Why is Egypt called the gift of the Nile?
Why is Egypt called the gift of the Nile?Ancient Egypt was incredibly lucky, but it used that luck masterfully.It was Herodotus who said:“Egypt is the gift of the Nile",Every year in Egypt, the Nile overflows and creates a rich valley of black soil that is abundantly fertile. This fertility was central to Egyptian civilization.With the blessing of this natural fertility, Egyptians were able to grow a range of native crops and also non-native crops including a variety of grains, vegetables and fruits.Egypt and the broader Nile Valley became one of the few places on Earth that had an independent agricultural revolution, as shown from the illustration below from Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari“Scholars once believed that agriculture spread from a single Middle Eastern point of origin to the four corners of the world. Today, scholars agree that agriculture sprang up in other parts of the world not by the action of Middle Eastern farmers exporting their revolution but entirely independently……Why did agricultural revolutions erupt in the Middle East, China and Central America but not in Australia, Alaska or South Africa? The reason is simple: most species of plants and animals can’t be domesticated.”Source: Sapiens by Yuval Noah HarariIt is no accident that the first four river valley ancient civilizations, also map to the places where the first agricultural revolutions occurred.Additionally, two of these River Valleys were very close geographically to each other - Egypt and Mesopotamia - so they could conduct a cultural and technological dialogue.And as they say, the rest is history.