Abstract

Nearly two thousand five hundred years have elapsed since the Greek historian Herodotus (ca. 485e425 BC) posed a number of fundamental questions about the source, age, and flood regime of the River Nile. Herodotus travelled widely in Egypt in around 450 BC e mainly in the Delta and Lower Egypt, but he may have journeyed as far upstream as Aswan and the First Cataract. A keen observer of nature, with a questioning intellect, Herodotus very quickly discerned that the dark alluvial soils of Egypt were very different from the desert soils of Syria and Libya, and inferred that they were derived from the Ethiopian headwaters of the Nile.
Herodotus was the first to recognize that Egyptian civilization was,
as he put it, “the gift of the river” (Griffiths, 1966) since he understood
that, without the regular and reliable hundred days of
flooding during the summer months, and the annual deposition of
silts along the floodplains, agriculture would not have been
possible on any significant scale under the desert climate of the Nile
Valley.