This chapter gives an overview of the major hydraulic works that have been undertaken in Alexandria from its foundation to the Arab conquest. Fresh water in and around Alexandria is positioned as a historical agent around which the city’s plurisecular history wove itself. Built on a rocky substrate that, until recently, protected it from the subsidence that affected most of the northern edge of the Delta, the city stood on a locus that was rich in subterranean water. This chapters shows how for centuries, Alexandrians were careful to collect, store, and distribute this underground freshwater as a way to keep themselves alive. Concomitantly, geoarchaeological and written evidence document sustained yet at times interrupted attempts by state authorities to enhance the city’s commercial appeal and water supply by tying it to the Nile via artificially maintained canals. These canals’ histories, as well as those of the city’s known hyponomes, cisterns, and other lifting devices, allowed the Macedonian foundation to develop on a grand scale, and to survive during periods of water crisis.

This chapter explores water development in the Buhayra province (western Delta), mainly from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, to examine the canal system and how it was developed. Buhayra province, an administrative prefecture in Ottoman Egypt, was located on the route that connected Alexandria to Cairo. From the early Islamic period down to the Mamluk period (1250–1517), the province had seen the development of canals for navigation and irrigation. Although Mamluk sources describe these water development works, we know less about them through the Ottoman period due to a lack of contemporary accounts. The most accessible and seemingly accurate source on the rural landscape is the Napoleonic map from Description de l’Égypte; this map, however, only reflects the landscape at the end of the eighteenth century. Such a situation makes the Ottoman period a blank space in the province’s history. This chapter aims to analyse what happened in the Ottoman period to those canals developed in the Mamluk period to understand, as sequentially as possible, how the canals and the landscape along them changed. The analysis also gives us a glimpse of the fringes of Ottoman rural administration, revealing how the canals were maintained at the time.

In this short chapter, I consider the representation of and contribution of Egyptian women to archaeology as suggested by the archaeological archive. I do so by looking at Flinders Petrie’s Delta excavation archives (1880–1924), reflecting thereby on the biases and absences in the record through a female Indigenous archaeologist lens. By highlighting the instances of recording Egyptian women in the colonial archive, and by reflecting on what such rare recording occasions can reveal, I centre not only the roles played by women, but also the strategic narcissism through which Egyptian women were, and at times still are, (un)seen. As an acknowledgement of the role they have played in the overall archaeological knowledge production process, I also challenge the persistence of colonial framing by referring to Egyptian male and female members of the excavations as ‘archaeologists’ rather than as ‘workforce’.

The history of Egypt during the first centuries of Islam comes with a striking paradox. While Upper Egypt, from Fusṭāṭ to Aswan, has received much attention due to the numerous papyri from the region, the Delta is rarely attested in these documents. This is most probably linked to the region’s humid soil, which contributed to the progressive degradation of papyri. Indeed, other than a few private letters written in Alexandria, no papyri from this period have been found in the Delta. Despite this, the Delta occupied a central place in the imperial construction of Islam, especially during the Umayyad period (40/661–132/750): it linked the new capital, Fusṭāṭ, to the Mediterranean and its main cities, was the prime locus of Arab settlement from the second/eighth centuries and was a choice transit space to Syria-Palestine and Cyrenaica. Based on narratives by Egyptian Muslim writers and papyrological documents mentioning the Delta, we can sketch the history of the administrative and fiscal management of this space, to follow the process of tribal settlement in relationship with imperial policies and to analyse the latter’s consequences on the social situation in the Delta at the end of the Umayyad period and in the early Abbasid period.

Human space is transformed into territory through multiple types of delineation, from closed limits materialised in the landscape (such as fortresses, barriers, etc.), to open and blurred limits forming transition areas, known and practised by actors. In the kind of territorial state which Egypt had been since its birth, it was essential for the rulers to spatially mark the limits of their sovereignty. During the New Kingdom, the economic and political integration of the border districts was made possible thanks to the khetem border posts and their administration. The aim was to ensure the integrity and security of the kingdom, by investing or even overinvesting in its periphery, in terms of political decision, discourse and representations. The king and his administration were well aware that the integrity of the state was at stake in these border zones. Yet, in spite of the uniformity of the discourse, and the fact that the same name was applied to all border posts around Egypt, as well as the same title to the person in charge of these settlements, it appears that the system adapted to and was intimately linked with the local situation and the specificities of each border region.

The public worship of Christian saints started to spread in Egypt in the fifth century CE. This was particularly the case in the Nile Delta, which is characterised by its unique location. This phenomenon is a multi-layered practice that is difficult to explore in full; nonetheless, the object of this chapter is to grasp some of the dynamics behind the growth or decline of a saint’s cult and the overall alteration of Christian saints’ glorification in the Delta between the fifth and ninth centuries. The dynamics in this context suggest that the evolution or decline of saints’ popularity were due to religious, cultural and social practices. A large variety of literary texts were witness to the presence of a saint’s cult and bear information about saints’ veneration in different periods. Selections from these sources are explored in this chapter. Other complex factors to be discussed include the topography and location of cults, the nature of the religious landscape where the veneration started, cultural exchanges and language barriers, socio-economic growth and political and institutional rivalries and shifts.

From the 5th millennium BCE onward, the Nile Delta constituted a distinct cultural entity that pursued its own economic and social development, until the advent of the 1st Dynasty and the political unification of Egypt. Despite this, the role Lower Egypt played in the formative process of the Pharaonic state has long been overshadowed by a greater focus on Upper Egypt and a narrative of state formation dominated by Upper Egyptian culture. Now, thanks to increasing archaeological projects in the Nile Delta, we can better assess the economic and social changes that occurred in the Delta throughout the 5th and 4th millennia BCE, as well as their interactions with neighbouring cultures. Revised interpretations of the anthropisation of the Delta and its role in the emergence of Pharaonic civilisation are offered in a way that considers local communities themselves, no longer distorted by Upper Egyptian remains, later royal propaganda and historical models from the last century. In this chapter, we will try to follow the path of Lower Egyptian populations as they first adopted agriculture and settled in permanent villages, then developed into a regional culture at the crossroads of southwestern Asia and northeastern Africa, before finally becoming a hierarchical society.

This chapter looks at what the Geniza archives tell us about Cairo’s community’s relationship with the Nile. Since its discovery by scholars in the late nineteenth century, this large and unique corpus of medieval and early modern manuscripts has allowed scholars to access part of the quotidian experience of Cairo’s – and to a wider degree Egypt’s – Jewish communities over centuries. It also documents their integration within transnational and diasporic webs that, just like Egypt’s agricultural surpluses, extended to Palestine and the wider Mediterranean. As is shown, the letters preserved in the Geniza complement, and at times disrupt, literary evidence. They notably do so by evoking a medieval world in which real disaster was perhaps never far away, and where the Nile, its waters, floods and promises or denial of sustenance, were always in view.

This volume is not a textbook or a handbook. It does not survey the history of the Nile Delta in a linear, streamlined and homogeneous way. Neither is it a volume that pretends to account for all places, peoples and stories from or tied to the region. Rather than aiming for exhaustiveness or completeness, the contributors offer over a dozen ‘stories made of true events’ about the history of Egypt’s ‘Northern Land’. Taken together, the following chapters illuminate the historical significance and complex webs of the region’s shifting landscapes and imperial histories over the course of over five millennia.

As with practically everything in 19th and early 20th century Egypt, we must consider the colonial context of foreign ‘viewings’ of the Nile Delta. Tourists pulled to the top of the Great Pyramid by Egyptian guides look down on a scene onto which they project their own recent experiences of Egypt and their knowledge of its history. They look, in the words of Mary Louise Pratt, with ‘imperial eyes’. When they venture into the landscape of the Delta itself, such as on the sporting trips recommended in Cairo of To-Day, they move through a landscape whose infrastructure and, to a certain extent, socio-economic system are the products of imperialism, and also of Egyptian nation-building in an international, imperial context. In this chapter, I shall explore these themes of modernity and imperialism through a superficially innocent genre of writing – the Euro-American travelogue – and a more overtly political genre – the contemporary Egyptian autobiography. For both, the late 19th and early 20th century Delta is in a sense a place of lost innocence, although they survey its landscape from two very different viewing platforms. The tension between the Delta of the shadūf and the Delta of the railway is always present.

The ancient-to-modern Nile Delta has been consistently conceptualised as a coherent, distinctive region, and toponymy is one of the manifestations of this space-making process. In that regard, available evidence, which ranges from the Old Kingdom to modern times and covers a variety of scripts and languages, testifies to two partly overlapping yet simultaneously distinctive takes on the region. One adopts an insider’s, fluvial and south–north vantage point; the other, an outsider’s, maritime and north–south one. The etymology, diachronic endurance and translation of the toponyms (t3-)mḥw and Δέλτα indicate a tension between the unswerving appeal of the indigenous understanding of the Delta as a place and the long-lasting, far-reaching posterity of the ancient Greek tradition beyond and within Egypt. This chapter analyses available literary and documentary evidence of the name(s) given to what we now commonly call the Nile Delta, from Antiquity to the modern period. I propose that we consider these place names as both manifestations and vectors of stories, and reflect on their contribution to our understanding of human pluri-millennial entanglements with this territory. I first discuss the two, Egyptian and Greek, names associated with the region, before focusing on the polysignificance of the apex region.

For millennia, Egyptian rulers dedicated vast resources to managing the annual inundation of the Nile, with the mandate to govern Egypt contingent upon the critical responsibility of channelling and gauging the river. These responsibilities encompassed critical administrative, engineering and hydraulic undertakings, from dam construction and canal dredging to precise monitoring of water levels to predict harvests and levy taxes. Yet, this mandate was also contingent upon the veneration of the Nile as both guarantor of Egypt’s prosperity and the conduit of divine grace and God’s agent of reward and punishment. Nile veneration in medieval Islam addressed these symbolic and spiritual aspects, through ceremonies enacted throughout the year centred on the nilometer (al-miqyās) at the island of al-Rawda, which served as supplications to God for a precise level of rising flood waters. Striking a delicate balance between the pragmatic and symbolic necessitated a nuanced response to the ancient practice of Nile veneration, one which had no precedent in Islam. My intention is to examine the interplay and balance between these considerations by analysing the phenomenon of nilometer construction in medieval Islamic Egypt through the lens of Nile veneration between the 7th and 11th centuries CE.