In Egypt's Land
Let's now turn to the other great center of population growth and development of
civilization in the Valley of the Nile. Here, the mysterious Sphinx ponders problems of
the ages, as he looks out over the narrow green Valley of the Nile, lying across a brown
and sun-scorched desert. In Egypt as well as in Mesopotamia, tillers of soil learned
early to sow food plants of wheat and barley and to grow surplus food that released their
fellows for divisions of labor, giving rise to the remarkable civilization that arose in
the Valley of the Nile. Our debt to the ancient Egyptians is great.
Here, too, farming grew up by flood irrigation with muddy waters. But the problems of
farming were very different from those of Mesopotamia. Annual flooding with silt-laden
waters spread thin layers of silt over the land, raising it higher and higher. In these
flat lands of slowly accumulating soil, farmers never met with problems of soil erosion.
To be sure, there have been problems of salt accumulation and of rising water tables
for which drainage is the solution. This is especially true since year long irrigation has
been made possible by the Assuan Dam. But the body of the soil has remained suitable for
cropping for 6,000 years and more.
It was perhaps in the Valley of the Nile that a genius of a farmer about 6,000 years
ago hitched an ox to a hoe and invented the plow, thus originating power-farming to
disturb the social structure of those times much as the tractor disturbed the social
structure of our country in recent years. By this means farmers became more efficient in
growing food; a single farmer released several of his fellows from the vital task of
growing food for other tasks. Very likely the Pharaohs had difficulty in keeping this
surplus population sufficiently occupied. For we suspect that the Pyramids were the first
WPA projects.
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