JCollins
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Geography, foreign neighbors, and travel 🧭
🕑 Added 2025-04-21 00:30:23 +0000 UTCI love geography. I could talk about it for ages, but I tried to keep it brief this time :) I hope you'll like it! And this one officially ends the currently planned lore posts, so I'm going to do a bit of questionary soon about what else you guys want to read about! ☺️
The Nile
As you probably all know, the Nile is one of the longest rivers on Earth, and one of the few ones that flows from south to north. This is the reason that in the game, the characters always call south ‘up’ and north ‘down’ because they are talking in the direction of the river’s flow. So they would say things like ‘we’re going down to Memphis’, so sailing downriver – but towards the north.
For this same reason, Upper Egypt is the land that starts in Nubia in the south, and reaches along the Nile to the north, to the opening of the delta. The delta itself in the north is Lower Egypt.
This probably sounds confusing as fuck, so here is a map instead.
This was probably a very sensitive subject during the Second Intermediate period, when the Hyksos occupation took place. Which might be confusing as well, and I actually didn’t understand all these periods until I saw a super straightforward timeline of it. I tried to recreate it, here it is:
So, as you can see on the map, the Hyksos kinda cut the kingdom in half. The border was around the city of Kusai for a long-long time, until Sekenenre Tao, a pharaoh from Thebes, started a revolt. He soon died in battle, and his successor (brother or son, not clear) Kamose continued the fight. He soon died too however, and the next king, Ahmose I was only a child. By the time he grew up, he had to start the war again, but he eventually succeeded and reunitied Egypt again.
Why does this have any significance? Well, because the Hyksos controlled the Nile too, and the Nile was used for everything. With the Hyksos rule, the Theban rulers couldn’t go up north, they couldn’t leave the Nile Valley through the delta, and they couldn’t go to the Mediterranean. They were basically land-locked between the Hyksos empire on the north, and Nubia on the south. So recapturing and controlling the Nile was an imperative part of Egypt’s history during all times because whoever controlled the river, controlled everything.
Narmer’s character does the job that Kamose and Ahmose did in real life – his father died in the war that he started, and Narmer finished the work. And then, a (male) Ahmose will follow him on the throne :)
The Nile starts somewhere deep in Africa, flows through Nubia, interrupted by 6 waterfalls (or cataracts). The first cataract is at Aswan, in Upper Egypt. During most of history, Egypt’s border started between this waterfall and the second, which is a bit further down south around Mirgissa.
The floods of the Nile were the core of life in Egypt. They started off by the tropical rains around July, and the flood came down the river up until November. When the water receded, it left behind some incredibly fertile, black soil. Egypt originally gained its name after this black earth, which is called ‘kemet’, and that’s the original Egyptian name of the country too. This name is mentioned a few times in the game as well.
The start of the flood was usully around the same time when the star Sirius appeared on the sky too, and this was always a very important event in the life of Egyptians.
Regulating the floods have always been an important job of Egyptian rulers. They started elevating the river banks around the Old Kingdom, to keep the flood out of the inhabited areas. A massive system of canals, dams, and elevated banks were also built continuously through history to regulate the floods and get the water further out to water the fields.
These jobs were so important that an entire system of workers were built around it, and was regulated by the pharaohs. They maintained the canals every single year, and sometimes they also did big works. For example, during the Middle Kingdom, a huge system of dams were built to regulate the water of the Faiyum lake, and to extend the reach of the fields around the area, essentially turning the desert into fertile land. And they succeeded.
The Delta
The Nile Delta is a gigantic land of continuously changing lakes, rivers, canals, and marshes. It changed so much, in fact, that there never were any reliable maps of the area back in those days, and many cities have been lost under the swamp.
This is the land where most of the papyrus comes from, and the shape of the delta, coincidentally, also resembles a papyrus reed’s bushy end, so it was a very important symbol in Ancient Egypt. In some places, the papyrus can grow as tall as six meters, so in many cases, it makes an impenetrable labyrinth. It was very important to keep it in check, so they cut the reeds back regularly, cleaned the canals for the boats, and maintained the water routes as much as they could. If the delta was un-sailable, they couldn’t get to the sea, after all.
The Delta was also an incredibly rich resource of fish, water fowl, and other animals, that were teeming in these shallow waters.
The sea
The Mediterranean sea had a fitting name in Egyptian, ‘The Great Green Road’. Most Egyptian vessels were not created for the sea because they were river-boats with a flat bottom. On the waves of the sea, they would have capsized, so they usually didn’t go there. The bigger boats, however, could sail out to reach further lands. Egyptians regularly traded with the Greek islands, and the countries along the coast.
Sailing
One of the drawback of building sturdy ships in Egypt was that… Egypt doesn’t really have forests. Most of their wood was imported cedar from Lebanon, so building ships was a bit of a tricky job. Smaller boats were often made from reed, and only the bigger, more expensive ones used wood. Often, they used paddles to navigate around, but from the Old Kingdom, sails appeared on bigger boats as well.
Sailing times down the Nile was wildly different, depending on when the travel took place. During floods, when the water was high and navigating the river was the easiest, the 900 km distance from Thebes to Memphis could be done in as little as 2 weeks. During the lowest water levels though, this could change into months because with low water levels, navigation became a lot trickier. Sandbanks could destroy and stop boats, so the driver had to be extra careful to sail around them.
Going down the river was easy. Going up was much harder. Without wind, the boats were pretty much stuck, so if one really wanted to travel by boat, it had to be pulled with ropes from the ground.
Roads and ground travel
The quality of the roads ranged wildly, just as much as it usually does everywhere today. In the countryside, at the river, the roads were elevated and they were very narrow. Further in, they were wider, where more people used them. They didn’t build bridges however, so if one wanted to cross the river or the delta, they had to use boats or find a shallow part of the water.
Most people used boats to travel, but they also had donkeys.
Horses, however, only appeared in Egypt in the New Kingdom, which is actually a fascinating subject, because! This was why the Hyksos could conquer Egypt in the first place! The Hyksos already had horses, even when the animal was completely unknown to Egyptians. They also had war chariots, which were absolutely deadly against the Egyptian infantry. The Hyksos basically butchered them on the spot, and so their conquering of Egypt was pretty quick and bloody.
It took more than a hundred years until the rulers of Thebes managed to breed out their own war horses, and they started experimenting at building their own chariots. Once they managed to set up their own cavalry, beating back the Hyksos in their own game was only a matter of time. In the game, Narmer was the one who did this, but this is the reason why our little group doesn’t use horses – because at the time, they were still expensive. Normal civilians didn’t have them, and they were almost exclusively used for battle. Narmer has horses at home, of course, but riding through the countryside on chariots would attract way too much attention.
The desert
Egypt is situated between two deserts – the Western Desert, which is the Sahara, and the Eastern Desert, that reaches between the Nile Valley and the Red Sea. This area is more mountainous, and it has more rain too, so people actually live here. While in the Western Desert, the roads are few and they reach from oasis to oasis, in the Eastern Desert, there were a lot more roads between villages, and trade was quite frequent between the Red Sea and Egypt.
Behind the boarders
Now this is quite tricky. Egypt’s history makes up such a long time that dozens of empires grew, flowered, and disappeared around it in the meantime.
When the game takes place, the main neighbors are the land of Nubia with its several small tribes and kingdoms (as a pretty much constant); the Hyksos were in the north, as I meantioned before. The Kushite kingdom was somewhere in Nubia, far down south on the Nile.
The land of Punt is a kingdom that was definitely there… somewhere. Except nobody knows where it was, but it was a rich land and Egypt had flowering commerce with it during its history. They say it may have been around the coast of modern Eritrea, and Egyptians imported ivory, ebony, gold, and animals from there. Its location was in fact so obvious to Ancient Egyptians that they simply never wrote it down anywhere because what kind of idiot doesn’t know where it is, right? Well, here we are, those exact idiots, 3000 years later.
To the west, there was also the land that was called Libya even back then. To the north, the Minoan culture was present in Crete at the time, which is actually where Narmer’s mother comes from.
To the east, the Hittites were already around, but their country wasn’t united yet. Assyria was a prominent empire to the east, in the north of Mesopotamia. Smaller kingdoms were present around it, such as Elam. Babylonia’s golden days have passed already – Hammurabi lived 300 years prior, and conquered right around the time when Zaia was alive. Zaia actually has some heavy personal experience with his conquests. After Hammurabi’s death though, the giant Babylonian Empire slowly collapsed, and by the time the game takes place, it’s still there, but it’s much smaller.
International travel and trade
Most trade with Egypt went into three directions – south to Nubia, east to Punt, and North towards Asia.
Evidence shows that Egyptians were trading as far as India – they imported perfumes and spices from there. Wood mostly came from the north as well.
The border with Nubia, for the most time, was around the first waterfall, around the island of Elephantine, or Aswan. This was the most busy trading point between Nubia and Egypt, where most caravans met. The pharaohs of Egypt sometimes tried to conquer further south, but they never really got very far. From Nubia, they imported gold, ebony, and exotic animals. Baboons, for example, were used by the guards as a sort of attack-monkey, and I’m not joking. They siced them on criminals, the baboon chased the person, bit them in the shin, and the guards would run up and capture them. Other exotic animals were also brought to the courts of pharaohs and kept in zoos, such as giraffes, or the adorable Bean the elephant from the first chapter.
