the river they acquired huge symbolic power. Geography isn’t everything. Often in human history the power of an individual or of an idea turns upside down what we might have expected from the position of rivers, or the shape of a coastline. But if geographical determinism works anywhere, it works for this land made by the