Nile Valley, the Nile Delta,

The Nile Valley, the Nile Delta,
and the Suez Canal Zone
Within the desert that is Egypt, the Nile Valley is a long, thin
oasis. While the deserts, which the ancients called the Red
Land, make up about 96 percent of the country, human life in
Egypt has always been focused on the fertile Black Land along
the river. Despite its vast wilderness, Egypt is synonymous with
civilization; its Arabic name, Masr, comes from the verb mean-
ing “to found, build, settle, civilize, colonize.” And that civiliza-
tion is synonymous with the Nile.
The Nile River has two sources, one in highland Ethiopia at
Lake Tana, which feeds the Blue Nile, and the other in Central
Africa around Lake Victoria, which feeds the White Nile. At
their junction at Khartoum, Sudan, the Blue Nile accounts for
about 70 percent of the river’s summer high-season volume.
Until contained by two twentieth-century dams at Aswan, the
surge of summer rainwater from the fertile Ethiopian high-
lands inundated much of Egypt’s Nile floodplain every August
through September. Each flood left a deposit of about 1/20 of
an inch (1 millimeter) of silt yearly, building very fertile sedi-
ments that are now about 25 feet (8 meters) deep.
Nearly all of Egypt’s farmland is found in that 14,000-
square-mile (36,260-square-kilometer) “river oasis” consisting
of the Nile Valley, known traditionally as Upper Egypt, and the
Nile Delta, known as Lower Egypt. The Nile runs almost due
north, so in Egypt it is necessary to switch the usual orientation