/lit/ - Literature

>>15172319
So this may take a while, but I’ll do my best to address the matter of Urbanism and Irrigation, starting with the practice of Agriculture and animal husbandry. I’ll keep posting throughout the day.

Agriculture in Egypt had been first developed from between 8000-5000BC. Coinciding with climate change which turned the previously green savannah into a desert with only the narrow Nile corridor, Egyptian agriculture was heavily reliant on inundations and water basins of considerable size variation.

The convex nature of the Nile's flood meant that irrigation agriculture was a matter of constructing chequer-pattern channels where flood water could be contained during the flood and channeled to plots that required more water and drained. Shadufs (Wooden pulley deviced used to extract water) would be invented only more towards the New Kingdom, so for most of Egyptian history water was carried via containers. The Nile floods were variable and measured according to a series of ancient Nilometer devices (Which were used by the administrative bureaucracy to assess taxation levels based on predicted harvests until the New Kingdom- where taxes became a pre-assessed quantity). The flood height of the Nile over a certain period was famously stable however, although over flooding and low niles weren’t uncommon. The Palermo stone provides a list of flood readings based on the regnal year of Egyptian kings.

Agriculture is best divided between the Farming of cereals, vegetables and legume, Horticulture and Animal Husbandry. Farming was carried out on plots of land, which were owned either by the state (Crownlands), were temple property, or private landlords. Owned land was typically spatially varied, as to minimise losses if a certain area of the valley was heavily affected by the flood. The most typical crops grown along the nile were in descending order of commonality: Emmer wheat and barley, lentils and other vegetables (Leeks, radishes, herbs etc). Wheat comprised the two staples of the Egyptian diet: Bread and beer, which was used in payment until the introduction of coinage as currency towards Ptolemaic Period. With the addition of fish and occasionally red meat, the Egyptian diet was perfectly capable of nourishing a working male. According to Butzer’s calculations, from the predynastic period to the Roman, the fertile conditions of the Nile created an economy where there was a surplus 5 times greater than what the Egyptian population could consume annually. This enabled a redistributive economy that could feed craft specialists, soldiers, priests, nobles and the massive bureaucratic scribal class and produce monumental architecture.