Ancient Egypt Geography

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The lives of the ancient Egyptians and the landscape of Egypt are inseparable relationships. The natural resources are the origin of why Egypt became one of the first civilization in the history and the primitive conditions of ancient Egyptians’ living, ranged from food to even religion. Likewise, the Egyptians’ lives were also very closely entwined with their geographical conditions.

There are two main features in the landscape of the ancient Egypt: one is the Nile River, called “Black Land” meaning the fertile area beside the river and the other is the desert, called “Red Land” which area located to the both sides of the river. “Each of these geographic regions possessed unique physical and ecological characteristics and each influenced …show more content…

Within the Nile Valley and Delta, with the adjacent low deserts, all of the basic resources that sustained human life were available — water, food and the raw materials for tools, clothing, and shelter.” As a food provider, the Nile made “the deep carpet of silt” which made up by the annual flood waters and eventually “gives the valley its astonishing fertility.” Across the river up to 25 kilometers, this broad area called floodplains, and it was the ideal place for “large-scale cereal cultivation.” The beer, one of the main staples of the ancient Egyptians, also made of barely which is the major cereal cultivated in the ancient Egypt near the Nile and it gave high nutrition including carbohydrates and B vitamins. “Cereal agriculture thrived in Egypt as nowhere else in the ancient world. What the farmers drew fed everyone else — not only the king and elite but also all of the full-time workers employed by the state, from bureaucrats to laborers who built the royal tombs and cult temples.” With natural levees that the Nile River made and the seasonal inundation, the area led a sedentary life of the ancient Egyptians according to archeological evidence from the Bavarian period that the people used to fish and grew various crops near the river. On the contrary to the hot and dry weather in the modern Egypt, the wetter climate before the late third millennium B.C.E. also made people easier for farming and settling …show more content…

Although the area was hostile to any farming activity and herding of animals, the eastern desert had always been a great interest for the Egyptians because it gave valuable resources such as metals, including gold and hard stones. Stone was used for tools and limestone which was "excavated in the bedrock, or limestone plateaus, which provided a solid bedrock base for pyramid construction.” Gold excavated mainly in the region of the Wadi Hammamet and southward, was the integral resource for gold artifacts such as decorating King’s tomb and inner coffin. On the other side of the Eastern Desert, the Sinai Peninsula “was also an important source of raw materials, including turquoise used in jewelry from mines in the western Sinai.” While “the Nile River offered both an obvious means of mass transit and an easy way to move goods,” these natural resources became one of the important economic bases of the ancient Egypt through the trades with near close neighbors, for example, Nubia, in the Predynastic

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