The Middle Nile Valley: Elements in an approach to the structuring of the landscape from the Greco-Roman era to the nineteenth century

Abstract

The construction of the Aswan Dam put an end to a form of relationship between people and the environment that had its origin in the pre-Pharaonic period. The annual Nile flood had been tamed and managed for centuries by the societies of the Nile delta. However, by the nineteenth century, attempts to modernize Egypt according to Western standards led to a gradual change in how the river was managed and exploited, focusing on permanent irrigation of the land. These changes took the form of successive hydraulic engineering projects that transformed the entire landscape. Our project aims to analyze how this long process took place, from the Greco-Roman period to the present day, by focussing on the middle valley of the Nile, in the area corresponding to the Oxyrhynchus nome (province), in order to reconstruct the methods of flood management and how they have transformed the landscape.For this purpose, we have combined an analysis of archaeological and written documentation, consisting primarily of papyrological data and secondary sources. We have also combined a reading of the historical cartography with the identification of traces of dykes and canals from satellite images (CORONA, ASTER, Quickbird, Worldview 2), and related enhancing functions of satellite imagery. These data were organized and registered on a GIS geodatabase that enabled all the information to be analyzed and confirmed. Our initial findings define an ancient landscape, in which old channels structured the landscape around the nome. These channels, and their levees associated with dykes, favoured both the containment of water and terrestrial transport, in an area that would be completely inundated in the flood season. This combination of channels with some element of retention was important for territorial and administrative organization within the nome, the administrative territorial division of Egypt, and its subdivision the toparchy.

CORONA Photographs in Monsoonal Semi‐arid Environments: Addressing Archaeological Surveys and Historic Landscape Dynamics over North Gujarat, India

“…From a landscape perspective, historical satellite data have been used for unravelling archaeological landscapes through the detection of relict geomorphological features such as palaeochannels (Challis et al, ; Mantellini et al, ). In Egypt, CORONA has helped to understand the archaeological landscape of the Middle Nile Valley before the construction of the Aswan Dam (Subias et al, ). In Asia, CORONA images have been used recently in Cambodia (Evans and Moylan, ) and China (Min, ), with a new perspective in heritage focused on evaluating the relationships between archaeological landscape, contemporary populations and current education programmes.…”

Tests with SAR Images of the PAZ Platform Applied to the Archaeological Site of Clunia (Burgos, Spain)

“…However, Tapete and Cigna [28] (pp. [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] have shown that the joint use of multiple SAR images at different time points in the same study area can reduce speckle by providing images of greater clarity than treating them individually. This reduction is carried out through the co-register function, which implies the creation of a stack of images, with one referent, and the rest-subordinate.…”

“…Therefore, what we conducted was to use the interpolation functions of SAGA, triangulation, to first generate individual images for each of the bands contained in the points, and then make a combination of them in false colour. With the resulting images, the SAGA function of principal component analysis (PCA) was applied, especially due to the good result obtained by our team when applying them in the published project on the Egyptian landscape of the Oxirrinquita nomos [12] with Worldview 2 images, and in analytics carried out in the Clunia project with SPOT multispectral images [1]. PCA is a multivariate statistical method used to reduce the dimensionality of the data resulting in the reduction of redundant information.…”

“…Finally, the ARQPAZ project aims to study the behaviour of radar images in three different environments associated with three archaeological sites, in which we have previously worked with non-invasive exploratory investigations: Oxirrinco [12], Cosa [13], and finally-Clunia. This work presents the results of the first evaluation of the possibilities of the SAR-X images of PAZ in the archaeological site of Clunia.…”

Irrigation engineering in Spain and how it has changed the country’s landscape

“…On the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, the Indus, and in the south of Mexico, organised societies began to appear that were capable of capturing and directing water, thus freeing themselves of having to rely on rising river levels to irrigate their crops. The essential elements in these first irrigation systems were canals, channels and dams/reservoirs (Subias et al, 2013). …”