1 Egypt as a ‘Special’ Case

There is a tendency among scholars of the ancient Mediterranean – and especially among Classicists – to categorise Egypt as a somewhat ‘special’ case that is not exactly ‘representative’ of the Mediterranean world. As James Keenan wrote regarding the status of Egypt within Roman history, ‘Egypt has not simply been shortchanged: it has been ignored.’Footnote ⁶ As a result, the ground-breaking, paradigm-shifting results of recent studies remain to be properly acknowledged and integrated within larger historical and public-facing narratives about the long-term history of Africa and Eurasia. One can think of the spectacular discoveries made on the sites of Mersa/Wadi Gawasis, Ayn Soukhna and Wadi el-Jarf, which show that Egypt was already involved in trade networks on the Red Sea between the Nile Valley and Delta, the Sinai and the horn of Africa (ancient Punt) from the Old Kingdom on (ca. 2649–2150 BCE),Footnote ⁷ as well as several missions documenting the long-standing occupation of the Mareotide region and its links to the Aegean and West Asia.Footnote ⁸ While Egyptologists have engaged with this work, the same cannot be said of most colleagues working on other regions or periods.

As I’ve shown elsewhere,Footnote ⁹ this phenomenon is linked to the Nile, whose alluvial valley and delta are conceptualised as strikingly distinct from the rest of the ‘Mediterranean’ (whatever that may mean).Footnote ¹⁰ According to this Nilocentric model, the ancient Egyptians lived in abundance thanks to the river and avoided contact with the ‘outside world’, until enterprising Greeks ‘opened’ it up to the Mediterranean. While the role of the Nile in Egyptian history cannot be understated, such a dichotomy and deterministic narrative says more about the mindset and identity politics of its proponents than about ancient to modern patterns of connectivity and socio-environmental opportunism and resilience.Footnote ¹¹

The idea of Egypt’s belated inclusion in the Mediterranean world is a story that legitimises modern European and North American imperial investments in the region. Its epistemological influence among scholars is as pervasive as it is enduring. Indeed, it remains frequent, and almost conventional, for historians working on ancient Egyptian material that dates from the Hellenistic and Roman periods to not be considered or consider themselves Egyptologists. Likewise, material from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt often finds itself marginalised, and at times disconnected from earlier material, in (Egyptian and international) museums. This also explains why multilingual documents from a particular period, and at times archaeological context, end up in different archival departments.Footnote ¹² This imaginary wall, between ‘Oriental’ (Egyptian, Hyksos, Nubian, Assyrian, Persian and, for later periods, Arab and Ottoman) and ‘European’ (Macedonian, Roman, Byzantine and, much later, French and British) rules, languages, scripts and archives more generally has historically caused, on both sides, a delayed, if not absence of, engagement with new work that does not – linguistically, chronologically or thematically – belong to one’s canonical body of evidence. A similar imbalance pertains to the historiographical status of Lower Egypt.

2 The Delta within Egypt

When compared to the narrow Nile valley and oases, deltaic landscapes have traditionally appeared, in the eyes of European scholars, to be cognitively and practically less easy to ‘enframe’.Footnote ¹³ The inability of the Delta’s silty, moist soil to provide as bountiful and pristine a harvest of documents, artefacts and monuments as the ones found in the more arid sites upstream or in the desert makes it a much less attractive archaeological playground. The same goes for its position within the geopolitical history of Egypt. Take for instance this passage from French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero’s 1912 Histoire ancienne des peuples de l’Orient:

The dynasties Maspero refers to in this passage ruled during the Second Intermediate Period as well as the Third Intermediate and Late Periods respectively – that is, when Egypt was at times divided into more than one state, and often ruled by non-Indigenous Pharaohs. The limited presence of ruins did, in a way, testify to the validity of this narrative that echoes the Enlightened, botanical model of civilizations best articulated by Volney.Footnote ¹⁵ To Maspero, as to a great number of his contemporaries and successors, Egypt was ‘great’ not only when, but also because it was ruled from the south, by ‘real’ Egyptians, and its demise, accelerated by foreign rulers, came to a definitive end when the ‘Greeks’ took over the civilizational torch. Yet as Frédéric Guyot shows in this volume, this narrative, which has traditionally been invoked to support the idea of a colonisation of Lower Egypt from the south, does not fit with archaeological evidence. Indeed, we now know that the early anthropisation of the Delta involved particularly substantial connections with the Levant, and that ‘the Neolithic farming that spread along the Nile Valley by the middle of the fifth millennium BCE stems essentially from Lower Egypt, and from the Nile Delta in particular’.Footnote ¹⁶

Another concomitant factor to consider is the fact that, as Lucile Haguet shows in her contribution to this volume, (pre-)modern European travellers to Egypt – including a substantial contingent of scholars – showed little interest in the Nile Delta by and for itself. To them, the region was a gateway to and from the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. They therefore ‘read’ it through the grid of Classical authors, and conceptualised it as a strategic piece within their imperial or commercial œcumene. Rachel Mairs’ chapter documents how this phenomenon also characterises the relationship of non-scholarly travellers with the region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet despite their obvious historical value, Classical writers’ testimonies tend to replicate a Hellenocentric or Romanocentric gaze, which does not account for local socio-economic histories.

To Maspero as to most of his contemporaries, the scientific interest of Egypt resided in its ability to be both the ancestor of the Classical world’s civilisational greatness and a Biblical Holy Land. Little within the interior of the Delta lent itself to such hegemonic narratives. Yet that is not to say that evidence is lacking. Indeed, since 1997, the Delta Survey has painstakingly documented a large number of ancient settlements whose traces have been observed over the past two centuries.Footnote ¹⁷ In many cases, the sites have since been overbuilt or transformed into fields. Such a phenomenon should not come as a surprise, since contrary to other sites upstream that were gradually abandoned due to the shifting bed of the Nile, the Delta has remained uninterruptedly settled despite its shifting hydrography.

These intertwined subjectivities and structural challenges certainly explain why, beyond their interest in Biblical and monastic sites (and even there, as Ramez Boutros’ contribution shows regarding the cult of saints in the Delta, much remains to be done), archaeologists have historically tended to prefer to move south. Indeed, in addition to being detrimental to the preservation of many sites, the Delta’s wetter climatic and environmental conditions can also make for unsettling archaeological environments, especially for archaeologists who are accustomed to digging along the Nile Valley or in Egypt’s deserts and oases. Meanwhile, apart from Alexandria and its vicinity, historians (including papyrologists) working on Hellenistic and Roman Egypt have overall dedicated very limited attention to Lower Egypt. Archaeological evidence such as that discussed in this volume by Frédéric Guyot, Claire Somaglino, Robert Schiestl, Sylvain Dhennin, Damien Agut-Labordère, Marie-Françoise Boussac and Bérangère Redon is slowly but surely disrupting this trend, but their work remains to be properly integrated within broader historical overviews, as I noted above, all the more so by scholars who are not specialists on Egypt. In contrast, as the chapters of Isabelle Hairy, Sobhi Bouderbala, Heba Mostafa, Ben Outhwaithe, Wakako Kumamura, Mona Abaza, Heba Abd el-Gawad and Rachel Mairs demonstrate, historians of later periods deal with a broader range of locally produced material (including archives). As a result, the history of medieval to modern Egypt finds itself more geographically balanced.

3 The Arab Conquest as a Historiographical Watershed

Despite some promising initiatives,Footnote ¹⁸ much work remains to be done in threading together corpora from ancient to modern Egypt. This structural oversight results from broader and ‘practical’ tendencies towards linguistic and technical specialisation and, therefore, compartmentalisation in most universities and museum settings. It is also a product of conventional boundaries within the fields of history in general, chief of which are the binary between Antiquity-related (geoarchaeology, Egyptology, Classics, papyrology, epigraphy) and later historical fields,Footnote ¹⁹ as well as the intersecting divide between Egypt before and after the 642 CE Arab conquest.

The stereotypical (and thus misleading) compartmentalisation of the pre-/post-642 divide as the central axis of Egyptian history (Table 1.1) is not only an Orientalist by-product of European imperialism, but also grossly misleading from a historical perspective.Footnote ²⁰ A perfect case in point is the city of Alexandria, which contrary to what Eurocentric discourses – from Vivant Denon to Lawrence Durrell – have been claiming for centuries, did absolutely not experience a phase of prolonged decay and ruin after the Arab conquest. Not only does written evidence invalidate such claims, but archaeological data (such as that pertaining to the city’s water supply that Isabelle Hairy discusses in this volume) indicates that the harbour city remained a commercial and geostrategic nexus within medieval and pre-modern Egypt’s economy.

Table 1.1

Stereotypical compartmentalisation of Egypt-related scholarly disciplines

Writings about the territory speak to the particular archives that have come to us: the non-Indigenous, the élite, the literary, the administrative, the imperial. These far-reaching, authoritative voices have for centuries spoken louder than, and often over, less prominent voices, and made it almost impossible for scholars to write about the Delta without resorting to clichés. To a large extent, the three historiographical storylines discussed here are rooted in the reception of ancient Greek and Roman representations of, and lieux communsFootnote ²¹ about, Egypt and the Nile Delta. Before we turn to these, let’s see what stories the land itself tells us.

1 Definition

A delta is an alluvial plain located at the mouth of a river endowed with strong sedimentary discharge, where the river divides itself into a series of unstable branches.Footnote ²³ Deltas form on the shores of nontidal seas or – like in the case of the Mediterranean – seas with very low tides.Footnote ²⁴ They appear when the sedimentary supply of a river is greater than the ability of the receptive water body’s geostrophic and wind-induced currents to wash away sediments. The configuration of deltas therefore results from the relationship between three factors: fluvial discharge, tide current and wind-induced currents.Footnote ²⁵ The Nile Delta, which is categorised as a megadelta, is anastomosing, which means it is a river ‘composed of two or more interconnected channels that enclose flood basins’.Footnote ²⁶ It is the largest delta in the Mediterranean (ca. 20,000km²), constitutes the bulk of Egypt’s arable land and is both the country’s most populated region (over forty million people or around 40% of the population of Egypt) and the world’s most densely populated delta (up to 1,600/km²).Footnote ²⁷ The current elevation of the Delta ranges from around seventeen metres above the sea level to one metre on the Mediterranean shoreline. As we shall see, the northern part of the Delta, which has historically been characterised by a succession of coastal lakes and lagoons (Manzala, Burullus, Idku and Mariout), beaches and sand dunes, is particularly vulnerable to climate change.

In general, and this rule applies to the Nile, sediments are deposited during decreases in water or weak floods, whereas erosion tends to be triggered mostly by water rise and strong floods. This pattern of erosion, remobilisation and deposit, which is fundamental to fluvial environments, was an important source of cadastral litigation in ancient Egypt.Footnote ²⁸ From a geomorphological perspective, it mixes up the sedimentological profile of displaced alluvial deposits and, for this very reason, often corrupts the dating of sedimentary layers.Footnote ²⁹ Further, along the Mediterranean coast, the eastern Mediterranean geostrophic current and the wind-induced currents flow eastward; as a result, most of the sediments carried by the Nile are redistributed along the shores of the Sinai.Footnote ³⁰ This 7,000-year-old phenomenon is partially responsible for the arched shape of the Holocene Nile Delta;Footnote ³¹ it has also played a key role in the development of the coastal barriers and sand dunes that form its northern edge, as well as of the extensive marshy zones located south of these dunes.Footnote ³² Over the past few decades, archaeological surveys and technologies like sedimentary coring and electrical resistivity tomography have allowed archaeologists and historians to get an increasingly refined understanding of these sedimentary dynamics and how they impacted local fluvial landscapes and their relationships to settlement patterns. These studies, which continue to give rise to an abundant bibliography, have become standard components of most archaeological projects in Egypt (and beyond).Footnote ³³

Like all deltas, the Nile’s is characterised at its northern edges by a succession and inter-penetration of sweet, brackish and salted waters; these form a patchwork of lacustrine, palustrine and lagoonal spaces whose size can vary considerably within the course of a single year. Such idiosyncrasies certainly explain the paradoxical image of the ancient Nile Delta, which evidence portrays as a simultaneously attractive and repellent moving space. The Delta’s coastal lagoons are only a sample of the varied ecosystems that have made up the Nile Delta throughout its history. Depending on the time and the place, relationships between local communities, non-human beings (including, according to ancient Egyptian ontologies, the Nile itself) and the state manifested through a wide spectrum of agrarian, halieutic, commercial, industrial, migratory and ritual practices and connections, all of which still persist today.Footnote ³⁴

As pointed out by John Cooper, the Greek and Roman cataloguing of the seven branches of the Hellenistic and Roman Nile Delta has had a considerable influence on modern renderings of the region’s hydrographical history. I agree that ‘we should question the primacy of the Greco-Roman texts as the proper starting point for inquiry into past Nile geography, or as the reference point for geologists and others interpreting discoveries in the field’.Footnote ³⁶ Accordingly, any identification of ancient Nile branches with their Classical names proposed below and in Map 1.1 should be taken with a pinch of salt. For not only did the courses of all distributaries change over time, but almost all of the Greek and Latin accounts were written by foreigners whose approach to scholarship was selective and recursive. We should also keep in mind, as Robert Schiestl’s contribution to this volume emphasises, that a plethora of other, smaller channels flowed through the Delta throughout its history.Footnote ³⁷

Map 1.1

The hydrography of the Nile Delta according to Herodotus, Strabo, Ptolemy, Sirapion and El-Idris.Footnote ³⁵

2 The Predynastic and Pharaonic Nile Delta

The end of the last ice age ca. 12,500 years ago led to a substantial rise of the sea level worldwide. This process, which lasted until ca. 6,000 BCE, pushed the maritime shores of the Nile far inland, and supplied vast areas with marshlands. The Nile Delta as we know it today entered its construction phase during the fifth millennium BCE.Footnote ³⁸ It was also during this period that the first sedentary communities settled along the riverbed.Footnote ³⁹ Available data indicates that around 4,500 BCE, four main channels made up the Delta. They might correspond to earlier versions of the branches called (from west to east) Canopic, Sebennytic, Mendesian and Pelusiac in Greek and Latin sources.Footnote ⁴⁰ The region’s flat and fertile landscape was then dotted with sandy ‘turtle backs’ (gezira in Arabic) rising above the flood line;Footnote ⁴¹ these became prime loci for human communities. The practices of fishing, hunting and gathering are largely attestedFootnote ⁴² and the development of agriculture, a Levantine ‘import’ as shown by Frédéric Guyot in this volume, dates from this period. Around 3,100 to 2,500 BCE, the climate reached its current aridity level, leading to a general drop in the Nile flood level and precipitation along the valley and, consequently, to a reduction of the vegetal cover and to more fluvial erosion.Footnote ⁴³ By the Old Kingdom (ca. 2,686–2,160 BCE), the Delta’s outline was comparable to what it is today. This included the existence of the (from west to east) Mariut, Edku and Burullus lagoons but not yet Lake Manzala, which was at the time still part of the sea.Footnote ⁴⁴ The climatic aridification unfolding at the time might have been one of the causes of the social troubles that led to the end of the Old Kingdom.Footnote ⁴⁵ Around the second millennium BCE – i.e. roughly from the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2,055–1,650 BCE) to the New Kingdom (1,539–1,069 BCE) – a series of low floods led to the formation, in the north-eastern Delta, of a littoral sand barrier, which isolated the easternmost (commonly called Pelusiac) branch from the Mediterranean.Footnote ⁴⁶ During this period, Egypt’s geopolitical kingdom – and at times empire – shifted north, leading to several cities located in the northern portion of the Delta being successively designated Pharaonic capitals.Footnote ⁴⁷ This episode, together with a westward migration of the Pelusiac branch, most probably contributed to the transfer of the Egyptian capital from Pi-Ramses (which may not have been connected to the Nile River anymore at the end of the Ramesside period)Footnote ⁴⁸ to Tanis during the Twenty-first Dynasty (ca. 1,069–945 BCE).Footnote ⁴⁹ Under the Ramessides (ca. 1,295–1,069 BCE), five branches made up the Delta: In addition to the four ones listed above, what could be the ancestor of the Bolbitine branch appeared; other minor distributaries, including the future Tanitic branch, are also attested.Footnote ⁵⁰

From the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE, several exceptionally high floods are attested.Footnote ⁵¹ During this period, the branches called Pelusiac, Mendesian and Tanitic (which was now in full activity) by ancient Greek and Latin authors started to migrate from the north-east to the north-west, as a result of the ongoing subsidence of the western Delta.Footnote ⁵² It is in this hydrographical context that several Greek emporia were established in Lower Egypt,Footnote ⁵³ and that the Mediterranean shore saw a development of its coastal and northern fluvial harbours, many of which were soon to become international exchange hubs.Footnote ⁵⁴

3 The Late Period and Hellenistic Nile Delta

In the fifth century BCE, Herodotus identifies five ‘natural’ branches (stomata): the Pelusiac to the east, the Canopic to the west, the Sebennytic in the middle and, flowing from the latter, the Saitic and Mendesian ones. In addition to these, he identifies two ‘dug’ branches (orukta), which he calls Bolbitine and Bucolic.Footnote ⁵⁵ The fact that the Bolbitine branch was already attested in the Ramesside period indicates that the ‘digging’ Herodotus refers to most probably consisted of the channelling of two natural distributaries.Footnote ⁵⁶ These developments cannot be precisely dated; however, it makes sense to suppose that they took place around the end of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty and the beginning of the Persian occupation (525 BCE) – i.e. in the context of intensifying interactions between Egypt, the Aegean world, the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia.Footnote ⁵⁷ The re-activation of the ‘Red Sea Canal’ under Nekau II (610–595 BCE) provides us with a compelling parallel.Footnote ⁵⁸ Available data indicates that this canal, which linked the Red Sea to the Pelusiac branch of the Nile via the Wadi Tumilat,Footnote ⁵⁹ was dug in a dry riverbed (Arabic wadi) for strategic, commercial and agrarian purposes.Footnote ⁶⁰ Approximately two centuries later – i.e. most probably under the Thirtieth Dynasty (380–343 BCE) – another canal was dug between Busiris and Behbeit el-Hagara (central Delta).Footnote ⁶¹ Overall, these hydraulic developments indicate that the Nile Delta was, at least from the Late Period, endowed with a much more dense and complex hydrographical network than had traditionally been assumed.Footnote ⁶²

The foundation of Alexandria in 331 BCE and the subsequent establishment of a Macedonian kingdom in Egypt had a durable impact on the deltaic landscape. The Hellenic immigration in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquest modified the socio-cultural profile of Egyptian towns and villages.Footnote ⁶³ Ancient evidence also indicates that the Ptolemies sponsored several hydrographical projects in the region, the aim of which was visibly to improve both the kingdom’s fluvial communication network and its agrarian productivity.

Indeed, several canals were dug in the Nile Delta and upstream during the Hellenistic period. In the Alexandrian region, a series of canals stemmed from the westernmost (Canopic) branch.Footnote ⁶⁴ These supplied the city and other new coastal foundations (Taposiris Magna, Plinthine) with water and goods and favoured agricultural developments in their vicinity.Footnote ⁶⁵ The most important of these canals was the around thirty-kilometre-long Alexandria Canal, which joined the Ptolemaic foundation of Schedia with Alexandria.Footnote ⁶⁶ The Red Sea canal was also reactivated under Ptolemy II Philadelphus (ca. 270 BCE), as is evidenced by the foundation during his reign of Arsinoe on the Red Sea, as well as by the concomitant building of warehouses and houses at Tell el-Mashkuta.Footnote ⁶⁷

On that matter, the ‘Mendesstele’, a stele erected at Mendes in 264 BCE, refers to a waterway that was ‘dug’ at the king’s instigation.Footnote ⁶⁸ The German mission at Buto identified traces of another canal flowing from the north of Sais to Buto and the Mediterranean; according to Bérangère Redon, it most probably dates from the third century BCEFootnote ⁶⁹ and might have been linked to the canal which, Strabo claims, existed between Naucratis and Sais.Footnote ⁷⁰ The inscription preserved on the back of the statue of (Pa)merih, son of Amonpayom of Tanis, alludes to what seems to be a waterway that, in the second century BCE, linked Mendes, and perhaps also Busiris, to Tanis.Footnote ⁷¹ Recently, Eva Lange-Athinodorou published a synthesis of the geoarchaeological work done on sacred lakes, canals and marshes associated with female goddesses’ temples in Buto, Sais and Bubastis. Available evidence suggests a potent relationship between these (natural and enhanced) hydric spaces and the Egyptian story of Horus’ hiding in the papyrus marsh of Akhbit (Khemnis in Greek sources).Footnote ⁷²

The specific effects of all these developments – and of the plethora of undocumented canalization, dikes and drainage works that were carried out in the region and upstream during the same period – are not well understood. We do, however, know that they caused an increase in the quantity of sediments carried by the waters of the Nile.Footnote ⁷³ The same can be said of the development, upstream, of the Fayyum Oasis. Starting from the beginning of the Ptolemaic period, the region underwent a large-scale makeover, which notably featured the implementation of a vast irrigation network as well as the drainage and conversion into farmland of vast areas of wetlands.Footnote ⁷⁴ These initiatives were not without consequences on the Delta. It has, for instance, been established that large quantities of water henceforth retained in the region caused a diminution of Lake Mariout’s water level.Footnote ⁷⁵ It is during this period of intensifying human presence and activity that the gradual bipolarisation of the Delta’s hydrography took place.

4 The Roman Nile Delta

According to Strabo (first century CE), the Delta was still made up of seven branches in his lifetime: the Canopic, Bolbitine, Sebennytic, Phatnitic (Herodotus’ Bucolic),Footnote ⁷⁶ Mendesian, Tanitic (Herodotus’ Saitic) and Pelusiac. In addition to these, the Greek geographer notes the existence of several other ‘pseudo’ branches that, since they were shallow and marshy, were unsuitable for fluvial navigation.Footnote ⁷⁷ Strabo’s testimony is also indicative of the Delta’s ongoing hydrographical evolution. First, the Bucolic (here Phatnitic) and Bolbitine branches are not distinguished anymore because of their channelised bed; this could be a sign of their full integration into the fluvial hydrography. Furthermore, according to Strabo’s description, the portion of the Sebennytic branch located between the apex of the Delta and Sebennytos was, in his lifetime, considered to belong not to the Sebennytic branch, as was the case in Herodotus’ time, but to the Phatnitic/Bucolic branch; consequently, the Mendesian and Tanitic/Saitic are said to now originate from the latter. These details attest to the importance gained by the Bucolic branch, to the detriment of the Sebennytic one,Footnote ⁷⁸ during the Hellenistic period. The same phenomenon can be observed with the Bolbitine branch, which, by carrying more and more of the water previously channelled into the Canopic branch, contributed to its gradual silting.Footnote ⁷⁹ It has been suggested that the Bucolic and Bolbitine branches are earlier iterations of the present-day Damietta and Rosetta branches. This relies on the narrative whereby their affirmation notably results from the channelling operations they were subject to: Endowed with a deeper, more linear bed, and a better gradient, these two distributaries would have become more ‘performing’, and gradually overtaken the other branches, whose bed and flow ended up being so reduced that they were not deemed to be branches anymore.Footnote ⁸⁰

The most important source on the hydrography of the Nile Delta under the Principate is Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography.Footnote ⁸¹ Ptolemy, who was born and lived in Egypt, is the first ancient author to distinguish a fluvial branch (potamos) from its ‘mouth’ (stoma).Footnote ⁸² This degree of precision could result from the fact that in his lifetime, the names of the river mouths differed from those of its distributaries. In addition to the seven mouths already mentioned in Strabo as both branches and mouths,Footnote ⁸³ Ptolemy mentions two ‘false mouths’ located next to one another, between the Sebennytic and Phatnitic/Bucolic branches, called Pineptimi and Diolkos. He also lists six main distributaries, whose names are unattested in previous Greek and Latin writers, but, in some cases, are known in documentary texts.Footnote ⁸⁴ In each case, the latitude and longitude of the source and terminal point of the branch are specified; he also locates several cities in relation to the hydrographical landscape. In addition to these new hydronyms, Ptolemy lists Egypt’s (including the Delta’s) lakes, and refers to two ‘rivers’, which are parallel to the coast. No other source mentions these waterways, but traces of it subsist in the landscape.Footnote ⁸⁵ Ptolemy also testifies to the growing marginality of the Mendesian and Tanitic branches, which, in the second century CE, had seen their discharge decrease and their inferior coarse silt to the benefit of the Busiric branch and of one or both of the transverse canals.Footnote ⁸⁶

The significant difference between Ptolemy’s description of the Delta and those of Herodotus and Strabo has two implications: First, it highlights how Ptolemy’s positioning as an insider to Egypt impacted his vision of the Delta and, inversely, exposes further the limitations of previous literary accounts as far as the region’s hydrography is concerned. Second, his account also reveals that the region’s hydrographical network had substantially changed since the Late Period. Such evolution no doubt partly resulted from human actions. These included the digging of several regional canals, some of which were of considerable length and width. One can think of the Red Sea canal, of regional canals such as the ones linking Schedia to Alexandria, Canopus to Alexandria and Busiris to Behbeit el-Hagara or of Ptolemy’s transverse canals, as well as the expansion of farmland in the northern parts of the Delta.Footnote ⁸⁷

To date, apart from the silence of earlier authors on the matter (which should not be taken as actual evidence), nothing proves the Roman origin of these canals. Rather, the channelling of the Bucolic and Bolbitine branches, as well as the activation of the Red Sea canal and other hydraulic operations attested from the Late to the Hellenistic periods, force us to consider the possibility that the transverse canals originate, at least in part, from pre-Roman initiatives. This is in line with the digital elevation model put together by Robert Schiestl, which reveals that the Butic river most probably consisted in the reactivation of existing canals.Footnote ⁸⁸ The digging, in many cases from natural distributaries, of large-scale waterways caused the diversion of significant quantities of water into their course. This phenomenon led to a drop of the water draft in the deltaic network and, hence, resulted in the silting of less performing branches.Footnote ⁸⁹ In this context of sustained anthropogenic interventions, the bipolarisation of the delta’s hydrography was gradually taking place, affecting notably the Mendesian branch, which, according to Manfred Bietak, saw its upstream course absorbed into the Butic canal.Footnote ⁹⁰ The branch would soon after silt up.

5 The Late Antique Delta

The hydrography of the Nile Delta evolved substantially during Late Antiquity and the early medieval period. In the western Delta, the disappearance of the cult of Agathos Daimōn in the fifth century CE and the silence of Arab authors on the Agathos Daimōn/Canopic branch imply that this distributary was already considerably marginalised (to the benefit of the future Rosetta branch) at the time of the Arab conquest.Footnote ⁹¹ In fact, it had become a canal by the end of the first millennium.Footnote ⁹² Until not too long ago, the silting up of the Canopic branch was considered to be the main event that led to the total or partial drying up of the region’s lakes, which were previously supplied by canals, and whose marshes had been partially drained for agricultural purposes. Indeed, Lake Abukir eventually disappeared completely, whereas Lake Mariut (whose level had risen about one and a half metres during the Roman periodFootnote ⁹³) and Lake Edku saw their size shrink and their waters become brackish.Footnote ⁹⁴ More recent work conducted by Clément Flaux and his team in the Mareotide area led them to hypothesise that the transformation of Lake Mariut ‘from a high-level, hypohaline coastal lake to a sebkha’ was actually the result of one or several tsunami(s), including one dated to 811 or 881 CE.Footnote ⁹⁵ This was one of the eight tsunamis or high-energy events known to have impacted the Alexandrian coast in Antiquity.Footnote ⁹⁶ Another well-documented event is the 365 CE earthquake, which triggered a tsunami over Alexandria, contributed to the destruction and submersion of part of Thonis-Herakleion and Canopus, led to the abandonment of a large swath of reclaimed agricultural land around the Lake Manzala and turned Tinnis into an island. The latter event does not seem to have seriously impacted Tinnis, though. Indeed, the city retained its status as a commercial hub and eastern point of entry into Egypt, which lasted until Saladin ordered its abandonment in 1192–1193 CE.Footnote ⁹⁷

In addition to the 365 CE earthquake, the silting up of the Mendesian and Tanitic branches – which can already be inferred from Ptolemy’s testimony – caused vast areas in the north-eastern edge of the Delta to become infertile alkaline and saline plains.Footnote ⁹⁸ In the fifth century CE, Lake Manzala was formed.Footnote ⁹⁹ This phenomenon once and for all deprived Tell Tebilla’s (Mendes-Thmuis’ maritime harbour) of its access to the Mediterranean, leading de facto to the desertion of the site.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The final decline of Thmuis and Tanis also dates from this period.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Further east, the Pelusiac-Bubastic branch gradually silted up as well, and was completely blocked by the ninth century CE. This event followed most probably a series of high floods (in 813, 816 and 820) that deposited a massive quantity of sediment in the Pelusiac channel. As a result of the movement of the region’s coastal sand masses, the Nile migrated west, flowing through a channel that corresponds to the modern Damietta branch.Footnote ¹⁰² The last document related to the Red Sea canal – which was then seemingly only navigable during floods – also dates from this period.Footnote ¹⁰³

6 The Medieval and Ottoman Delta

We do not know much about the history of the Nile Delta’s hydrography and landscape after the Arab conquest. This is partly due to the lack of geoarchaeological projects focusing on this period.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Historical evidence and, to some extent, archaeological data do however provide us with some clues, none of which attest to any major hydrographical change between the turn of the second millennium and the reign of Mehmed Ali.

Following the Arab conquest of 640–642 CE, and as the centre of gravity of Egypt’s geopolitical orbit shifted from Constantinople towards Medina, the Nile Delta continued to be embedded in intensive trade and mobility networks that spanned from the Red Sea, Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf to the Atlantic coast. In addition to Alexandria, which remains an important harbour throughout this period, the coastal cities of Rosetta, Damietta and Tinnis were also important commercial nexuses. As Sobhi Bouderbala shows in this volume, the Arab conquest also led to the settlement of Arabs – especially veterans – into the Egyptian countryside. While the estimated number of Arab settlers does not seem to have paralleled that of the Greek(-speaking) peoples who migrated to Egypt after the Macedonian conquest, their presence had a long lasting impact on the social fabric of Egypt. This was especially the case in the Nile Delta.

As we shall see in the next chapter, Arab sources conceptualise and manage Lower Egypt in a way that is closer to Egyptian ontologies than to Greek and Roman ones.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ They also use a distinctive set of hydronyms from the ones found in Greek and Latin sources. This makes it challenging to correlate medieval branches with the ones mentioned in Classical texts. What we know is that by the end of the ninth century CE, the preponderance of the modern Rosetta and Damietta branches was already well established. These two branches owe their names to the cities located at their mouths. In the eastern Delta, Damietta or Dumyāṭ corresponds to the ancient settlement of Tamiathis. In the western Delta, Rosetta or Rashīd was founded (at the turn of or prior to the eighth century CE) close to the ancient settlement of Bolbitinē, where a Muslim fleet was stationed in the eighth century CE.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The proximity between Rosetta and Bolbitinē gives credence to the hypothesis that the Rosetta branch corresponds to the ancient Bolbitine branch. Other major distributaries documented in medieval Arabic sources include: the Tinnis branch, which flowed through Lake Manzala and connected the island-city of Tinnis to the Nile; a high-maintenance, and over time seasonal, canal running from the apex of the Delta to Alexandria; and the Red Sea (or Trajan’s) Canal, which connected Fusṭāṭ to Qulzum (Clysma) and is said to have been reactivated by ῾Amr Ibn al-῾Aṣ, maybe following a famine in the Ḥijāz.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ What was left of the ancient branches of the Nile had by then become canals or drains,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ and they might have disappeared completely during the high floods that touched the country in the eleventh, thirteenth and seventeenth centuries CE.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The apex also experienced considerable growth following the foundation of Fusṭāṭ by ῾Amr Ibn al-῾Aṣ and, in 969 CE, that of al-Qahirah (Cairo) by the Fāṭimids, who made it their imperial capital. Heba Mostafa’s contribution to this volume emphasises how the choice of this location resulted from a deep understanding of its geostrategic quality, which is in turn indissociable from its sacredness as a nodal locus within the river system. The city established itself as the centre of Sunni Islam and as an intellectual metropolis. Further north-east, on the banks of the Damietta branch, the city of Mansurah was founded by the Ayyubids in 1219 CE. It started bearing its current name following the capture of the Capetian king Louis IX in 1250. Ben Outhwaite’s chapter documents how the Cairo Geniza archives as well as an increasingly large corpus of edited Arabic papyri offer us a vivid window into the transnational and fluvial webs that Cairo’s Jewish community, and Egypt more broadly, was part of. They also highlight the crucial role deltaic commercial hubs played within these networks.

Just like in earlier periods, port cities located on the western and eastern Mediterranean edges of the Delta acted as connecting points between Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea. Contrary to a still prevailing trope, and while it did go through phases of man- or tectonic-made destruction and also shrank in size and population,Footnote ¹¹⁰ Alexandria retained its strategic and commercial role throughout the medieval period. The city also experienced a boost under Ottoman rule.Footnote ¹¹¹ The distinctive administrative and political status it had been endowed with since its foundation also appears to have been maintained at least until the Faṭimid period (969–1171 CE).Footnote ¹¹² This was the case despite the periodical yet chronic silting up of the Ashrafiyyah CanalFootnote ¹¹³ and Alexandria Canal (διώρυξ Ἀλεξανδρείας or khalīj al-Iskandariyya)Footnote ¹¹⁴ and the drying up of Lake Mariout,Footnote ¹¹⁵ which seems to have benefited Rosetta/Rashīd. Indeed, according to Al-Idrīsī (twelfth century CE), the town was in his lifetime a stopover for boats sailing downstream towards Alexandria; instead of reaching the latter town through the canal, they would enter a nearby littoral lake.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In the eastern Delta, Tinnis eventually took over from Pelusium (Egyptian Peremoun, Arabic Farama) as the easternmost port of entry.Footnote ¹¹⁷ As mentioned above, Saladin’s decision to force the abandonment of Tinnis in 1,192–1,193 CE profited Damietta/ Dumyāṭ, but evidence indicates that ships continued to reach the city via Lake Manzala.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The appeal of both Rashīd and Tinnis resided in the fact that they were located on a spot that allowed boats to transition to and from the sea and the Nile via a littoral lake and connecting canals. This presented a much safer, and smoother, alternative to entering the Nile through the shallow and unpredictable Rosetta and Damietta mouths.Footnote ¹¹⁹

While less is known about the years following the 1517 CE Ottoman conquest of Egypt,Footnote ¹²⁰ the agrarian economy, land tenure and tax farming systems that characterised later phases of the Ottoman presence in Egypt have been the object of a substantial body of historical scholarship. This is especially the case for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote ¹²¹ These studies have illuminated the state’s interest in maximising the irrigation network of the region (notably through canal dredging) as well as local power dynamics at play between landowners, tenants and the state. In many ways, these intersecting arrays of relationships are in line with what papyri document for the Roman periods.Footnote ¹²²

7 The Modern Delta

Starting from the reign of Mehmed Ali (1805–1848), perennial irrigation was introduced in Egypt as Egypt’s canal system was expanded.Footnote ¹²³ This included a reactivation of the Alexandria Canal, which was renamed Mahmoudiyah Canal in 1820, as well as, on the eastern edge of the Delta, the Suez Canal, whose inauguration took place in 1869. It is in the context of the digging of the Suez Canal that two cities were founded at the eastern edge of the Delta: Port Said (1855) and Ismaïlia (1862). The Canal also benefited the port-city of Suez, which corresponds to ancient Clysma located on the Red Sea edge of the Wadi Tumilat.

In her seminal paper ‘Les systèmes hydrauliques de l’Égypte prémoderne’, French historian Ghislaine Alleaume writes that ‘by submitting for the first time in history all of the territory to a single mode of water and soil management, the nineteenth century carried out a revolution that, within less than a century, completely transformed the organisation of the Egyptian landscape’.Footnote ¹²⁴ It is true that the generalisation of perennial irrigation in Egypt had a deep, all-encompassing impact on Egypt, including the Delta. Indeed, since Antiquity, fields had been irrigated through a system called basin irrigation, which capitalised on the annual cycle of the Nile flood. By triggering a sustained rise in the water table, perennial irrigation contributed to exacerbating soil salinisation and therefore to decreasing the suitability of the land to crops such as grains.Footnote ¹²⁵ During the first half of the nineteenth century, this phenomenon continued to be partly mitigated by the yearly flood. Things started to change following the building of dams at the apex of the Delta between 1843 and 1861, and more so following the Anglo–Egyptian war of 1882 and the ensuing British occupation of Egypt. For as Jennifer L. Derr argues, ‘the process of colonising Egypt entailed the creation of a new geography of water and agriculture’ by colonial technocrats and engineers.Footnote ¹²⁶

The reshaping of Egypt’s agricultural landscape under British rule aimed at harnessing and ‘enframing’Footnote ¹²⁷ the country’s soil, water and bodies in order to maximise their capitalistic output. This colonial extraction enterprise took the form of a top-down imposition of water-hungry and exportable cash crops such as cotton and sugar cane over more traditional and locally consumed food crops like wheat, barley and rice. It was achieved through a series of integrated measures, including maps (the British Survey of Egypt),Footnote ¹²⁸ regional dams (the first or Low Dam at Aswan, which was built between 1898 and 1902), and the imposition of perennial irrigation throughout the country.Footnote ¹²⁹ In addition to disrupting millennia-old systems of know-how and local relations with the land and the river, the Ottoman-then-British-led transition of Egypt’s irrigation system from a basin to a perennial one had a major impact: It deprived the Nile valley and Delta of the vast majority of its fertilising sedimentary supply, which led to Egyptian agriculture being dependent on chemical fertilisers, worsened the salinisation of arable land and exacerbated a series of parasitic diseases that continue to impact the bodies of a large number of Egyptians.Footnote ¹³⁰

The building of the High Aswan Dam (1960–1970) under Gamal Abdel Nasser both sealed and accelerated these processes.Footnote ¹³¹ At a regional level, the High Aswan Dam led to the retention of more than 98% of the sediments carried by the flood by Lake Nasser. Accordingly, only a tiny proportion of the former Nile river sediments now reaches the Delta. This means that the overall sedimentary load that does reach the Mediterranean Sea is now unable to compensate for coastal erosion, subsidence, climate-induced sea-level rise and the human-induced losses of coastal marshlands, water table rise and soil salinisation.Footnote ¹³² Accordingly, the Nile Delta is slowly but surely transitioning from being a river-dominated, arcuate delta to a wave-dominated, concave one. This phenomenon prompted Jean-Daniel Stanley and his colleagues to hypothesise that the Nile Delta has entered its ‘destruction phase’.Footnote ¹³³ These dynamics are behind the growing number of sea floods which Alexandria and other coastal settlements are experiencing, despite attempts at protecting the corniche through a wall of concrete blocks. They have also led the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to categorise the Nile Delta’s vulnerability as ‘extreme’ and to devise an adaptation project in collaboration with Egypt’s Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation.Footnote ¹³⁴ Current projections estimate that 13% of the Nile Delta could be submerged by the end of the century, including a substantial portion of the city of Alexandria, which might to a large extent be underwater by 2050.Footnote ¹³⁵ The latest modelling indicates that the flooded area will return Lake Mariut to its ancient size.Footnote ¹³⁶ The same applies to Lake Manzala in the east, where state-run operations aimed at allowing in seawater took place recently.Footnote ¹³⁷

1 Wilful Womb: The Delta as a Space of Regeneration and Resistance

The vast wetlands that formed the northern edge of Lower Egypt have traditionally been conceptualised as loci of regeneration and resistance. What amounts today to four littoral lakes (Mariout, Idku, Burullus and Manzala) was actually a much wider area made of lagunas, islands, floodable depressions, marshes and lakes, where water went from salted to brackish and sweet depending on the time of year and on the quality of the flood, and where reeds, papyrus, lotus, flax, birds and fishes thrived. Compared to the tilled landscapes located upstream, the northern portion of the Delta looked like a vast succession of undifferentiated spaces where water and land merged.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Lower Egypt’s geographical, cultural and economic wealth and liminal qualities are best encapsulated in one of the founding stories of the Osirian cycle: It is in the marshes of Khemnis, close to Buto (ancient Pe and Dep) in the central north Delta, that Isis took refuge, gave birth to and hid her and Osiris’ son Horus from Seth. One of the most vivid textual expressions of this narrative is found in the so-called Metternich Stela, which dates from the reign of Nectanebo II (360–343 BCE) and was originally erected in the temple of Mnevis in Heliopolis. The text of the stela aims at giving protection against scorpion and snake bites. It does so through a series of stories and spells that revolve around the episode of Thot and Isis curing baby Horus from a poisonous bite in the marshes of Khemnis. Isis’ voice features prominently:

Upon coming back to Khemnis, Isis found Horus unconscious and immediately sought help:

A woman who lived in the marshes then approached Isis and tried to encourage her, saying, among other things:

After the woman suggested that perhaps Horus had been stung by a scorpion or poisoned by a snake, Isis smelled the poison in her son’s mouth and called for divine help. Nephthys came, then Thot, who helped her cure Horus. Isis then entrusted her son to the locals:

In this story, Isis, a self-described refugee, is welcomed and sheltered by the ‘lowly’ inhabitants of the marshes. ‘Those in Khemmis and the nurses in Pe and Dep’ helped the goddess, cared for her and shared her pain. As a token of gratitude and trust, the goddess asked them to look after Horus. This foundational story ties the very origins of Egypt’s sacred, Osirian royalty to the Delta’s marshes, whose womblike, liquid, wet, luscious spaces are seen as sacred and safe refuges. The image of Isis nursing Horus in the marshes became a regular theme in Late Period to Roman Isiac iconography.Footnote ¹⁴² Together with its sacred, royal meaning, it also supposes a deep awareness of the bind that tied the Nile Valley and Delta to the marshlands that bordered the ‘Great Green’ (Mediterranean Sea). There, the divine order was gestated and reinforced precisely because the marshes were not as easily controllable by central authorities as the tillable landscapes upstream.

It is no surprise, then, that Greek, Latin and European writers have customarily described these areas and their inhabitants as ‘hostile’.Footnote ¹⁴³ To be sure, we know of a few uprisings against the central Egyptian state that took place in the region: Tefnacht of Sais’ military campaigns against Piankhy in the eighth century BCE; the second century BCE Lower Egyptian uprising, which lasted through the last decade of Ptolemy V’s reign; the Boukoloi uprising (second century CE); and the Coptic revolt in the Bashmurian region in the eighth and ninth centuries CE.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ But uprisings also took place elsewhere in Egypt, so one cannot simply explain the often derogatory treatment of the northern Delta as the result of historical events. More than being anchored into historical dynamics, such discourses betray the anxieties of ancient and modern élites towards wet and (semi-)arid environments, which do not belong to the expected range of agrarian, sedentary landscapes deemed ‘civilised’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Here too, Maspero’s 1878 Histoire ancienne des peuples de l’Orient offers a good case in point:

Maspero describes the ‘primitive’ Delta’s marshes as disordered, wild landscapes, whose civilizational potential depended upon its agrarian regulation. The Orientalist subtext that permeates this nineteenth-century description still endures today.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Here too, historical data tells a different, and much more sophisticated, story. The occupation of the northern Delta is well attested in the Predynastic period, and later evidence shows that the region was integrated within the broader Egyptian landscape.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The same is true for the desertic edges east and west of the alluvial Delta, from the salt pans of the Wadi Natrun and Pelusium to the Mediterranean and Mareotic shores, to the roads linking the Sinai to the Red Sea via the Wadi Tumilat.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

The sacredness of Lower Egypt’s wet and salted landscapes expressed in the story of Isis and Horus at Khemnis endured, albeit in shifting ways, through Late Antiquity. Indeed, the wet and the dry agricultural margins of the Delta were also important loci for the development of Christian monasticism. While much attention has been dedicated to the archaeologically documented monasteries and ascetic settlements of the Wadi Natrun as well as to the cult of Christian saints in and around Alexandria,Footnote ¹⁵⁰ the dynamism and far-reaching networks of the monastic communities located in and around Tinnis, Panephysis and Diolkos (Lake Manzala area) have only recently begun to be properly acknowledged. Like the Late Antique pilgrimage sites and routes that ran along the north-eastern edge of the Delta, through the Land of Goshen and to and from the Sinai Peninsula, these monastic centres are more proof of the integration of the Delta’s agricultural margins into the religious and economic landscape of the Late Antique Roman Empire.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The Arab conquest seems to have led to the closure of many of the region’s monastic centres and the Bashmurian revolts were followed by the displacement of local Christian communities.Footnote ¹⁵² Nevertheless, later evidence documents the endurance of pilgrimage and monastic sites in the Delta, including in the Wadi Natrun. Ramez Boutros’ contribution highlights how the same goes for the appeal of the cult of Christian saints, and this phenomenon extends, in later period, to Sufi saints and other (Christian and Muslim) saintly sacred places.Footnote ¹⁵³

2 Triangular Plane: The Delta as a Computable Space

From Antiquity to the nineteenth century, the expansive area comprising the two, western- and easternmost, branches of the Nile Delta and the Mediterranean was called ‘The Northern or Low Land’ by Egyptian and Arabic speakers. To the south-facing Greek then European gaze, this territory looked like one or several ‘deltas’.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The way in which Lower Egypt has conventionally been described in ancient to modern writings is not insignificant: On the contrary, as Edward Said showed in Culture and Imperialism, these imaginative geographies often operate through the mundane, imbricate themselves into the formulaic, the seemingly innocuous and the conventional. Such is the case with the stereotypical description of the Delta’s geography. From its shape, to the length and location of its branches, canals, edges and settlements, to estimates of its total surface and shifting tillable lands, the Delta is a landscape that has, for millennia now, been geometrically encased and mathematically rendered by native Egyptians, settlers and foreigners. Comparing Lower Egypt to a triangle, measuring its lengths and surface, locating its settlements and nomes, counting its populations and estimating the duration of travels through its territory have allowed ancient to modern farmers, landowners, civil servants, writers and travellers to achieve a certain measure of personal control over the region. By the same token, expert geographical, agrarian and hydraulic knowledge also (in)directly legitimises royal, imperial or colonial claims to occupation, extraction and control. Such phenomena are in no way particular to Lower Egypt, nor to Egypt for that matter. But due to its particular shape, size and deltaic nature, the Nile Delta offers a powerful example of the discursive entanglements through which landscapes are constructed.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

After a short contextual setup (2.1–4), Herodotus’ Book 2 opens up with a geographical reflection on Egypt that situates the reader off the Mediterranean coast, and gradually brings them on the shore, then upstream. What captures Herodotus’ attention from the start is the relationship of Egypt to the river Nile, its water and sediments. More specifically, he is interested in mulling over what – elements, expanses of land – count as Egypt, and what are the dimensions and limits of the ‘Egypt to which the Greeks sail’:

The very name given to the Delta in European languages is a testimony to what it represents in the eyes of the Greek, the Roman and later on the European, who approached it: A triangular expanse of low, flat land that can, through an alphabetical metaphor, be encompassed in its entirety from the sea; a territory that is bordered, united and rendered productive by the Nile.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ As Damien Agut-Labordère notes in this volume, ‘for both Herodotus and Strabo, Egypt is essentially assimilated to the Delta’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ This narrative tactic is in line with Herodotus’ treatment of Egypt as a whole. Writing about Herodotus’ use of ‘symmetry and inversion’ in his description of Egypt’s geography and population, Phiroze Vasunia emphasises the underpinnings of such an approach:

Vasunia compellingly shows the centrality of Herodotus’ symmetrical use of geography in his rendition of Egypt’s landscape. His conclusions echo the concept of ‘enframing’, which was coined by Timothy Mitchell in reference to the nature and aims of British colonial practices over Egypt’s land, resources and population.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Mitchell focuses on enframing as being a fundamentally modern phenomenon. Accordingly, his study does not engage with the intimate relationship between Classical literature and education on the one hand, and European imperial habitus on the other.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Yet while nineteenth-century technological advances did certainly give European colonial empires an unprecedented scope and reach, ancient Helleno- or Romano-centric renderings of foreign and conquered lands both testify to comparable positionings and, by extension, to the influential role such discourses had on the shaping of modern scholarship.

Indeed, Herodotus’ gaze and the Classical descriptions of the Delta’s geography written after him have shaped the ways in which later scholars and travellers, be they of European descent or not, have conceptualised, experienced and described the Delta. As peppered as they can be at times with varying measures of modern anecdotes, all subsequent scholarship, travelogues and literary accounts of the region situate themselves within an emulative spectrum that ranges from including a few (in)direct references to Classical texts to being a close paraphrase of, and reading of modern landscapes through, ancient Greek and Latin authors.

Take the opening sequence of the 1813 Description de l’Égypte memoir Voyage dans l’intérieur du Delta written by Expédition d’Égypte’s members and engineers Jean-Marie Du Bois-Aymé and Jean-Baptiste Prosper Jollois:

Du Bois-Aymé and Jollois start their memoir on the interior of the Delta by focusing on its contours. Thus, they first state how the ‘Delta is the part of Egypt that is enclosed between the Mediterranean and the two branches of the Nile’. There follows a series of mathematical facts: In Antiquity there were seven mouths; the Delta owes its name to the Greek letter because it appears to have a triangular shape when approached from the sea; modern Egyptians ‘have divided their territory differently’ (they do not specify how); the Delta has no elevation; it is cut by a great number of canals; Lake Burullus occupies a considerable space to the north; as the crow flies, the Delta is, from its apex to Rosetta and Damietta, around 160km long; the two main branches of the Nile are ca. 230–240km long; the Delta’s basis is ca. 145km long if one follows the coast’s sinuosities, and there is ca. 137km in a straight line between the mouths of Damietta and Rosetta, which are the extremities of this base. Thus, they conclude, is the general aspect, the extent, of the country they were about to travel through.

This narrative choice agrees with the Description’s long series of emulations of ancient Greek and Latin descriptions of the Delta, and testifies to the Classically infused gaze of the European élite of the time.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Indeed, not only did most European travellers and scholars conspicuously paraphrase ancient writers, but they also, as Lucile Haguet demonstrates, obsessively tried to map ancient Greek and Latin descriptions onto the landscape they encountered.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Thus, despite its claim to empirical authority and enlightened objectivity, this geometrical approach conveniently veils the limited experiential knowledge of both ancient Greco-Latin and modern European writers of the realities on the ground. As Émile Amélineau already noted in Reference Amélineau1893 regarding the habit of scholars of using Herodotus and Strabo in order to reconstruct the ancient Delta’s shifting hydrography, ‘[t]his system is too easy, and leads to deplorable results. We’ve so far trusted Greek authors, whom we thought infallible, too much; basic reflection should however have shown that they could be mistaken’.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

If one excludes site-focused archaeological publications, modern scholarly production about the history of the interior of the ancient Delta remains limited. It can be summed up by two types of work: One that focuses on Lower Egypt’s agrarian landscape (formation of the Delta, branches and, starting with Ptolemy, mouths of the Nile, carrying capacity and, especially for later periods, cadastral archives); the other on the region administrative and religious geography (nomes, dioceses or provinces with their capitals/bishoprics and their tutelary gods and – when visible in modern times – ruins). The region is thus historically framed as a container; one that matters insofar as it both produces and moves (agricultural, commercial) wealth, and one whose wealth ought to be assessed, maximised and controlled. As Wakako Kumamura and Mona Abaza show in their respective contributions to this volume, medieval and modern archives considerably disrupt this panoramic narrative, thus forcing us to seriously question ancient historians’ (including Egyptologists’, papyrologists’ and Classicists’) shortcomings. The same can be said of the long-lasting occupation of urban centres located inside the Delta, including in areas that were once at the northern edges of the floodplain like Buto, Mendes, Sais, Tanis and Mansurah.

This is not to say that the Nilotic contours of the Delta – that is, in Antiquity, the western- and easternmost branches of the Nile, and the Rosetta and Damietta branches for later periods – have not historically been crucial areas of mobility, interconnectivity, territorial integration and thus geopolitical interest. On the contrary, focusing respectively on the veneration of the nilometer of al-Rawda Island in medieval times, on viticulture in the Mareotide, on the water supply of Alexandria in the longue durée and water development in the Buhayra province, Heba Mostafa, Marie-FranÇoise Boussac and Bérangère Redon, Isabelle Hairy and Wakako Kumamura each document the multifarious manifestations of the relationships between politics, governance and the Delta’s water.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Taken together, they also highlight the strong – economic, historical, as well as historiographical – pull of the westernmost branch of the Nile, the ‘political nucleus of Egypt’,Footnote ¹⁶⁸ which links the apex to Alexandria and Lake Mareotis, as well as Thonis-Herakleion, Canopus and, in later periods, Rosetta.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ As Damien Agut-Labordère and Claire Somaglino show, the same can be said of the easternmost branch, whose course linked the apex to the nodal, fluvial and maritime city-harbours of Pelusium, Tinnis and through them the Sinai, Syria-Palestine, Cyprus and Arabia.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

While ancient and modern discourses have typically emphasised the deltaic border as a sharp territorial, religious and geopolitical reality, local sources paint a much more complex landscape. As we saw above, the marshes of the northern Delta, which were already heavily invested with religious and political roles in the Pharaonic period, and whose ancient extent was much larger than today, shaped the region to a considerable extent. Likewise, the shifting desert and maritime edges are porous zones that connect the region to many intersecting worlds. This is a recurring theme in several of the contributions to this volume.Footnote ¹⁷¹ For, as Claire Somaglino points out in her contribution, the ‘Egyptian borders in Antiquity were less lines than area and points’ of exchanges and passage. The triangle’s lines are blurred.

The quantitative and geometrical treatment of the Delta in historiographical narratives about ancient Egypt ought to be critically contextualised. To a large extent, it is, together with the outshining appeal of Alexandria, a by-product of modern colonial histories.

3 Knot and Key: The Delta as an Imperial Crossroad

It is no accident that, even though several of the Description de l’Égypte’s memoirs focus on parts of the (history of the) Delta, the only deltaic remains visible on the collection’s frontispiece page are those of Alexandria and Giza. And there is a reason why there is no Lower Egypt equivalent to Auguste Mariette’s Voyage dans la Haute Égypte and Itinéraire de la Haute Égypte. The reason is not only the particular conception of which histories matter, but also the role of the Delta in this canonical narrative. Like their ancient counterparts, whose writings often serve as interpretive grids,Footnote ¹⁷² modern scholars’ interest in the shape of the Delta, its waterways, its land and its population is a fundamentally geostrategic one. This manifests in varying ways in different types of publications, from Strabo’s ambulatory description of Alexandria to Makrizi’s work to the Description de l’Égypte to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century maps of the Delta and twentieth-century ‘izba archives and travel guidebooks.Footnote ¹⁷³ In all cases (that is from Antiquity to today), Lower Egypt is embedded within transnational imperial markets that both rely on and generate territorial patterns of – agrarian, commercial, religious, touristic – demands and control.

Conceived of by scholars as a space of regeneration and resistance that is best apprehended from its contours and quantifiable attributes, the Nile Delta is also stereotypically defined by what is around it. The region’s appeal proceeds from its location and what/who can (be) move(d) through it. As Rachel Mairs makes clear, to members of ancient to modern imperial élites, including businessmen, travellers, pilgrims and tourists, the region was most often portrayed as a transitory space one moves through, rather than stopping in.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Within this landscape, the Delta and particularly Alexandria and the Cairo area are conceptualised as gateways into the internal and imported wealth of Egypt and, through her often-feminised land, the ‘Orient’. This liminality is, paradoxically, the rationale for the historiographical underrepresentation of the region in and out of itself.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ This is not to deny the documented reality of the many connectivity networks in which Lower Egypt was embedded throughout its history, something that the contributions that make up this volume collectively emphasise. Rather, it is to acknowledge that these historical dynamics coexisted with, and perhaps fuelled, a scholarly and popular ‘abstractifying’ of the region that does justice neither to its historical significance nor to the complex (hi)stories on the ground.

In many ways, the formulaic and generally superficial rendering of the Delta in much of the erudite tradition prior to the turn of the twenty-first century is a product of the Age of Enlightenment. Indeed, the discussions of (Lower) Egypt’s landscapes, as well as the passages about its early history found in scholarly works and travel memoirs of that period, generally serve two complementary functions: To document and exemplify a (mostly French or British) project of military invasion of Egypt and to rationalise the moral value of this imperial project through its ‘civilising’ nature. Unsurprisingly, as noted earlier, such historical musings often amount to paraphrases of ancient Classical texts, which are mobilised to articulate colonial fantasies about a European takeover of Egypt.

Take Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Reference Huet1716 Histoire du commerce et de la navigation des anciens. The book is based on the report Huet submitted in 1667 to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who had sponsored it in the context of France’s plans to attract commercial investors to India, where the Dutch and English empires had already set foot.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

While Huet mentions what was in Egypt (its fertility; the goods it produces), what made it a crucial catch for Alexander in the context of his quest for a ‘universal monarchy’ is where it was located. In that regard, the geostrategic liminality of the sites of Pharos and Rhakotis encapsulates the marvellousness of Egypt’s commercial situation. For just like Egypt was at the crossroad of Asia, Africa and Europe, so was the spot chosen by Alexander for his Egyptian foundation, which was auspiciously located between Tyre and Carthage, and between the sea (understood as belonging to the Greek world) and Lake Mareotis (equated with Egypt).

This idea of the unlocking of a well-situated Egypt by a European monarch through the foundation (Alexander), conquest (Octavian, Amr) or ‘rebirth’ (Napoléon Bonaparte, Mehmed Ali) of Alexandria became a trope all unto itself.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Corollaries to this phenomenon are both the overemphasis on Alexandria and its hinterland over the rest of Lower Egypt and an epistemological disconnection of Alexandria from Egypt, as well as of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt from earlier periods.Footnote ¹⁷⁹

In scholarship pertaining to the Hellenistic and Roman world (including Egypt), Alexandria both swallows and is described as standing apart from the Delta, which is relegated to a faded, supporting role. The transfer of the centre of power to Fustāt/Maṣr/Cairo following the Arab conquest comes with a transfer of this trope from Alexandria (that is, the Mediterranean coast) onto the new capital area (that is, the apex).Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Meanwhile, post-642 CE Alexandria has traditionally been portrayed as a fallen, ruined landscape that was only revived under Mehmed Ali’s reign, and even more so after 1882, when large contingents of migrants from Europe and the Levant settled in the city.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Thus conceptualised, Alexandria becomes a sleeping phoenix, whose rise would only happen through another European-led conquest.Footnote ¹⁸² This theme, and the cyclical temporality that it conveys, relies on the occlusion of Indigenous Egyptians’ occupation of the Mareotide seafront, as well as on the sidelining of Egypt’s pre-Macedonian Indigenous and foreign histories.Footnote ¹⁸³

The modern tropes of Alexandria’s exceptionalism, and of its concomitant outshining of and disconnection from Lower Egypt, owe a lot to the work of French philosopher and Orientalist Comte de Volney, who conceptualised modern Alexandria as an ‘anti-Occident’.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ To him, while ruins are a ‘curiosity’ in Europe, ‘in Alexandria, on the contrary, as soon as we exit the new city on the continent, we are stunned by the aspect of a vast field of ruins’. The ruins, writes Volney, are ‘sowed with ancient columns, modern tombs, palm trees, nopals’, and a space ‘where the only living things are jackals, sparrow hawks, and owls’.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ More than mere descriptions, Volney’s recollections of Alexandria’s ruins serve as metaphors for the state of Egypt under Ottoman rule. The dissonance between the dilapidated ‘Turkish’ city, which Volney acknowledges to be ‘the emporium of a quite considerable commerce’,Footnote ¹⁸⁶ and what he imagines it to have looked like in the Classical period, triggers a future-orientated nostalgia. ‘The Turkish spirit’, Volney writes regarding the lack of maintenance of the city’s ‘New Harbour’, ‘is about ruining the works of the past and the hopes of the future; for there is no tomorrow in the barbarism of ignorant despotism.’Footnote ¹⁸⁷

In Volney’s time, Egypt’s ‘key’ was Cairo. ‘Amidst this general barbary’, says he in the chapter of his Travels dedicated to ‘The State of Commerce’, ‘one could be stunned that commerce had preserved the activity it deploys in Cairo.’ Chanelling what Huet writes about the site of Alexandria, he then argues that Cairo being ‘the seat of a great commerce’ in his lifetime is attributable to two reasons:

This passage is followed by a description of the African and Near Eastern caravan and waterborne routes that transited via Cairo. The following chapter, entitled ‘On the Isthmus of Suez and the junction of the Red Sea to the Mediterranean’, expands on the commercial advantages of the situation of what would become the Suez Canal area.

Together with Savary’s letters, Volney’s travels are among the most read and influential European writings about Egypt to be produced before the French invasion of the Ottoman province. They also inspired The Ruins, whose focus on the birth and death of empires was instrumental in the development of the notion of ‘civilisation’. More crucially still, Napoléon, numerous members of the Expédition d’ÉgypteFootnote ¹⁸⁸ and many travellers and scholars of the time read Alexandria’s landscapes, bodies and ruins through the filter of Volney’s writings.Footnote ¹⁸⁹

While our understanding of the history of Lower Egypt (Alexandria included) has changed considerably since Huet’s, Montesquieu’s and Volney’s lifetime, the tropes they contributed to the promotion of had a lasting influence among scholars, and they continue to show up in some publications.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ As all tropes, they are partly capitalising on ancient (literary) evidence and in need of nuance, both chronologically and spatially. First, as we saw above, the area of Alexandria was already occupied and integrated within the Egyptian territory way before Alexander of Macedon’s foundation and it did not fall into oblivion after the Arab conquest.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Yet as Damien Agut-Labordère demonstrates in this volume, ‘the foundation and emergence of Alexandria is actually the final stage of a long-term process of relocation of Egyptian political centres along the western branch of the Nile Delta, at the fringe of the Libyan world’.Footnote ¹⁹² Second, the foundation of that city did not lead to the ruin of other urban centres and commercial zones in the Delta. We now know, for instance, that Lake Manzala remained an important point of entry and exit throughout Antiquity, as well as the medieval and (early) modern periods. The same can be said of numerous deltaic towns, and one could also evoke the importance of the land route corridor linking the northern Sinai to Pelusium, the apex of the Delta, the Wadi Tumilat and the Red Sea. Archaeological and textual evidence also documents the presence of thriving commercial centres at the apex of, within and at the edges of the Delta throughout history. Yet when it comes to broader historical narratives and public reception of the history of the region, these intersecting and diachronic dynamics remain too often eclipsed, and the focus continues to be on Alexandria or, for later periods, the area of Cairo.

As I hope to have shown with the overview provided in this introduction, empires not only shaped the ways in which local communities, settlers, travellers, merchants, passersby, pilgrims, tourists and the governing élite lived in, moved through and ruled deltaic landscapes; they also profoundly impacted what stories scholars have been telling, and how they’ve been doing so. To be mindful of their self-referential and thus skewed nature does not necessarily discredit the historical phenomena these tropes are often partially rooted in. Rather, this act of methodological self-awareness opens up space, thereby allowing us to ask different questions and revisit or complicate some canonical narratives.

With that in mind, the kaleidoscopic set of contributions gathered in this volume invites the reader to mull over two overarching questions: What was the significance of the Nile Delta within the successive empires it belonged to from the Pharaonic to the modern period? And how did imperialism shape the region’s socio-environmental dynamics in the longue durée? Recent developments are now forcing us to open the door of the echo chamber in which the tales we tell ourselves have been bouncing for way too long. What happens when we let more air flow in?