Delta of the Nile

The delta of the Nile indicates the area of Egypt where the the Nile is thrown in the sea the Mediterranean. It is a marshy area which since antiquity was always rich in fauna and flora. The Egyptian papyrus comes mainly from this area.

It is located at the north of the Egypt and starts in the north of the city of the Cairo, with some 150  km of the Mediterranean coast, in a place which the Egyptians name “the Belly of the cow” ( Batn will el-Baqara ). The Nile, after a course of almost 6600  km, is divided there into several branches.

The independent source of information concerning the branches of the Delta under the Nouvel Empire was updated in the Ramesséum at Thèbes. There, in the vast warehouses where all the goods necessary to the operation of the temple of Ramsès {{II}} piled up, one discovered an astronomical quantity of earthenware jars having contained wine produced in the Delta. The collar of these earthenware jars, playing the same part that the labels of the modern bottles, indicated, by the hieratic dummy entry, the exact place of production of invaluable drink and in particular the branch of the Nile at the edge of which it was manufactured.

One knows thus that in the east developed “the Re water”, which bathed pi-Ramsès, the capital of the time. Its during Westerner was “the water of the West”, whose layout followed about that of the current canopic branch. The backbone of the Delta was the “Large River”, whose name indicates that it was to be at the time either most important for navigation, or longest. To these three principal branches were added “the water of Ptah”, which was detached from “the water of the West”, and “the water of Amon”, which separated compared to the “Large River” in the middle same of the Delta.

The branches of the Delta appear obviously in descriptions of Egypt which the Greek geographers of Antiquity left. Whereas under the New Empire one counted five of them, the classic authors report to us that there were seven, baptized compared to their outlets in the sea; of is in west, they bore the names of pélusiaque, tanitic, mendésienne, pathmitic, sebennytic, bolbitine and canopic .

The Egyptian texts of the time saïte bring back the existence of “employees to the doors of the foreign countries”, true customs officers posted with the three point-keys of the country: Elephantine, in the extreme south, the Eastern angle of the Delta and the canopic mouth in the west, regarded as true doors. In the east, the “employee with the door of the septentrional countries” supervised commercial flows borrowing the two ways which led to the Middle East: Ouadi Toumalat and the pélusiaque branch of the Nile. In the west, a “employee with the door of the foreign countries of the Great Green” (the Mediterranean) controlled the traffic on the level of the canopic mouth. The importance of the latter was recently confirmed by the underwater excavations in bay of Aboukir, with the site of old the Héracléion, today under water; a stele was left the sea, carrying a decree, known since the end of the 19th century by a found copy with Naucratis, which reports that Nectanébo {{Ier}} held “the tenth of gold, the money, the wood in the rough and worked wood, of all that comes from the sea of the Greeks” to the temple of the goddess Neith to Know.

Ancient cities of the Delta

The fluctuations of the Nile exerted a strong influence on the establishments. To escape from raw and the variations from flow, the towns of Low-Egypt were installed on sand hillocks (“back of tortoise” for the Egyptologists), which are the geological vestiges left by the pre-Nile there is approximately 15  000 years. But, when the flow of an arm became insufficient for a sure navigation, the political power did not hesitate to change capital. It was probably the case when it was transferred from pi-Ramsès to Tanis, after the pélusiaque branch which bathed pi-Ramsès, had decayed with the profit of the arm tanitic, then only inland waterway in the east of the Delta.

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