Word: nile
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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EGYPT: Militants on the Nile...
...gray row of company housing on a dusty back street of the town of Kafr el Dawar in the Nile delta, a man answers the door, yet again. He wears a striped galabia and a look of exhaustion. "I am sorry," he says, "but I cannot talk. I am the father of Mahmud, but I don't know anything about him." Outside the house, a teenage boy says he is Mahmud's brother. Mahmud is not here. He left 14 years ago and never came back...
...again boomed to nearly 3 million and faces grave ecological threats. The gleaming city that Arab poet Ibn Dukmak compared to "a golden crown, set with pearls, perfumed with musk and camphor, and shining from East to the West," is slowly sinking into the unstable, sewage- contaminated Nile Delta...
Northern Africa was a somewhat wetter place five millenniums ago, and the land was fertile in a broad swath on either side of the Nile. Many Egyptians still lived in huts made of papyrus or mud; raised wheat, barley and livestock; and paid homage to the local chiefs. Within just a few hundred years the Pharaoh Narmer would forge the entire area into the great Egyptian Empire. But recent scholarship shows that local chiefdoms were already coalescing into larger kingdoms, as they were in the neighboring land of Nubia, just upriver. As in Europe, a stable food supply created...
...lives of Egyptians were closely tied to the Nile's annual flood cycle, and they were acutely aware of its influence on agriculture. They erected huge monolithic statues representing the god Min -- who symbolized fertility and the harvest -- and period tombs inevitably contain pottery, jars of wine and beer or platters of food. People were often buried with items related to their occupation: hunters with spearheads, political leaders with symbols of office...