THE NILE Delta and the Mediterranean have been pushing against each other for the past 10 million years since the river first began carrying dirt to the sea.1 For most of the last 7,500 years though, the Delta has enjoyed the upper hand. As the fifth-century b.c.e. Greek traveler and historian Herodotus sailed toward Egypt’s northern coast, he wrote of how “as you approach it and are still within one day’s run from the land, and you drop a sounding line, you will bring up mud, though you are in eleven fathoms’ depth.”2 For Herodotus, the presence of all this mud so far out at sea was evidence enough of how the Delta had been steadily made over the course of thousands of years by the accumulation of sand and dirt carried by the Nile.3 In his words, “The Delta, according to the Egyptians themselves (and I certainly agree), is alluvial silt and, one might say, a contribution of the day before yesterday.”4 As evidence that the Delta was indeed a product of “the day before yesterday,” Herodotus noted the region’s absence of any of the ancient ruins responsible for bringing so many visitors like himself to Egypt.
Another of these travelers who wrote of the Nile Delta and its steady creation over millennia was an American named John Antes who lived in Egypt in the eighteenth century, the period of most immediate concern to us in this chapter. Of the Delta he wrote, “The large quantities of muscle and oyster beds, with other productions of the sea, which are to be found under ground in various places, even not far from Grand Cairo, made me sometimes think, that most probably the whole Delta was originally noth-ing but a shallow bay of the sea, of unequal depth. . . . Near Rosetta there seems to be striking proof that the country is still encreasing by the sedi-ments of the river; by every appearance it seems that Rosetta was formerly situated close to the sea.”5 In addition to these fossilized remnants of the sea, Antes also observed how the yearly flood moved large amounts of dirt to grow the area of the Delta. “When I thus noticed what large pieces of ground were yearly carried away, and of course removed towards the sea, and considered that this must have been the case from the first existence of the river, it seemed to me a very strong argument . . . that perhaps the great-est part, if not the whole of the Delta has been thus produced, and must still be encreasing by an encroachment upon the sea.”6 And like Herodotus many years before him, Antes also observed “that no monuments of very great antiquity are to be found in these low places, but only on some few elevated spots, and even these few do not seem to be so old as those found in the upper parts of the country.”7 Thus the period from Herodotus’s visit to Egypt 2,500 years ago to Antes’s observations at the end of the eighteenth century saw the steady expansion of the Delta into the Mediterranean. This reign of Egypt’s northern coast over the sea, however, would soon begin to come to an end a few decades after Antes wrote his account.
Indeed on the basis of much more contemporary accounts, there is clear evidence that the multiple millennial domination of the Delta’s dirt over the Mediterranean has slowly been coming to an end since about 1800.8 Like other deltas around the world, Egypt’s is slowly retreating.
Some parts of the coastline are being eroded at a rate of 125 to 170 meters/
year.9 This is primarily a function of the detrimental effects of two hun-dred years of gigantic public works projects meant to manipulate the Nile’s waters for what were stated at the time to be exigent political and eco-nomic needs. From the efforts of the early nineteenth-century Ottoman provincial governor Mehmet (Ali to irrigate more of the Delta to Presi-dent Gamal (Abd al-Nasir’s Aswan High Dam hydroelectric project in the mid-twentieth century, the ecology of the lower Nile was changed more rapidly and more fundamentally in the past two hundred years than ever before. One consequence of these changes to the river has been that the
Delta no longer receives the full impact of the yearly flood and the rich silt it contains (over 125 million tons of sediment a year).10 These gifts of the Nile now pile up behind the Aswan High Dam. Thus unlike Herodotus, someone sailing toward the Nile Delta today would not find much mud in the sea at even a very close distance to the shore. Among the other regret-table environmental consequences of these public works projects—each of course with its own significant human costs as well—are salinization, coastal erosion, massive increases in the usage of chemical fertilizers, and extreme water loss due to evaporation from Lake Nasir behind the High Dam. These grand environmental stories of the creation of the Nile Delta and its current erosion are clear enough to anyone interested in Egypt and have received much attention from geologists, historians, environmental activists, hydrologists, and others.
Instead of these well-known millennial tales of creation and destruc-tion, this chapter focuses in on some of the thousands of smaller scale daily interactions between Egyptians and the Nile Delta’s silt in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—a few decades before the nineteenth and twen-tieth centuries’ massive projects of river manipulation.11 This history of human interaction with water and dirt in Ottoman Egypt (as elsewhere) is at its heart a story about the outlines of society—literally—and about how imaginaries of the rural landscape were formed and maintained through and by water. The yearly flood and the massive amount of sediment it brought ensured that the shape of Egypt in the Ottoman period and before was in constant flux. Water ebbed and flowed, embankments broke, canals were dredged, silt settled, water evaporated, and dams collapsed. These and other environmental and infrastructural realities of life in rural Ottoman Egypt meant that peasants and the imperial bureaucracy they were a part of had to adapt to a constantly changing physical landscape. The history of how peasants and the Ottoman state dealt with this environment in flux reveals how and why they conceived of, negotiated with, and tried to harness the dirt of their countryside.
The annual meeting of water with dirt was a process that fundamentally shaped Egyptian peasant and Ottoman imperial imaginaries of the rural environment. As is made clear in a seventeenth-century satirical Arabic lit-erary account of the countryside, proximity to the Nile and the particular ways its flood waters settled in land created a hierarchy of rural spaces.12 At the bottom of this hierarchy were swampy lands (bila¯d al-malaq) on the margins of the Nile watershed. These areas received water but not enough to properly irrigate agricultural fields to grow food. Next were villages very close to the river with highly sophisticated irrigation networks that
fed water to very productive areas of cultivation. And at the top of this social ladder were Egypt’s large towns and cities. That Egyptian peasants and the imperial bureaucracy equated relative levels of irrigation to social status, political and economic import, and cultural sophistication clearly indicates the centrality of water to the development of imaginaries of rural society and environment in Ottoman Egypt.
At the same time, an examination of both local and Ottoman impe-rial imaginations of the environment further suggests something of the cooperative nature of water management. Controlling, sharing, and using water both necessitated and fostered cooperation and compromise among all parties. As we will see below, many conceptions of how best to manage water were built on this cooperative ideal, one understood and cultivated by both the imperial bureaucracy and Egyptian peasants. This common acceptance of the cooperative nature of water utilization goes a long way in explaining the remarkable similarities of many of the shared impe-rial and local views of the rural Egyptian environment. As I show below, however, this is not to say that peasant and imperial interests and actions were always in lockstep. Taken together, these cooperative and contested negotiations over environmental resource management help delineate a set of environmental imaginaries at play in the early modern Ottoman Egyptian countryside that included notions of community, responsibility, precedent, and resource allocation.
Two aspects of life in rural Ottoman Egypt bring the imperial bureau-cracy’s and peasants’ engagements with dirt and water into the starkest of reliefs—canal dredging and the changing shape of alluvial islands in the Nile and its tributaries. Canals had to be dredged regularly throughout Egypt to keep irrigated water flowing in the countryside, and likewise the vicissitudes of the Nile ensured that alluvial islands were constantly get-ting larger and smaller, reforging their spatial form, and connecget-ting and disconnecting from canal banks. Both of these processes, among others, altered the physical landscape of Egypt, changed political and social rela-tionships between peasant groups and between peasants and the Ottoman state, affected rural labor practices, challenged the abilities of rural Islamic courts to adjudicate complex disputes, and reshaped economic interests.
In more specific terms, I will show below how canal dredging involved the establishment of legal precedents for the responsibility of maintaining properly functioning waterways and other irrigation works and how allu-vial islands contributed to notions about what constituted evidence for the continuous use and cultivation of property. These ideals of community, precedent, sharing, and the establishment of responsibility were all integral
facets of both imperial and local imaginaries of the rural Ottoman Egyp-tian environment.