Word: lande
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most Egyptians the Nile still rules, and a peasant from pharaonic days would find life little altered along much of the riverbank today: land is still divided into tiny plots, and the precious water is still raised from the river by having a cow or blind-folded water buffalo turn a primitive screw or a crude wooden lift balanced by a weight of mud. The ordinary meal of an Egyptian fellah still consists of foul beans; moulekieh, a soup made of the greens that grow among cotton plants, is a dish reserved for special days...
...have difficulty distinguishing a Syrian from a Jordanian, or either from a Lebanese. But an Egyptian stands out. His Arabic accent is different, and his speech is peppered with odd words, some dating from the pharaohs, some borrowed from visiting?or conquering?Europeans. Although Egypt is a predominantly Muslim land with a large Coptic minority, its customs differ from those of its Islamic neighbors. In Saudi Arabia, for example, tombs are unmarked, and the dead are quickly forgotten. Cemeteries in Egypt not only have tombs but houses as well, so that the living can spend holidays with their family dead...
...Aswan High Dam, a building project almost as monumental as the Great Pyramids, was once looked upon as a panacea for most of Egypt's ills. True, it has doubled the country's electric power output and improved the productive capacity of 900,000 acres of land, guaranteeing water to farmers in upper Egypt. But the dam has made some old problems worse. The Nile's silt, which enriched the delta through the millennia, is now trapped behind Aswan's concrete; farmers must buy artificial fertilizer to do what nature in the past provided free. Because...
Released from prison in 1948 and cashiered out of the Egyptian army, Sadat took any job he could land: baggage porter, truck driver, used-tire dealer. By now he was divorced from his first wife and in 1949 he married Jihan Raouf, the beautiful, 15-year-old daughter of middle-class Anglo-Egyptian parents...
Everything made me happy in Mil Abu el Kom, even cold water in the winter when we had to leave at dawn for the flush canal?a canal filled to overflowing for no more than two weeks, our "statutory" irrigation period, during which all land in the village had to be watered. We worked together on the land of one of us for a whole day then moved to another...