Free The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World by Lincoln Paine

1700 BCE . TheNew Kingdom, the period of pharaonic Egypt’s greatest prosperity and most active foreign relations, began about 1550 BCE and lasted five hundred years. Thereafter the land came under increasing domination by foreigners from the south and east. In the meantime, Egyptian culture attained a degree of sophistication unmatched anywhere in the world. The Egyptians were literate masters of engineering, the visual arts, medicine, and religious, political, and social organization whose work is characterized by an almost obsessive attention to detail. Their culture thrived for more than two thousand years, their peace and prosperity interrupted only occasionally, and in the great scheme of things briefly. The pyramids at Giza and elsewhere date from relatively early in the history of unified Egypt, but the society that produced these monuments neither appeared nor ended abruptly. Although the conquest ofAlexander the Great brought the dynastic age to a close in the fourth century BCE , Egypt has throughout its history been a center of commercial andcultural exchange thanks to its position astride the Nile, the longest river in Africa, and at the intersection of the land crossings between Africa and Asia, and between the Mediterranean andRed Sea and Indian Ocean.
    The Nile rises in the mountains of east-central Africa and flows northward intoSudan. In the sixteen hundred kilometers below Khartoum, the river’s course is broken by six major cataracts, or sets of rapids. In antiquity the northernmost of these, the First Cataract atAswan, represented a natural barrier between Egypt andNubia (northern Sudan), and the early pharaohs’ fortification of the island ofElephantine made it a gateway to the south. This was by no means an absolute boundary, and New Kingdom pharaohs pushed as far south asNapata in Kush, between the Third and Fourth Cataracts. North of Aswan, the Nile valley widens slightly for its last thousand kilometers, hemmed in on either side by the Sahara. Egyptian civilization arose within this slip of land, no more than twenty kilometers wide in Upper Egypt but annually inundated by the sediment-rich floodwaters of the Nile until the construction of the Aswan Dams in the twentieth century.
    To the west are a few remote oases linked to one another and the Nile by desert tracks, but these were not large enough to support populations capable of threatening the stability of the valley and they offered little to attract any but the most hardened traders. The landscape to the east is bleak but the mountains are rich in deposits of quartzite, alabaster, and gold, which have been mined since pre-dynastic times. Beyond the mountains lies the Red Sea, which was reached via arid, narrow valleys cut by seasonal streams, calledwadis.The most important Egyptian towns were generally located near where these wadis reached the Nile, strategic sites that afforded their inhabitants an easy command of north–south and the more limited east–west trade. In the early period these included Elephantine,Hierakonpolis (Kom el-Ahmar),Naqada,Coptos (Deir el-Bahri), and the important royal burial site at Abydos. The majority of these towns were located on the west bank of the river, although Coptos was nearWadi Hammamat and the point on the Nile closest to the Red Sea. At the head of the delta near modern Cairo,Memphis straddled the boundary between the rich agricultural lands of the delta and the traditional centers of power to the south. Memphis was also the city through which Mediterranean commerce funneled into or out of Egypt via the many branches of the Nile and the delta ports, of whichButo was probably the most important from pre-dynastic times. The capital was also near the terminus of the major overland trade routes to Sinai (a major source ofcopper and turquoise),Canaan (Palestine), and beyond.Thebes (Luxor) later emerged as an important capital near Coptos, with a corresponding mortuary site on the west bank of the