Geography of Egypt

Nile River

Longest river in the world

But

Not the largest!

What is the largest?

The Amazon River

The Nile River

Is over 4,000 miles long!

Wow!

That’s like going to California and back.

It’s the only major river in the world that flows north.

The source

Of the Nile River

Is at Lake Victoria

From there, it flows north to the Mediterranean Sea.

Egypt is often called

The “Gift of the Nile”

Why?

B/C without the Nile

Egypt is mainly a desert.

The Nile provides life to a desolate area.

Just as people in Mesopotamia

Depended on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers

To provide fertile land and food.

The people of Egypt depended on the Nile.

Each year the Nile would over flow its banks

And deposit silt on the ground

Silt is fine bits of rock and soil

It made the land very fertile

After the river returned to its banks

The farmers would plow the fields

And plant seeds in the fertile silt.

The crops would grow quickly

Sometimes producing two to three harvests a year.

However!

Sometimes the Nile took life away

When rain fell too lightly upriver

The Nile did not overflow

The land lay baked by the sun and crops dried up.

With out the harvest

People would starve

Sometimes, too much rain fell upriver.

When this happened, the Nile flooded wildly

It would wash away crops

drown people

And animals

Over time, the Egyptians worked out a way

To predict when the Nile would flood.

They developed a calendar

And divided it into three seasons

Inundation

The time when the Nile flooded its banks

During this time

Building projects took place

Emergence

The time when the Nile receded back within its banks

This was the time when the farmers

Would plant their crops

Harvest

This is the time when the crops were harvested

After this, the cycle started again!

Smile you’re done